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CHILDREN'S 
FOLKLORE 

REVIEW 

VOLUME 24 
NUMBERS 1 AND 2 

2002 

PUBLISHED BY THE  

CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE SECTION OF THE AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY  

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT  

EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY 



 

CONTENTS 

FROM THE EDITOR  ..............................................................................5 

THE 2000 AFS COLUMBINE PANEL 

INTRODUCTION: FOLKLORE RESPONDS To COLUMBINE AND 
ADOLESCENCE 
SIMON J. BRONNER ..... …………………………………………………...7 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY: RUMOR-PANICS IN THE WAKE OF THE 
COLUMBINE SHOOTINGS 
BILL ELLIS ................................................................................................. 21 

THE WAR ON YOUTH: A MODERN OEDIPAL TRAGEDY 
JOANN CONRAD ....... …………………………………………..33 

"EVERYBODY Is THEIR ENEMY": GOTHS, SPOOKY KIDS, AND THE 
AMERICAN SCHOOL SHOOTING PANIC 
ALLEN BERRES ....................................................... ………………..43 

A FEAR OF ADOLESCENT CRUISING: ADULT REACTIONS To A 
TRADITION THAT WON'T Go AWAY 
CHARLIE MCCORMICK .................................................................................... 55 

2001 NEWELL PRIZE PAPER 

REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE WITHIN A GROUP HOME 
JESSE GELWICKS ....……………………………………………… 65 

CFS: 2001 ANNUAL MEETING………………………………………..88 

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS…………………………………….90 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS………………………………………..92 

ON THE COVER: REPRODUCTION OF THE COVER OF W.W. NEWELL'S GAMES AND SONGS 

OF AMERICAN CHILDREN. 



 

FROM THE EDITOR 

At the 2000 American Folklore Society meetings in Columbus, Ohio, the 
Children's Folklore Section sponsored a session entitled "The Monstrous 
Child: Folklore Responds to Columbine and Adolescence." The panel was 
chaired by Simon J. Bronner, and papers were presented by Bill Ellis, JoAnn 
Conrad, Allen Berres, and Charlie McCormick. In spite of the 8:15 AM hour, 
the session was standing room only. 

This double issue of the Children’s Folklore Review presents those 
papers with an introduction written by Simon J. Bronner especially for this 
publication. The Executive Board of the Children's Folklore Section felt it 
was important to present the panel as a whole and authorized the presentation 
of them in volume 24, numbers 1 and 2, as a single publication. 

In a way that no one in the popular media has been able to do, the 
authors of these essays examine the traditional and popular culture elements 
pertaining to adolescence and the Columbine shootings and shed a good deal 
of light on a difficult subject. We are sure you will find these essays 
fascinating. 

In addition, this volume contains the 2001 Newell Prize winning paper 
by Jesse Gelwicks, a student of Jay Mechling's, the minutes of the annual 
meeting, and the usual notes and announcements. 

C.W. Sullivan III 



 

THE 2000 AFS COLUMBINE PANEL 

INTORDUCTION: FOLKLORE RESPONDS 

TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

SIMON J. BRONNER 

It may surprise you to know that this issue on adolescent folklore is a first. Its 
special claim is being a thematic set of essays focusing on adolescence as a 
social category of folkloric production by teenagers and for folkloric response 
by adults and children. This is not to say that folklorists have not been 
listening to teenagers since adolescence became known as a prominent life 
stage in the twentieth century. Especially in American colleges, folklorists fill 
archives with collections by and from adolescents, but they have rarely used 
these materials for a focused inquiry into the age. At the same time that some 
of the best known American folklore genres, such as contemporary legends 
and initiation rituals, derived largely from teenagers, it may be argued that, 
overall, age as a social category of folkloric production has been slow to be 
recognized, and adolescence as a vague period between childhood and 
adulthood has been given even less. To drive the point home, one can note 
that standard reference works in the field such as The Standard Dictionary  
of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (ed. Maria Leach, Funk and Wagnalls, 
1949), American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (ed. Jan Harold Brunvand, 
Garland, 1996), Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music 
and Art (ed. Thomas A. Green, ABC-CLIO, 1997), A Dictionary of English 
Folklore (ed. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, Oxford, 2000), and 
Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore (by Harry Oster and Alan Axelrod, 
Penguin, 2000) lack entries for adolescence. This omission is compounded by 
folkloristic neglect of perspectives from psychological and human develop-
ment or family and youth studies, with which studies of adolescence abound. 
Indeed, such perspectives, associated with sociological and psychological 
disciplines, have not been commonly incorporated into culture studies; 
although, family and youth is one of the pillars of folklore's "social contexts." 

