I remember the smell: the musty odor of too many sweaty teenagers piled into too creaky a place.
And the sound: hundreds of sneakers slamming the wood floors in the main building, boom-boom-boom up and down the stairs.
Our chemistry lab — tucked into the basement underneath the auditorium in that 1922 building — felt like a giant petri dish. It was dark, cramped and — like most of our classrooms — mercilessly not air-conditioned.
Lake Worth High School was already old when my class, the Class of 1974, showed up in the fall of 1971. The “school on the hill,” at A Street and Lake Avenue, is the oldest continuously operating high school in Palm Beach County. Then and now, it’s a sprawling social experiment.
In January 1971, the most controversial issue facing the school board was its conservative dress code: girls’ skirts had to pass the “fingertip test” — be no shorter than the reach of a girl’s fingertips — and boys’ hair could not touch their shirt collars.
Feuds over the dress code regularly made the front page of The Palm Beach Post. One board member screeched at a meeting: “If they (students) want to make spectacles of themselves, let them!” Another crowed: “Tear down one fence, and they’ll demand you tear down another!”