Butch Recalls Crazy Moments in School Lunchroom

   I guess we all remember those crazy happenings in the good old school lunchroom. Most of the time we just sat there and ate the prepared school lunch or the food our mothers had packed for us, and talked to our friends. After all, in addition to the school cooks watching from the serving counter, there was usually a teacher who had been assigned lunch duty to supervise everyone.

   However, a few kids who were bored and needed some excitement to liven up the day, just could not resist pulling a prank on some unsuspecting fellow student. Here are a few…

(1) Placing a foreign object in food…they would divert their attention and  hide something in the food…a hair, a chewed piece of gum, a bug, a spit wad, or whatever was handy. One time my sister’s class had been dissecting frogs in her science class right before lunch. She and another girl thought it would be fun to place a frog eye in their friend’s corn. Yes, they waited until after she had eaten it to tell her. When school was let out, the girl walked home and took Pepto-Bismol!

(2) Food fight…This is a classic activity at many schools. I don’t recall an all-out food fight, but there were “mini-fights” in which students threw food at someone else, oftentimes flipping it with their forks catapult style and trying to hit them in the face. Most common items were vegetables and beans.

(3) Extra salt…We had little salt shakers on the tables, so why not add a little extra salt, maybe even half of a shaker, to someone’s mashed potatoes or dessert while they weren’t looking?

(4) Switcheroo…Did you love the apple crisp and never have enough? No problem. While a buddy was gabbing with a friend, someone could steal his apple crisp and replace it with those carrots that they hated. However, a real comedian wanted those carrot sticks to shove up his nose and make a funny face. I also watched a boy steal potato chips from his good friend…one chip at a time!

(5) Food sculpture…A few artistic students were quite talented. They could create sculptures of various things from their food…animals, faces, mosaics, etc. The 1950’s new Michaelangelo!

(6) Thermos shake-up…I remember the time a boy in my class brought a hot dog in his thermos, along with a bun in his lunchbox, to make a sandwich for lunch. When he left to buy an extra milk, a friend shook the thermos several times. When the boy opened his thermos, the hot dog exploded out the top like an X-15 rocket and hit the ceiling. It was amazing!

(7) Spit and sneeze prank…This was usually done to someone who nobody liked. While they weren’t looking, a nasty kid might spit into someone’s chili…or pretend they had a bad cold, and sneeze directly into their food tray…and of course then say they were sorry. Disgusting! (When I was a police officer, I found out that an employee at a restaurant in Crawfordsville had been spitting on the hamburgers before he placed the bun on top. He was doing this to customers he didn’t like. Perhaps he got his start in the school lunchroom?)

(8) Ketchup squirting…Who can resist squeezing the ketchup bottle and squirting someone? And if those small packets of ketchup were used, they just poked a very tiny hole in the opposite end and watch it stream out onto clothing.

    Well, I was a good little boy and never tried any of the above. A few pranksters ended up in the principal’s office, but most were never caught. Why not? Well, back then if you told on someone, you were labeled a “tattletale” for life. There were likely many other lunchroom pranks and crazy things that you remember from your glorious school days!

John “Butch” Dale is a retired teacher and County Sheriff. He has also been the librarian at Darlington the past 36 years, and is a well-known artist and author of local history.