And why should such perspectives be incorporated into culture studies? 
The contributors to this issue may answer that inquiry into the ways that 
cultural expectations of age are formed suggests perspectives on aging. 
Within folklore studies, the field of children's folklore has been a location for 
observation of the cultural adaptation to aging. If the argument is made that 
folklore is a force in everyday life, then aging as a process all humans endure 
should be fundamental to 



 

BRONNER 

the expression of folklore. Further, if the argument is made that folklore 
persists in the modern world because it serves social and psychological 
functions for us as individuals and members of groups and society, then age 
relative to family and community raises many of the questions for which we 
seek answers of adjustment. In childhood above other ages, folklorists 
recognize rapid social change leading to cultural production as individuals 
age and form identities. Therefore the folklore in childhood that forms to 
communicate within a large semiliterate, age-stratified group is a 
conspicuous cultural marker. Folklorists are hardly alone in seeing the social 
connections that result from separation of children into school grades and 
affiliation with families. Still, they may be drawn to cultural differences by 
race, ethnicity, and gender precisely because they stand out physically 
before the ordinariness of age. They may also be lured to the analysis of 
texts categorized into genres or the context of region before age, because of 
the artistic composition inherent in folklore. 

Then came the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999 and a cascade 
of commentaries in the popular press on the troubled and at times menacing 
teen as a problem of age. Looking for explanation, early reports speculated 
that the tragedy was racially motivated, but interviews with participants 
revealed that scenario to be unlikely. Turning to questions of what was 
occurring culturally, and emotionally, for the pair of killers at their age, 
commentators tended to exaggerate the exotic life of the American teen with 
folkloric overtones-rumors, legends, beliefs, rituals, pranks, cults, and dress. 
Writers separated the innocent child from the menacing teen, since the 
assumption could often be heard that the troubled youths were "normal," 
happy children until they entered the dark door of adolescence. In the movie 
Planet of the Apes released in 2001, an ape warns a parent thinking of adopt-
ing a youthful human pet, "Be sure to get rid of it before puberty; one thing 
you don't want in your house is a human teenager." Implicit in such popular 
texts is a search for an explanation for the violence, rebellion, and alienation 
that seemed to be in the chemical mix of adolescence and, in the case of 
school shootings, were thought to have fired affected teens to the point of 
combustion. 

The kind of folklore reported in the popular press through the  
spate of school shootings during the 1990s stressed the adolescent search, 
assumed to be characteristic of the age, for eerie supernatural realms, bizarre 
bonding rituals, and sexual adventures. Journalists voyeuristically 
documented shocking signifiers of identity in dress, hair, body-piercing, 
music, and tattooing, and a subversive development of alternative or counter-
mainstream lifestyles (including formation of 

8 



 

FOLKLORE RESPONDS TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

gangs and even attraction to satanic and diabolical cults). For some, these are 
signs of a culture in decline, and folklore as a repository for anti-social 
values. For others, it shows a cultural creativity that comes with recognition 
of adolescence as an increasingly differentiated social movement at the heart 
of a vibrant popular culture. To be sure, it was not uncommon for published 
ethnographies and filmed documentaries to show high school culture to be 
essentially conservative, with revival of civic rituals of conformity and class 
loyalty surrounding football games, graduations, and proms. 

