Bad Manners and Brimstone

Quote from: jpcher on October 19, 2020, 02:14:18 pm

Oh, my, Gardensgrey! That brings back such memories!

Doodling on the covers was a must!

My dad was a printer. He got us huge sheets of paper we used as book covers that were ideal for drawing on. 😁

Not related to book covers (not a thing we did at my school), but we always had heaps of paper. My dad worked in the data centre for GM and that included a print shop. There was always loads of scrap paper, a lot of it perforated sheets with the holes down the side (we never had a problem finding paper to make banners in my house).

He would also bring us damaged magnetic tape holders (plastic covers about the size and shape of a film reel) to store our treasures and his screws and nails. We had one of them filled with old crayons and someone left it in the back window of the car. We then had a film reel shaped block of multi-coloured wax.

I remember opening up brand new schoolbooks for the first time and loving to just stick my nose into them and smell that wonderful 'new textbook' smell!   

we covered my kids' books back in the late '90s and early '00s. You could buy stretchy fabric ones, etc., but I liked the paper because I would re-label them so it was easier to tell what they were at first.

(I wish they'd let us label the edges, so you could tell which book was what from the top of your backpack)

Ritual of a bygone era:  I started kindergarten in 1960. My parents had 5 kids. For weeks before school started, they would double down on stockpiling brown paper grocery bags. The first evening after textbooks were distributed on the first day, we’d clear the dinner table & the book cover production line would start. My parents wielded the scissors, cutting rectangles out of all those grocery bags. The rest of us would fold those rectangles around the books, making sure to make deep pockets for them to slide in. Most of the time, these brown paper bag book covers lasted all year. Back then, there wasn’t such a thing as a store-bought book cover, and later on, only a few had these.

Oh my gosh! I remember folding book covers! I had forgotten all about that. They used to hand them out to us at school with our textbooks and we were required to use them. They had the folding instructions printed on them. We used to draw and write all sorts of things on those book covers. Here's one I remember...

In case of fire, throw this in.

Boy, we thought we were clever! 

I was also in California in Elementary/Junior High in the 60's/70's. Newport Mesa school district in Orange County. Girls could not wear pants to school at all...unless it was raining. It also seemed that it had to be raining at the principals house because I knew several girls who were sent home to change to a skirt, even though *it was raining at the school*. We also were NEVER allowed to wear jeans. Shoes also had to have a heel strap...because we couldn't run in a slip on shoe...but we were  not allowed to run on campus.

Lots of conflicting "rules". I was so glad to get out of that district. The state I moved to had a much more relaxed dress code.