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					Also this issue: Here We Are Now -Patrick Rapa The Hangman James Lewes is documenting a very perishable part of the local rock scene. -Patrick Rapa Where They Were Then From Studio to salon to saloon, old-heads recall the scene they can¹t exactly remember. -A.D. Amorosi Punk Calling Diary of a man in a local band (or two) in the early 䢔s. -179Frank Blank² Moriarty Getting to the point the bryn mawr club knows where it¹s going, and where it¹s been. -Mary Armstrong Those were the frickin¹ days Rolling stone¹s david fricke remembers the main point -Patrick Rapa The Lowdown Peaks, valleys and what finally put a fork in The Low Road. -Lori Hill Deep Thoughts with The Low Road

October 17-23, 2002

cover story

all you zombies

how the hooters inspired high school cliques to fight on the same side.

by Frank Lewis

Anyone who attended high school in the early ’80s, or who’s at least seen a John Hughes movie, knows that the social stratification of teenagers that’s gotten so much attention since Columbine is nothing new. Long before the trenchcoat mafioso there were, to quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, pinheads, dweebies, wonkers, richies,” to name a few.

My high school, Paul VI in Haddon Heights, N.J., was like that. There was movement between some groups -- I had friends among the punk/new wavers, the metalheads/stoners (who were also the smartest people I knew), the National Honor Society crowd, the street hockey nuts and the "play people," those involved with the drama club and/or annual musical production (I was hardcore stage crew). But some circles -- the wrestlers, the Gweeds (short for Guido, referring to those who were strangely preoccupied with their Italian lineage), the Dancin' on Air regulars and other subsets of beautiful people -- were pretty insular. And we all had our own tables in the cafeteria.

But in the fall of '84, a truce was called. We didn't start socializing, and some of us never stopped hating pep rallies, but something resembling universal school spirit gripped the entire student body as we united for a few months around a common cause: bringing The Hooters to our auditorium.

In 1984, The Hooters' national release, Nervous Night, and its hit "And We Danced," was still a year away, but locally they were already huge. So was rock station WMMR, and that's where the idea of a contest built around The Hooters was born.

The rules were simple: Write "WMMR" and "Hooters" on as many 3 x 5 cards as you could, and the high school that delivered the most to the station's office (at 19th and Walnut at the time) would win a Hooters concert. And at the launch on Oct. 3, no one, including 'MMR, had any idea what a regional phenomenon it would become.

I don’t recall how long it took for the contest to catch on, but it did, like nothing else in my four years at Paul VI. Suddenly nearly everyone — the socialites, the socially invisible, the exchange student from Venezuela — was scribbling on 3x5 cards. And when all the office supply stores in the WMMR listening area ran out of them after a few weeks of this, we cut up paper and kept right on going. Art students used the tabletop paper cutter in the supply room when the art teacher, a humorless old nun, wasn’t around. The rest of us made do with rulers or scissors.

The art teacher wasn’t the only one who hated the whole thing. Some warned that not only would cards not be filled out in their classes, but completed cards in plain sight would be confiscated. Others, however — and not just the younger ones — recognized that something special was going on. They looked the other way, and sometimes even let us bang out cards for the last five or 10 minutes of the period. The principal, a demanding, dictatorial but occasionally reasonable priest, opted to tolerate it.

At first the cards were delivered to the station, but that didn’t last. “It was quite overwhelming,” recalls Jack Quigley, who was promotions director at the time (he now teaches music while working toward a masters in music education in Virginia). “It was overwhelming to the point that we had to change our storage location three times.”

Every day at 5 p.m., WMMR announced the top five schools as of that day. The Arbitron ratings, which relied then on personal journals of listening habits, could not have reflected the impact this had on the station’s audience. This was big. My knowledge of local radio history is limited, but I would bet that there’d been nothing like it since the late ’50 and early ’60s, when everyone under 18 listened to the same music and the same few DJs. (Quigley says the idea for the Hooters contest came from similar promotions by stations of that era.)

In hindsight, I think the Hooters contest phenomenon was greater than the sum of its parts. WMMR was popular — most of my friends listened at least to John DeBella’s “Morning Zoo” — but the top 40 station of the day (98, I think) was big among my peers as well, and my metalhead friends preferred WYSP. The Hooters were well known, but I don’t recall them having the kind of appeal among teens that would inspire devoting dozens of hours over two months to scribbling the same words hundreds or thousands of times.

“It’s hard to say why it took off so much,” says Quigley. “But at that time, music was going through a change and kids didn’t have anything to hang their hats on.” Most radio stations, ’MMR included, were chasing the 18-34 market. Most alternative music could not be found on commercial radio, hip-hop was still emerging.

Eighteen years later I still don’t fully understand it. It was all so … old-fashioned, like one of those movies in which Mickey Rooney organizes the neighborhood kids for a benefit show. We were Gen-Xers, coming of age in the Me decade, barely remembering a world without mousse and David Letterman. Coolness in the form of ironic detachment was the coin of the realm, and here we were getting giddy over a stunt by a radio station best known for Hawaiian shirt Gonzo Fridays.

When hand-counting the ballots became impossible, ’MMR hired a company to estimate totals by weight. At the final storage site, a warehouse, “There were rows and rows and rows of these cards,” Quigley recalls. “I remember kids were writing on toilet paper … and those old computer punch-out cards, anything.” The deadline was in early December, but the announcement of the winner was pushed to January due to the enormity of the task of counting them all.

Paul VI was in the top five throughout much of the contest, and we owned the no. 1 slot for the last week or so. But we never considered that other schools might be holding back, so we were shocked when Shawnee High of Medford, N.J. won — with more than 3.2 million cards, according to an Inquirer article from the time. The grand total: 26 million cards from 52 schools.

I’ve long wondered how many trees perished for this quirky contest, and whether adults with legitimate uses for index cards ever figured out why for a few months they sold out everywhere like the must-have toy of the year around Christmas. And I’ve wondered why people like me and many of my friends, who never attended school sporting events and considered pep rallies evidence that the place was a fascist state, got so caught up in the movement.

Maybe it was because the contest was not sponsored by the school or any other recognized authority figures. That made it not only palatable to almost everyone, but attractive even; because underneath the wide array of fashions and hairstyles we adopted, we shared at least one thing in common: resentment toward our adult oppressors. Forbid us from filling out cards in school? We’ll do it at home! For once you cannot stop us! The sportos motorheads geeks sluts pinheads dweebies wonkers richies united shall never be divided! At least not until this contest is over!

Afterwards, things went back to normal. There was a minor controversy a few months later over the theme song for the junior prom. The girls split over the various sappy love songs on the ballot, but nearly ever guy voted for “Follow You, Follow Me” by Genesis, so it won easily. This did not sit well with the female organizers, however, so they called for a do-over, sans the Phil Collins classic. So much for unity.

That spring I briefly dated a senior who was way out of my league, a brunette knockout who typically paired only with Gweeds. I blew it badly, of course, and she went back to her own kind, but the mere fact that I’d responded to her flirtations instead of seizing up in fright was a big step for me. What does this have to do with the Hooters? Nothing, really, except that today it reminds me of the scene near the end of The Commitments, in which Jimmy is lamenting that he couldn’t keep together the talented but dysfunctional band he’d formed. The oldest member, Joey, tells Jimmy that in fact he has accomplished something — he broadened all their horizons, and that was a lot.