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- Hey, I'm welcome to the short stuff.
“I'm Josh and there's Chuck and everybody else's present”
in spirit in this step. You should know short stuff. - Where the boys are? - Is that the song? - I think so.
I always think of that book of love song.
I wanna be the book of love. - What weights, you say yours? I wanna hear it. - I wanna be where the boys are, but I'm not allowed. You've not heard that song?
- I didn't know Lou Reed sang a song like that. - Do I sound like Lou Reed? - I was like, you kind of speak singing, which is Lou Reed's deal. - Yeah, I do speak singing.
I can't put my all into it. - Hey man, there are a lot of people who made great careers out of speak singing. No shame. - That's right.
All right, I might take you up on that and become a speak singer. - That's right. I mean, that's the gateway to being a white male rapper so just be careful.
- Okay. I will be careful.
If you see me with like three lines cut into my side,
decide about it. Maybe take me out for some Jackson give me some. - The talking too. - I've done that accidentally. - Oh, I haven't seen, well, you may do that accidentally to me,
but I'm talking intentional. - Okay, yeah. - All right, so we're talking spring break.
“That's why you sang, can you sing it again, please?”
- Where the boys are? - It was lovely. That is actually, they think where spring break, the American institution of going to warm places in the spring, usually from northern universities
and getting plastered for a week came from a book called What's The Call Took? - Where the boys are? - Not bad, but okay, I'll speak singing. You got to sing where the boys are.
- Okay, I just want to be in your group. - Oh yeah, we could do that. We could do it speak singing barbershop. - Yeah. - Do it. - Not even a quartet.
- Yeah, that's a great, that's such a great bad idea. (laughs) - Oh, we can also add the slide whistle, you got me too, is like an extra thing. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's our only instrument,
as far as I'm concerned. - Yeah. - So where the boys are? (laughs) - All right, so you mentioned where the boys are a bunch
and that was sort of the big launching point for spring break, but we got to back up a little bit to some sort of ground laying, I guess. People since the 19th century, apparently, American college students, even way back in the 1800s,
would take a little weekend breaks during the spring to like hot springs and maybe even to the coast to kind of get themselves right. And the 20th century, early in the 20th century, the road trip was born and woman colleges,
woman only colleges were born and you pair those things together and you're gonna get girls going to see boys. And so all of a sudden, members of the opposite sex were really hanging out with each other a lot more.
- Yeah, this is when this might be. - That's right. And then people started drinking a lot more, like kind of out in public, like if you went to the military at 18,
like it was okay to go to a die bar and get drunk, but that was kind of frowned upon in college, but starting around the early 1920s or so, college kids started drinking. - Yeah, that whole jazzy, jump guessing, right?
- Probably. - So there was an act of nature, a force of nature, that also plays into this pretty prominently, the great Miami hurricane of 1926 that said, try again Miami and wipe Miami clean.
And so the city had to rebuild into the version we know today.
As a part of this,
the nearby city of Fort Waterdale was like, "I, we need to get people back here."
So we're gonna do the thing that cities have always done
and still continue to do to attract tourists. And that has build an Olympic size swimming pool.
“- Yeah, I think it was more of a novelty at the time”
because that was certainly the first one in Florida in 1928. And not too long after, like five or six years later, there was a swimming coach from Colgate University in Upstate New York, which was very cold. You said, "Hey, guys, it's very cold."
And there aren't a lot of indoor training pools here. So let's go down to Florida. They built this was bang new pool and Fort Waterdale. They went down there, they trained in the spring. And by 1938, the college coaches swim for 'em was formed
and Word had gotten around. That it was like a good place to go train, which accidentally coincided with the opening of sort of a younger person's bar called the elbow room.
- Yeah, and the C-Breeze hotel.
It sounds like my kind of place, man. A hotel bar will love those. - Same. - I don't even drink anymore and I still love a good hotel bar.
- They're great. - So yeah, these college athletes,
“these swim teams now had a place to be Florida”
and a place to party, the elbow room. And it's just started to kind of get back that like, hey, there's this really fun thing that the swim teams are doing. Other swim teams kind of took part in this too.
And this idea kind of spread beyond swim teams. College swim teams too, just college students who started to come down to Fort Waterdale and Doros. - Yeah, like I like to drink. I like to flirt, I like to be in the sun.
- I like a farmer's tan. - That's right, so maybe that's a great place to take a break and we'll be right back with where the boys are, where is that boys are? - Well, now we're on the road,
driving in your truck. Why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. (upbeat music) All right.
(upbeat music) - Two percent. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, an on my podcast, two percent.
I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. All be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts and more. To look past the in practical and way too complex pseudo science
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- Listen to 2 percent, that's TWO percent
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“- So, yeah, I guess we're finally at where the boys are, right?”
'Cause things have been kind of picking up steam through the '40s and the '50s, but then in 1958, there was an English teacher from Michigan State University. His name was Glendon's Warthout.
And he said, hey, kids, I wanna hang with you.
Let's go down to Spring Break.
I'm gonna follow you around.
And I'm just gonna write about your Escapades. And apparently, it was debauchers enough and just crazy enough that he managed to write a book out of like this essentially this week in Fort Lauderdale with some of his students.
And the name of that book was Unholy Spring. Unholy Spring, Unholy Spring. - That's right, he changed the name to where the boys are, of course. The book was a pretty big hit,
but the movie really put it on the map. When NGM put that out, not too long after. And that's what really changed things. All of a sudden Florida was on display as like, where, well, where the boys are, and where the girls are,
“and what you need to be doing every spring.”
And, you know, we got some loose numbers here. I'm sure it's kind of hard to put great numbers on the 1960 Spring Break growth.