Statistics kept on juvenile crime showed a decline in assaults and 
violence during the 1990s, and yet opinion polls revealed a popular 
perception that youth violence is spreading and juveniles are increasingly 
considered dangerous and feared. "Teen violence, school violence, and 
gangs" consistently shows up as a significant problem "facing the United 
States" in public opinion polls. When a national sample of Americans was 
asked shortly before Columbine by the Public Agenda Foundation for the 
"first thing that comes to your mind" to describe teenagers, the largest 
percentage, 27 percent, replied "generally negative comments." The next 
largest group was "Disrespectful/Rude/Lacking manners" at 12 percent 
followed by "Rebellious/Uncontrollable/ Wild" at 10 percent (Roper Center, 
1999). And one thing for sure, they thought that teens faced more problems 
than they did (80 percent). A different survey organization asked parents of 
teenagers shortly after Columbine, "what is the most important problem 
facing people their age," and the leading answer was "social pressures (popu-
larity and 'fitting in'), at 29 percent; "crime and violence" was at 8 percent 
(Roper Center, 1999). Especially indicative of this view is the answer with 
folkloristic implications to the question, "If your teen had to choose between 
fitting in with friends or becoming outstanding in some way, which would 
your teen choose?" The survey sponsor was surprised by the high number of 
Americans who replied "fitting in" (43 percent), and yet that observation 
leads to consideration of the intensity of the social groupings in adolescence 
that often rely on expressions of folklore for a sense of identity. 

Against the background of such social surveys, folklore can be seen 
being "expressive" for teenagers and "attitudinal" for adults. Consider these 
examples of folklore of (production), and about (response), school shootings. 

-October 1,1997, Pearl, Mississippi. At the June 1998 trial for Luke 
Woodham, 16, charged with entering his high school with a rifle under his 
trench coat and killing two students and wounding seven oth- 

9 



 

BRONNER 

ers, he testifies that he was influenced by a group of youths calling itself 
"The Kroth." The youths engaged in violent role-playing games and 
conjured spells against their enemies. 

-April 28, 1998, Pomona, California. Two boys, 14 and 17, are shot to 
death at an elementary school playground after a fight escalates between 
two rival "party crews," which stage parties with music and disc jockeys. A 
13-year-old boy, whose name is withheld by authorities, is taken into 
custody and charged as a minor. 

-April 20, 2000, Columbine, Colorado. Reports on the lifestyles of 
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who murdered 12 classmates and a teacher 
before shooting themselves speculate on the planning of the assault to 
commemorate Adolf Hitler's 110th birthday. They are connected to a group 
called the "Trench Coat Mafia," described by columnist Joe Conason as 
"young alienated wannabes." Their preoccupation with "industrial" music, 
the columnist asserts, "suggests the possible influence of a fascistic youth 
subculture that has inspired horrific violence elsewhere." 

-November 25,2001, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Police arrest Eric 
McKeehan, 17, and two 15-year-olds whose names were withheld because 
of their age, for conspiring to commit a Columbine-style attack on the high 
school. The Boston Globe quoted Eric McKeehan's mother, as saying her 
son was not guilty. Ms. St. Hilaire, 52, said her son had been in rebellion 
since the sudden death of his father in September and had started wearing 
dark clothes and a Mohawk hairstyle and piercing various parts of his body. 
The New York Times on November 27 quoted parents of the three boys por-
traying the group as "harmless teenagers, somewhat troubled perhaps, but 
not capable of the violence they were accused of plotting." 

