The Oxford Chronicles: High School in the 80s

The following is a featured guest post from a valued reader:

When I was ten years old, my parents moved our family from sunny Florida, where we went to the beach every weekend and swam in the beautiful Gulf of Mexico, to Connecticut. It was early October and was already gray, mostly leafless, and cloudy. I would have pulled off both of my own thumbs if I knew that it would get me back to my old house and school.

Life as the New Kid in Small Town Connecticut

We settled in a small country town, a half-mile up the road from a dairy farm. A cold, drafty house built in the late 1700s on the corner of Quaker Farms and Hog’s Back Road was my idea of hell on earth.

My brother fared much better. He made friends quickly and within a couple of years, he had developed into a popular athlete. My social status, on the other hand, devolved from being the teacher’s pet and class clown with loads of friends to a dorky nobody. You don’t actually move to Connecticut. You’ve always been there and so have your family and friends. I spent my first three years as “the new kid.”

Our town, Oxford, was so small that we didn’t even have a high school. We  shared one with Seymour, the town to the east of us. Throughout junior high, I heard  stories about Seymour High, which convinced me that, if I went to school there, I would surely spend all of my time stuck in someone’s (probably my own) locker. It was the land of the metalheads, one of the two social groups accepted by Connecticut teenagers in the 1980s.

Land of the Metalheads

The price of admission to the metalheads was a denim vest over a leather jacket  with a wallet chain, engineer boots, and one of those big combs with a fist-shaped handle in the back pocket of a shredded pair of jeans. Include a wispy mustache, shoulder-length feathered hair and a love of all things heavy metal, and you, too, could be an  official badass. If you were lucky enough to have your own car, you drove a Nova. It had to be primed flat black and a good portion of the car’s body had to be made of Bondo, which held all of the rusted parts together.

Life at School

If I didn’t go to Seymour High School, the only other options were a couple of private Catholic high schools in the area (also out of town). So the school that I ended up attending was in the city of Waterbury, about fifteen miles from home. For ten years in a row, Waterbury was listed as one of the top five best places in the state to get punched in the face. It’s a former factory town where the skeletons of the massive brick buildings  still stand unused for close to a hundred years. In the fifties, the city was run by the mob.  I suspect that nothing has changed on that front.

Our campus looked like a country club and, compared the schools in Oxford, it was massive. The students were from several towns surrounding Waterbury. It seemed like everyone knew everyone else even on the first day of classes.

The only people familiar to me were my three other friends from Oxford, whose  parents also valued their lives enough not to send them to Seymour. I could say that we were welcomed with open arms by the other students, but that would be a lie. While Seymour High was the domain of the noble metalhead, the Guidos ruled our school.

The Guidos

The male students looked like they were made in one of those factories nearby, all  stamped out of the same mold. They had their hair cut into flat tops. Add a gold chain, a pair of red Reeboks, a skinny tie, and a group of identically-dressed clones to follow you everywhere you go. The official car of the Guido was the Camaro. It was your birthright as a proud member of the Waterbury gentry.

At school, when I mentioned what town we were from, the response was always a raised eyebrow. Even in a state as small as Connecticut, and only a couple of towns away, Oxford was an unknown. One of us – probably me – made the mistake of  mentioning that there were a few dairy farms near our homes. Thereafter, we were  known for the duration of our high school careers as “The Oxford Shit Kickers.” That is not a name that shakes off easily.

Challenging Curriculum

The curriculum at the school was very challenging and the faculty was extremely strict. The priests who lived on campus could be intimidating until you got to know them. It was never acknowledged, but I believe that the freshman class was hazed  particularly hard in order to weed out the kids who weren’t on par with the school’s  expectations. For that whole first year, I was a nervous wreck.

I think it was due to the overwhelming anxiety we felt that my friends and I began to come up with ways to amuse ourselves. The four of us met in my homeroom each  morning before our classes started. We’d joke around nervously and take comfort in the  fact that at least we knew one another. Making one of the other guys laugh turned out to  be the best way to relieve tension, and we made a habit of this practice.

That’s when the trouble started.

Read the Full Story

It only took thirty-three years, but I finally sat down and wrote about my high school experiences and the group of friends who turned every day into an adventure. The title of the book is The Oxford Chronicles and it’s a cross between Ferris Bueller, Stand by Me, and Revenge of the Nerds. It’s available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle.

You can also find out more if you go to OxfordChronicles.com. Even if  you didn’t live through the 80s, you’ll get a kick out of the stories.