But they said that basically tens of thousands
of students started coming after that movie came out and by the mid-1980s, like close to 400,000 students were going just to Fort Lauderdale. - Man, in Fort Lauderdale, I mean, it's a city in Florida, but you had 350,000 extra people
for over the course of like a month probably. Like that's, that's an impact for sure. - Yeah, and a bad impact at times. - Yeah, like that's the thing, if you trace the history of Spring Break,
it's like fun, fun, fun, fun. Oh, it's awful now and then murders and rapes. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, awful. Fun, fun, fun, awful. And from what I can gather, Chuck, it turns awful
when the middle age dudes show up. That's when it turns awful, because they should not be there. They have no business being there. Spring Break is for college kids. When the older dudes show up,
that's when things get dark and bad. - Yeah, although high school kids, I went to Panama City and high school and it was dark and bad with high school kids. So I can assure you of that.
- Okay. - I did too. - 'Cause that was a good kid at the time. - Yeah, I was not a good kid at the time. - Yeah, I mean, I was there.
How was that those parties? But, you know, I was drinking my apple juice I was pretending like I was drinking beer. - Oh, where are you really? That's awesome.
- I was very cringy to look back upon that, but I think it's sweet and really charming actually. - Yeah, I can admit that now. I'm gonna be 55 this weekend, all bets are off. - I know, how are you feeling?
- I feel like I'm 53. - You should have said Spring Break. - So Spring Break is going bad in Florida. In Fort Lauderdale, the town obviously gets together and this seems to be sort of the rule and say,
all right, we gotta start curving some drinking laws. The mayor goes on good morning Americans
“says, "You need to start going to other places."”
And they did, so all of Florida became destinations. Panama City where I went, like I said, senior year, 89. And then Daytona Beach was another big one. And Daytona really grew after MTV in 1986 started broadcasting live for their MTV Spring Break Party stuff.
- Yes, the first year in 1986 they had live,
musical performances, that was just a part of everyone, but in that year, they had performances by the Beastie Boys and Starship. - Yeah, I mean, who else would you get? What else goes together better?
- And I bet we can guess what song Starship performed. - Stair off. - Yeah, and we built the city, those were the two. That we built the city, though, is also appears in one of the better Simpsons episodes where the family
goes on Spring Break and really keeps singing that song the whole time. That's really funny. - And what's cool, I just can't not mention it. That's the second Spring Break episode the Simpsons did.
The first one was where Bart and Millhausen Nelson and at least one or two other kids just ran away and went on Spring Break and ended up wearing wigs if they got out of the top of the sunsphere in Knoxville and it's a good one.
- That's fun. - Okay, so go watch those two. I think is the point of this episode. - That's a takeaway. - So Spring Break's going big in Florida, MTV is there
in the '86, like I said, but before that in 1983,
“a very key thing happened right here in the ATL”
when some black college students got together and we have some great historical black colleges and universities here in Atlanta and not all of them went somewhere else for Spring Break. So one year in '83, they got together and said,
"Hey, we're stuck here on campus. Let's have a big picnic in a big party." This is coming off of, you know, the song La Freak by Sheek a few years earlier. And of course, the song Super Freak from Rick James was big
and it was a picnic. So they called it "Freak Nick" and "Freak Nick" became a huge, manga's deal in Atlanta and with people coming from all over the country
in the world, even, but it blew up Atlanta for about a decade or so. - Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of people
Ostensibly black college students, mostly.
Just came to Atlanta and shot the town down
“because the main thing of Freak Nick was cruising, right?”
And you just, all of a sudden, had an extra few hundred thousand cars on the main drags throughout Atlanta and like it would take you hours to get places that it should take you 10, 15 minutes because there were so many cars just stopped
in the middle of the road. That was a picnic, it was nuts. - Yeah, I mean, people started saying home and white people were terrified because they were young black people having a lot of fun
out in the street. - Right. - And the incidents of crime were here and there but nothing like it was being portrayed in the news as like this sort of, you know,
lawless situation happening. There's a great documentary that I can't recommend enough that was out a couple of years ago on Hulu called Freak Nick,
the wildest party never told that Atlanta's own germane
to pre-produce, but it's great. How do you recommend watching it? - Yeah, I think it actually did start to get pretty dark in the final years. - It did.
- But, and again, 'cause middle-aged you showed up.
“- Yeah, one thing you can do if you want to crack down”
on spring break is make one or two new laws and it'll completely choke the life out of it. For a freak Nick, they pass the law about cruising and like that basically broke it up 'cause that was a point of freak Nick.
Panama City Beach where we both went for spring break.
That was for a very long time that accepted the spillover from Fort Lauderdale and became a spring break mecca in and of itself. And in 2015, it got really bad. There was like, it was just,
I think it was like how it normally was but just some really ugly stuff got out on social media. There was a girl who was unconscious and sexually assaulted and there was a video of that that made it round.
Eight people were shot in one house at one point. So Panama City got some really bad rep right then. And they did something about it. They said you can't drink on the beach anymore and that took care of it from that point on.
- Yeah, they're still a band. It's only in March, which is generally when spring break is, ours is an April but they're usually as in March. So yeah, that kind of did away with it.
And that's kind of the deal with spring break. They're definitely a lot of universities now that do alternative things, like programs where you can say like, hey, don't go out and just get drunk on the beach.
Like go volunteer for habitat for humanity and they're a collegiate challenge or go work for HIV advocacy. So plenty of other options besides the traditional spring break for sure.
- For sure. - But yes, no matter what you're doing, whether it's working for habitat for humanity or you're staggering around Fort Lauderdale.
“Every 10, 12 minutes, you have to shout spring break.”
That's right, short stuff is happening. (upbeat music) Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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