Added to the above suggestions of youth forming "esoteric" or subcultural 
folklife, are examples of "exoteric" adult lore about the shooters circulating 
on the Internet and through faxes: 

1999. One of the boys who murdered his classmates in Littleton 
prepared by designing new computer games levels that resembled his 
school and peopling them with representations of his classmates (declared 
"false" on the Urban Legends Reference Pages at http:// www.snopes2.com) 

1999. Chain letters are circulating with the text, "This forward is 
dedicated to all of the students of Littleton, Colorado. For every person this 
forward is sent to The City of Denver, Colorado will give .25 cents to the 
town of Littleton. Now this may not seem like much to you, but as soon as 
this gets around it all starts to add up. Please. If you just take the time to 
send this it will help the victims of the terrible incident that happened today. 
Send this to as many people you can and start building a new hope for the 
students." (Declared a 

10 



 

FOLKLORE RESPONDS TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

hoax, on Urban Legends and Folklore page at http:// urban legends.about. 
com/librarv /blchain4 .htm) 

1999. Chain letters are circulating with the text, "As of right now, 
there are 25 confirmed dead CHILDREN and faculty and over 30 critically 
injured in yet another (High) school shooting spree. I'm asking you, as 
fellow members and friends to please pray and keep in your hearts these 
poor families of the victims." (Declared of questionable origin on Urban 
Legends and Folklore page at http://urbanlegends.about.com/librarv 
/blchain2.htm) 

Probably the first folkloristic commentary on Columbine was published 
in the New York Folklore Society Newsletter by Steven Zeitlin in the 
Fall/Winter 1999 issue. Zeitlin, co-author of the book City Play (Rutgers 
University Press, 1990) and Giving a Voice to Sorrow (Perigree, 2001), 
warned against over-reacting to violent fantasies expressed in folklore such 
as "I met her in the attic with a semiautomatic" by thinking of them as 
confirmations of the violent intent of youth. He worried that "in the wake of 
Columbine, many teachers and administrators have tried to squelch children's 
fantasies." He drew attention to the shooters' creation of "adolescent 
folklore": they proclaimed death to all enemies, dressed in black, formed a 
club, hosted a web site, devised a suicide pact, even adopted a catchy name, 
the now infamous "Trench Coat Mafia"—and projected it on to reality." But 
despite spotlighting the folkloric aspects of a public issue, Zeitlin still casts 
his net widely over "American children's folklore" and treats these teens in a 
cast of "schoolchildren." 

Bill Ellis in his book Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults (University Press of 
Mississippi, 2001) also warned of public over-reaction to "rumor-panics," 
often connecting teenagers to the threat of, or the attraction to, devil 
worshipers. Documenting oral reports in May 1987 in Lansford, 
Pennsylvania, that a satanic cult planned shooting students attending a high 
school prom, Ellis focused on the event's multiple meanings for (production) 
and about (response) adolescents. 

For some adolescents, making such a prom deadly may have 
heightened its status as a rite of passage, making their attendance 
doubly a proof of their adult status. The participants may not have 
been simply adolescents dabbling in the occult; the Lansford death 
threats, police later discovered, were written by a parent who had 
grudges against administrators and used the cult stories as an 
opportunity for revenge. For some school administrators, turning 
the prom into a show of force may have been a way of assuring 
edgy parents that they were, after all, in control of their children. . . . 
Finally, 

11 



 

BRONNER 

for a few participants, the event may have been seen as a hoax 
proving that adolescent "quasi-satanic" rebellion was justified, since 
grown-ups are prone to hysterical delusions and really do not 
understand what [musician] Ozzy Osbourne is all about. Hence the 
event carries the seeds of future panics, and indeed, as we will see, 
the same material was recycled in the area in 1996, with similar 
results. (218) 

