DISPATCHES
By: Hank Kalet
There were 250 students in my graduating class in 1980.
That now seems like a lifetime ago. So much has changed since then both in terms of the kind of school South Brunswick has become and what the average high schooler needs to deal with in his four years.
Think about it. When I entered high school in 1979, Jimmy Carter was president and the Pittsburgh Pirates were about to upset the Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series. Cal Ripken had yet to play a game for the Orioles, Wayne Gretzky had yet to score a goal and Michael Jordan was still in high school.
The Continental Airlines Arena had not even been built yet. Maybe it shouldn’t have been.
Mister Rogers was still producing new shows and the top shows on television included "Happy Days," "Three’s Company," "The Love Boat" and "Soap" who said TV was a cultural wasteland?
Disco reigned on the radio (this led a Chicago rock disc jockey to burn a pile of records at the old Comiskey Park, touching off a riot). I was listening to Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, the Cars, the Kinks’ "Low Budget" and Neil Young’s "Rust Never Sleeps," and I was moving into punk and the British pub rock of Graham Parker and Elvis Costello.
Intel had just announced production of its latest processor, which could address up to a megabyte of memory a miniscule amount compared to today’s personal computers.
My brother Mark was just 9 years old. Now he’s married and has a 8-month-old kid.
South Brunswick was a small community back in 1979. The U.S. Census put the population at 17,127 it is now 36,963.
East of Route 1 was primarily farmland, though the Dayton Center and Square developments were being built and the development boom that was to completely alter the town was yet to come.
High school students attended class in a small portion of what is now Crossroads on Major Road, while the Crossroads Middle School was located in the building that now houses the Upper Elementary School. In the early 1980s, the building was gutted and completely expanded, with construction of a new field house and a host of new classrooms being added.
We didn’t have ice hockey, lacrosse, golf or swim teams. There was no McDonald’s, no Burger King and no Wendy’s to cut out to.
I had four years of CIPED a community involvement program that took us out of class one day a week. We did this as much to relieve the overcrowding in the building as we did for educational purposes. I spent some time assisting on radio news at WRSU-Rutgers and writing press releases for the Rutgers Sports Information Department doing radio at Rutgers; now, the Post is offering the same chance to students involved in the CASE at SBHS a 40-hour career study program.
By September of my senior year, I had narrowed down my college choices Rutgers, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel and a couple of other schools and I was preparing to take the SAT test for the second time. The pressure was fairly minimal as far as the school culture was concerned. Any pressure I felt about academics came from home, where my dad was far more committed to my schooling than I was. I was a relatively mediocre student pretty smart, but lazy and unmotivated. And yet I was accepted at nearly every school to which I applied.
As I said, much has changed. Police now patrol the halls of most high schools. The pressure seems greater now, at least according to the students I’ve talked with over the last few years. There is a greater premium on testing and the competition among students has grown to a surprising level.
To some degree, this is good. This shows a greater emphasis on academics and classroom work. But it also makes students grow up a whole lot faster than they should have to.
If you were a student in a suburban high school in the late 1970s, your worries were minimal. There were drugs around and a lot of drinking, but we didn’t have to worry about guns or other weapons.
And some things, of course, stay the same. Synthetic dance music again reigns on the radio, while television continues to offer us stimulating fare such as "Survivor," "Big Brother" and the other reality shows.
Cal Ripken is retiring and Michael Jordan is contemplating a comeback.
And I’m still listening to Bruce Springsteen and waiting for the newest disc from Bob Dylan.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of The South Brunswick Post and has been forced by a couple of gray hairs to admit he’s getting older. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]

