Just this year, the Texas legislature tried and failed to ban anyone under the age of eighteen from using or creating social media accounts.
Had this pipedream become law, it would not have worked. Trust me, pre-majority youngsters would have found a way to continue bullying, spreading misinformation, and hurting feelings online. It’s what they’re good at. Thinking otherwise is akin to believing Miss America contestants value world peace over the Big Tiara.
How did I learn that regulating social media is difficult? Because underground social media existed at Bailey Junior High School in the 1950s. To be fair, ours did not look like Twitter or Snap Chat. It was non-electronic; to use it after dark required a functioning light bulb. Nonetheless, it empowered the usual evils—bullying, misinformation, and mental abuse. The jolly activities that make school fascinating.
We called our social media ‘slam books” and, like websites, anybody could have one. A slam book user could enter unsigned compliments, accusations, insults, or other terse observations about school chums. Think of today’s “anonymous sources.” Or Facebook.
Anyone could publish a slam book. You needed only a blank spiral notebook. Transforming an innocent schoolroom accessory into a slam book required only that the creator select a couple of dozen classmates and put each student’s name at the top of a page.
This simple social media platform, when completed, had the potential to include every student at Bailey, limited only by the number of names chosen for praise or persecution and the quantity of books produced. That was pretty much it for preparation.
Distribution was even simpler. Slam books moved surreptitiously from hand to hand, usually during study period. Thanks to that strangely effective medium known as Radio Playground or Tin Can Telegraph (communication networks unknown to adults) you knew exactly what to do when handed a slam book: you wrote anonymous entries, just as today’s online commentators do.
A slam book’s life expectancy varied; its pages might fill up; an alert faculty member might seize it; it could get lost or just wear out. Worse, someone might recognize your handwriting. At Bailey, at that time, you did not want to write “Dumbass” on a future Central High football star’s page and have him figure out who did it.
That may be why I never created a slam book of my own. Users of slam books, had they thought about it, might have defended them as helpful evaluations of fellow students that could improve personality, deportment, appearance, and school spirit.
Adults employed similar systems, then and now, but called them “peer ratings,” tortures fully as painful as slam books. Slam books inflicted emotional scars. In 1951, a classmate fired off an anonymous slam book comment at me, the kind of jab you just shrug off. Or should; I let it fester for 74 years.
During those decades I survived platoons of familiar critics—parents and professors urging me to maximize my potential; wives and girlfriends who wanted the seat left down; even a Jackson Daily News drama critic who called my performance in a Millsaps College play, “adequate.” Is that heartache and anguish, or what?
The 1951 slam book criticism at issue consisted of a single word: “urp.” Not even “Urp.” I was unworthy of capitalization, let alone a phrase. Just “urp,” three letters conjoined to form a horrid little tidbit that singed my self-esteem.
Later that school year, glancing accidentally at a nearby classmate’s history test answers, I identified the witchlet who penned “urp” in her cramped cursive. We had exchanged few words in our time at Bailey; did one of them light her cruelty burner? Was my “urp” meant for some other victim? Had this Medusa-in training intended to write “Murphy” and started with the middle letters?
My humiliation did not respond to rationalization, prayer, or meditation. I remember two things about the year 1951: Bobby Thomson’s home run at the Polo Grounds that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants, and “urp” at Bailey Junior High School. What does that tell you? As my analyst said to me last month, “Man, when your goat gets got, it stays got.”
William Jeanes is a former Northsider and slam book contributor.