Implicit in these interpretations is the treatment of adolescence as a 
special age because it is a cultural "coming of age." That "coming" could 
suggest a development as much onslaught as transition. It implies a 
vulnerability of a young initiate leaving childhood, and the threat of new 
virile power confronting adulthood. By relativizing the subject of 
adolescence in other cultures, Margaret Mead in her classic study Coming of 
Age in Samoa (1928) tried to show that adolescence need not be as troubled 
as it was in America. Her observations for the cultural expectations of the 
1920s still echoes in reports after the school shootings of the 1990s: 
"Adolescence was characterised as the period in which idealism flowered and 
rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties 
and conflicts were absolutely inevitable" (1). Her relation of her experience 
in Samoa to the United States in the 1920s, however, differed in two respects 
from the concerns raised during the 1990s. One is that she admired the casual 
parental atmosphere that she thought led to an easy transition into adulthood. 
Many reports took the shootings of the 1990s to show the failure of 
permissive parenting. Second, she highlighted the experience of girls, not 
only because she thought that as a woman investigator she could be more 
intimate with her girl subjects, but also because she considered them more 
vulnerable as well as under-studied. In light of the reports of the 1990s that 
shooters were almost all boys, attention shifted to struggles of male identity 
in formation. Boys, once thought more in control of their situation than girls, 
suddenly appeared at risk, and much of their plight seemed cultural. In a post-
feminist world, they could be seen questioning the proper expressions of 
various masculinities in American society. 

As a coming of age, adolescence intensely involved folklore because it 
appeared to be a liminal state in need of ritual clarification. In Michael 
Moffatt's Coming of Age in New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 1989), he 
found college students segregated by age particularly affected not only 
because of their "coming" stage of life, but also because of their transition 
between the "school life" they viewed as juvenile and the real world of the 
future. Much of the ritual clarification they sought concerned new social 
affiliations and sexual awaken- 

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FOLKLORE RESPONDS TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

ing. In folklorists reports of legends, rituals, pranks, and jokes as the 
common expressive genres of "coming of age" implied ritual components to 
claim new group identity apart from family, a departure from childhood, and 
an anticipation of the power of adulthood. The kinds of questions asked of 
teenage folklore become revised when challenged by the events of 
Columbine. Instead of concerns for narrative competency and genre 
definition found in many legend collections from the 1960s to the 1980s, 
approaches are possible that address perceptions of teenage angst as well as 
menace. A reinterpretation of cultural collections along some of the 
theoretical lines found below inform, or misinform, "the restlessness of 
youth" (Mead): 

1. Disease Theory. Adolescence is an incurable or unpredictable 
pathology. Hormones rage, and strange bodily outbreaks of body piercing, 
satanic expression, and hair coloring are symptomatic of a problem outside 
of the individual's control. In much of the folklore stemming from this 
disease, there can be demonstrations of strength and bravado, and 
occasionally violence. There is the observation that the condition may be 
unrelated to the person's identity before or after adolescence, and indeed, 
these symptoms are something that individuals "get over." And some adults 
may consider "quarantining" as a response. Although the root cause of the 
disease is debatable, one common culprit is puberty, which is often assumed 
to be coming too early, or problems arise for individuals when it comes too 
late. 

2. Psychoanalytical/Anxiety Theory. Adolescence is a period fraught 
with anxiety, and may be the time filled with the most conflict between 
individual desires and societal taboos. Anxieties of repressed sexuality, 
conflicts of identities (sexual and social), guilt over separation from parents 
(and occasionally attraction to parents), and issues of peer conformity and 
adjustment. Folklore is particularly used in adolescence as a fictive plane to 
symbolically confront or resolve various anxieties and adapt to psychological 
conflicts. Indeed, psychoanalytical interpretations have arguably been 
applied to adolescent legends and rituals more than they have to the 
traditions of other age groups because of the perception that anxieties 
especially need expression and resolution during adolescence. Although 
related to the disease theory, anxiety theory posits a psychological rather 
than pathological response to the age. 

3. Organizational Theory. With the onset of adolescence, individuals 
gravitate to one another, and in that formation, create subversive, destructive 
organizations adults may think of as pernicious "gangs," and many teenagers 
view as identity-marking "cliques." There is the implication that these 
formations undermine the traditional val- 

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ues imparted through family and community. Another ramification is that 
these groups naturally compete for dominance rather than moving toward 
consensus. Alternative explanations for shooters are that they either fall 
outside these formations and become dangerous because of their alienation, 
or they come from one of these groups seeking to eliminate others. 

