It's spring break season and if you're planning
on going to the beach and have a crazy time,
well then you have a man named Sam Ingram
to thank for it. And no he did not invent
the beer bong.
The story of spring break as this week in
college or now even in high school when you
have a crazy time, preferably in a warm place,
preferably by an ocean, probably with some
booze that you may or may not be old enough
to drink, all started in 1936. That was the
year that Sam Ingram who was the swim coach
at Colgate University--not to be confused
with what I brush my teeth with every morning,
and night, sometimes after a garlic-y lunch--decided
to take his team down to Fort Lauderdale in
order to train at the Casino pool which was
the only Olympic-sized swimming pool at the
time in beautiful or kind of weird Florida.
Two years later in 1938 the city of Fort Lauderdale
in order to drum up a little bit of local
business decided to host 300 collegiate swimmers
for a meet at that Casino pool. Thus began
ladies and gentleman the spring break tradition.
Apparently whenever you put college people
plus water together they have to get drunk.
It's like a law of nature or something. Time
magazine actually reported on college spring
break for the first time in 1959. Quoting
from that article, 'Twenty thousand spring
vacationing collegians who began taking over
the town two week-ends ago behaved in the
same sun-struck, beer-propelled way as have
their predecessors for the last twenty years.
They grilled themselves rare all day, beach-boozed
all night, and blew the foam off the early
hours by decanting sand sharks.' By the 1980s
370,000 students were flooding Fort Lauderdale
every year, that original sight of spring
break, a trend which was helped in no small
part by the 1983 hit starring Tom Cruise 'Spring
Break'. Three years later in 1986 spring break
moved from the big screen to the small screen
when MTV began first live-broadcasting from
various spring break locales which later on
in the nineties taught me as a child what
a wet t-shirt contest is. But in more recent
years with more attention being paid to things
property damage, bodily injuries and oh yeah
excessive drinking, local governments like
Fort Lauderdale or Fort Liquordale as it used
to be known in the 1980s have kind of tamped
down on spring break revelry. Although if
you did see the 2013 movie 'Spring Breakers'
I don't think there's any sign that PCB is
stopping. I couldn't handle. Give me a beach
but with nobody on it. Who's fun? But I want
to hear from you, where you live does this
kind of spring break wildness happen and have
you ever gone to a crazy spring break beach?
Let me know in the comments below. If you
are like me and are no longer in school and
don't have a spring break anymore, I feel
you. I think that we need to get Kid President
on making spring break just a global holiday.
We all need one. Really just maybe not, not
at Panama City Beach. If you want to hear
an expanded podcast all about spring break
and things that I didn't talk about like the
health aspects of all that spring break drinking
and possible sex-having you should head over
to stuffmomnevertoldyou.com. And hey be responsible
people.
