Junior year in high school, I was into hanging out with my girlfriends, listening to music, and talking mainly about boys. I could’ve cared less about school policies or the Vietnam War. I hadn’t thought much about the latter except a couple of years earlier when my older brother enlisted in the army in order to avoid being drafted and sent straight to Vietnam. But senior year, things began to change.
I started reading books like Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Brautigan’s The Pill vs the SpringHill Mine Disaster, and books on Vietnamese colonial history that turned me against the war, most likely in combination with Nixon becoming president and expanding the war with a bombing campaign in Cambodia, not to mention the persistent TV images of dead US soldiers.
As for school policy, I had been against redundant and repetitive homework ever since Mrs. Sullivan assigned my 4th grade class the task of writing Roman numerals from 1-300 in one night! That was the only time my parents called our neighbor, the superintendent of schools, at least until my senior year. Two years later, Mrs. Sullivan redeemed herself when she assigned our 6th grade class Macbeth as an end of year production; she made major revisions to the play and divvied up the three witches’ appearances so more girls could be surly on stage.
But until senior year, I hadn’t considered the dress code as something repressive, a mandatory behavioral policy that unfairly limited girls’ options on cold winter days in Cleveland, nor had I considered it a gender issue. We girls had to wear dresses or skirts that fell just above the knee and were not allowed to wear pants. No one - heaven forbid – could wear jeans to school in 1969. Then one day in the fall of our senior year, I began to take a personal interest in our school’s dress code, thanks to a social studies teacher.
That year, I took the required class on US government with Mr. Lemington, a tall imposing older teacher who wore a suit and tie to school every day. To be a social studies teacher at our high school, you presumably had to be a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, that far-right, white nationalist organization that strongly supported the American war effort “to contain communism” in Vietnam. The first time I entered his classroom, I was agog! Everywhere I looked were American flags, eleven in all of all sizes, some brand new, some tattered as if they had flown on a tank or a ship in battle. All around us, there were political posters and bumper stickers imploring: “Socialism has never worked and never will”; “Impeach Earl Warren”; “End the welfare state”; and “America, love it or leave it!” These were the not-so-subtle messages this teacher and the social studies department wanted us to internalize. His colleagues, including the one we called Spoon, were generally more refined in their attempts to influence or control us, but they conveyed the same basic message. They supported the war in Vietnam, to the point of actively persuading graduating seniors to enlist. They saw opposition to the war as unpatriotic, and they were hostile to any behavior they interpreted as questioning the status quo.
That early fall day when I started caring about the dress code, I was walking through the halls of Olmsted High doing errands for a teacher and wearing cute new brown corduroy culottes with a hem that fell maybe three inches above my knees. Yes, higher than officially sanctioned! Spoon happened to be in the hall, coming my way. He smirked as he approached me. “Lauffer,” he said, “That skirt. Short enough for you?” “No, Spoon, actually it’s just the perfect length for this warm fall day, you asshole,” I thought as I kept walking. At that point in my life, I didn’t know that what I had just experienced was an expression of the male gaze from a person in a position of power, an expression of misogyny.
The teacher's remark bothered me but I managed to push it out of my head until later that day, at home. During our family dinner, I shared the story and my parents were concerned. This state of affairs led to the second school-related call to our next door neighbor, the superintendent of schools. The next morning at school, I was called out into the hall only to see Spoon awkwardly standing there. He apologized for what he had said to me. I have no recollection, 50 years later, of how I responded in the moment, but I know that I began to voice my objection to our restrictive dress code to my friends and anyone else who would listen.
That same month, my friend Annie and I began organizing for the Student Moratorium Day to End the War in Vietnam. Cleveland was the center of the national organization and we were drawn in after going to a march in downtown Cleveland. We spoke to our peers at high school, asking if they’d be willing to wear a black arm band on October 15th. We had kids sign up, bought black fabric at Zayre’s, and painstakingly cut out 200 black arm bands to distribute the following day. It was heartwarming, seeing so many making this statement for peace. But by lunch time, many kids had removed their black arm bands. When Annie and I asked some of them why, they let us know that the social studies teachers, Mr. Lemington and Spoon, had accosted them in class or in the hallways, and asked them to explain their decisions to support the Moratorium. The teachers pressured them to take off their black arm bands. Nevertheless, Mr. Lemington tried and failed with several students who may have been stronger in their anti-war resolve.
In parallel to our efforts to draw attention to ending the war in Vietnam (on a very different scale with different consequences), we started an anti-dress code petition, we lobbied friends in student council to vote to abolish it, we attended school board meetings in the winter to present the petition, and at least one other time in the spring to scrutinize the vote on ending the dress code. It was a lesson in civics that could have not been replicated in a classroom. In late May, two weeks before graduation, the board voted not to abolish the dress code policy but to modify it, keeping rules that the school newspaper called “petty” and “rather fussy.” Blouses and shirt had to be tucked in, no outdoor jackets could be worn in school, but hair length was no longer regulated. As the Spotlight reported, “This code went into effect Monday, May 25th, when boys started to ‘legally’ wear blue jeans, and girls appeared in slacks.” A minor victory for student agency!
Leaving OFHS that June, we felt empowered to change the world. We could question authority and disrupt negative impulses and bad policy. "Peace would guide the planets," and we had hope for a better world, each of us destined to make an impact! But the Vietnam War would go on for another four to five years, leaving 58,220 Americans and over one million Vietnamese people dead. Our generation emerged from that rubble, taking different paths into our futures. As Joan Baez sang, “The years were young, the struggle barely had its start.”