4. Societal Theory. Adolescents suffer from lack of parental attention or 
inability to properly raise children, which results in asocial or amoral 
behavior. Teachers and school administrators as surrogates of society may 
also be responsible because they do not respond to the needs of teenagers or 
continue to treat them as children rather than take them seriously as young 
adults. An explanation for shooters according to this theory is that they seek 
revenge against parents and teachers because of their treatment. There is also 
the implication that the new society that adolescents dwell in is a mass 
society, reinforced by the growing size of consolidated schools. Individuals 
may feel increasingly lost within this mass culture.  

5. Mental States Theory. This concept points to the rebellion of 
adolescence that results from states of boredom or alienation common to the 
growing number of teenagers growing up in suburbia. Although depictions of 
"juvenile delinquents" of the 1950s were set in the inner cities, and a number 
of gang violence scares of the 1990s were also placed in the inner cities, 
shockwaves of concern could be felt because of the location of teen violence 
in suburban environments assumed to be healthy. Some explanations for 
trouble in suburbia include a need for "action" in a dulling environment, some 
form of special middle-class paranoia, increase of recreational drug use, and 
the unnatural extension of childhood in high school and even through college. 
This view often comes with a questioning of the effects of affluence and 
materialism on creating a civil society among teenagers. 

6. Hegemonic Theory. Popular culture receives blame for spreading 
messages of violence and revulsion in this theory. It also may be credited for 
creating new subcultures revolving around fads and alternative lifestyles. 
Campaigns against violent or sexually explicit song lyrics, videos, 
magazines, and movies are based on the special reception that teenagers have 
for the extreme limits of popular culture. Teens are seen as dupes of 
corporate marketing of material settings of malls, shocking fashions, and 
rousing concerts. They are victims of cultural hegemony spread over 
adolescence by profit-hungry, amoral capitalists who seem insensitive to the 
destructive results of their marketing. 

7. Moralistic Theory. A different take on the messages of violence 
and revulsion encouraged in popular culture which result in formation 

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FOLKLORE RESPONDS TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

of new adolescent folk cultures comes from a theory of moral decline. In the 
historical decline of structures of "traditional values," the theory holds, 
centers of moral education such as families, schools, and churches have lost 
their grip on teenagers, and there is a growing acceptance of once 
unacceptable behaviors. Instead of a value placed on following authority and 
the lessons of a previous generation, there is an attraction to defying 
authority or standing alone often in anti-social ways. Some will blame the 
decline on breakdowns in the loss of community, the breakdown of the 
traditional family, the rise of selfish individualism, or post-modern cynicism 
of organized religion. 

8. Regional/Environmental Theory. From American studies, there are 
ideas of some regional or community environments that encourage aggressive 
forms of adolescence. One can hear references to the violent legacy of the 
South, for example, or the "hunting heritage" of Pennsylvania and the Upper 
Midwest, and the "gun culture" of the West. As teen shootings were reported 
in all corners of the United States, this theory was increasingly challenged, 
but questioning still occurred about the connection of the regional 
background of teenagers to their cultural behavior. 

9. Emergence Theory. Performance theory suggests that adolescence is a 
particularly ripe age for emergence of new cultural forms. The desire to 
differentiate from other teens in school with whom adolescents are 
segregated, perhaps the need to symbolically express identities or confront 
suppressed desires and anxieties, the need for attention-often revealed in 
shocking or creative ways-and to structure experience around novelty and 
fashion lead to a constant renewal of cultural creativity. In this view, the 
formation of new cultural groups such as Goths and Wiccans, often with 
reference to tradition, is a natural and healthy process, but individuals who 
turn the emergent performance into sociopathic spectacle show the risk 
inherent in an open society. 

Then there is the theoretical question of when adolescence begins and 
ends as a distinct physiological or cultural period. Popularly, adolescence is 
thought of as the teen years, or physiologically as a period between puberty 
and physical maturity. One cultural marker is the sharp break between a 
sense of adolescent production, or cultural creativity, and adult response 
indicated in a survey conducted by American Demographics/Harris 
Interactive (December 2001, 10). It asked a sample of Americans to associate 
visible tattoos or body piercings with certain characteristics. The survey was 
driven by the observation that young adults are the most active body artists, 
and demographic factors of race, gender, and ethnicity are not as much 
predictors of who is likely to have such work as age. 

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BRONNER 

PERCENT OF ADULTS WHO ASSOCIATE THE FOLLOWING TERMS 
WITH VISIBLE TATTOOS OR BODY PIERCING, 

 BY AGE 

CHARACTERISTIC 18-24 25-29 30-39 40-49 

Rebellious 63 49 71 68 
Experimental 57 59 53 50 
Immature 29 32 45 47 
Freakish 29 34 37 32 
Alternative 58 77 42 41 
Artistic 53 34 29 23 
Normal 46 19 20 19 
Stylish 29 25 13 16 
Fun 34 27 15 10 
Gay 12 10 16 9 
Sexy 22 25 12 12 
Tough 8 10 9 7 

One way to read these responses is the large change among age groups as to 
the issue of whether the behavior is "normal." The response for the group in 
their late twenties to the one from the late teens to early twenties dropped 27 
percent. This response suggests a perception of some customs as normative 
for adolescents. Note, for instance, the rise of the perception of the custom as 
immature from 29 percent among the group in their late teens to early 
twenties to 45 percent among the group in the early thirties. The group in its 
early thirties also felt more strongly than the group in its late twenties that the 
behavior was "rebellious." In this regard, one wishes that the survey had also 
asked about the characteristic of "adolescent," to see if there is a correlation 
between a perception of rebellion and adolescence. One of the traits one has 
to notice in the above survey is that the youngest group felt much more 
artistic than the group in the late twenties. One has to question the largest 
change in viewpoint concerning "alternative" from the group in its late 
twenties to the group in the early thirties. This response might suggest that 
the group in the thirties associated the distinction of the body markings with 
adolescence while a considerable portion of the group in the late twenties 
considered the markings still an option or choice that could be "sexy," "fun," 
or "stylish," rather than a sign of a younger age. But the answers to 
"immature" and "artistic" beg the question of traditions associated with a 
period we might designate as adolescent. From there we might question how 
"adoles- 

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FOLKLORE RESPONDS TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

cent" becomes not only a marker of age, but an adjective for kinds of 
behavior and customs. So we are left again to ask about folklore as an 
expression of age. 

I could argue that folklorists have to get over their sense of surprise at 
adolescent folklore before confronting theoretical questions of age. In 
folkloristic literature, authors frequently express surprise that recognition to 
adolescent folklore came so late, and further, they express astonishment that 
adolescents produce as much material for folklorists as they do. The surprise 
in the former stems from the admission that many folklorists are teachers of 
adolescents, and yet have not adequately examined them as a folk group. The 
shock in the latter probably owes to the perception that adolescents discard 
the rhymes, songs, and tales abundantly collected among pre-pubescent 
children. What is not anticipated are the new materials generated in the form 
of legends, jokes, speech, and rituals. And what is generally not interpreted 
are the ties of this material to a sense of cultural disconnection. Oriented as 
they are to finding continuities, historical and social, folklorists are 
challenged by adolescent material to explain the cultural emergence, and 
frequent social fragmentation, common among teenagers. 

The late folklorist Sue Samuelson expressed amazement in her review 
of adolescent folklore published in 1995 that the first American study to 
consider adolescent folklore separately from childhood was Martha Dirks' 
"Teen-Age Folklore from Kansas," appearing in Western Folklore in 1963. 
Dirks' point was to show that teenagers, often dismissed as tradition-bearers, 
had a formidable repertory of humor, slang, customs, and songs. Her survey 
sought to find continuities of this material with other traditions, but lacked a 
developmental approach. Even before Dirks' survey, groundbreaking studies 
by Brian Sutton-Smith sought connections between distinctive genres of ado-
lescence and the developmental needs of the age. His "The Kissing Games of 
Adolescents in Ohio," first appearing in the journal Midwest Folklore (1959), 
posed the question of the social and psychological function of such games in 
the post-pubescent sexual development of teenagers during the 1950s. Other 
"adolescent" genres receiving this treatment included drinking games (see 
Monique Young's 1981 M.A. thesis at the University of California, 
Berkeley), graffiti (see Peter Peretti, Richard Carter, and Betty McClinton, 
"Graffiti and Adolescent Personality" in Adolescence 1977, and Susan 
Gelman's "Toward a Study of Postal Graffiti: Text and Context in an 
Adolescent Girls' Genre" in Western Folklore 1978), scary and sexual 
legends (see Gary Alan Fine and Bruce Noel Johnson, "The Promiscuous 
Cheerleader: 

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BRONNER 

An Adolescent Male Belief Legend" in Western Folklore 1980, and Sue 
Samuelson, "The White Witch: An Analysis of an Adolescent Legend" in 
Indiana Folklore 1979), legend trips (see Patricia Meley, "Adolescent 
Legend Trips as Teenage Cultural Response," Children’s Folklore Review 
1991), gross jokes (see Simon Bronner, "What's Grosser than Gross?" in 
Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore 1985), ritual insults (see 
Millicent Ayoub and Stephen A. Barnett, " Ritualized Verbal Insult in White 
High School Culture," Journal of American Folklore 1965), ritual and play 
(see Michael Licht, "Some Automotive Play Activities of Suburban 
Teenagers," New York Folklore Quarterly 1974), and material culture (see 
Ariane Sains, "The Latest Teen Rage? Embroidery" Children’s Folklore 
Review 1990). It is not coincidental that the word "rage" frequently enters 
into the rhetoric of these works, both to reflect the quick circulation of 
material among adolescents and the trope of aggression in adolescent 
folklore. 

There is a decided emphasis in these previous studies on defining the 
limits of adolescent genres and documenting characteristics of folkloric 
performance, but interpretations of social and psychological function can 
lead to more developmental approaches. Kenneth A. Thigpen in his 
extensive survey, "Adolescent Legends in Brown County" (Indiana Folklore 
1971) for example, declares his textual purpose of "a survey of legend 
content of a segment of a community," but concludes with a developmental 
observation of the "basic adolescent need for adventurous involvement." 
What he means by this is a distinctive theme of using legends in adolescence 
for tests of daring designed to show maturity. He noted a sense of danger, a 
simultaneous attraction to and revulsion by death, and a building on tensions 
between teenagers and adults that is inherent in these adventures. Although 
he did not comprehend the full implications of folklore representing 
subgroups, or friendship cliques, of teenagers, he offered balance to the 
stereotypical view of the menacing teen. One group he called "Middle 
American" is characterized as "highly individualistic; politically, religiously, 
and socially conservative; rebellious against authority as it pertains to them 
individually, but not opposed to the concept of the present system; preferring 
alcoholic stimulation, particularly beer and liquor, as symbols of maturity 
and substances of experimentation and titillation" (209). The other he called 
"counter-culture: communal in social orientation (especially within the peer 
group); politically apathetic, though leaning toward liberalism; religiously 
apathetic, though tending to substitute ideas associated with the occult for 
traditional religious concepts; preferring non-alcoholic drugs (except for 
wine) such as marijuana, as symbols of maturity and substances for 
experimentation and titillation" (209). 

18 



 

FOLKLORE RESPONDS TO COLUMBINE AND ADOLESCENCE 

In light of Columbine, the adolescent social landscape appears more 
complex and ideas of adolescent imagination more challenging. One needs to 
account for previously unheard of groups such as "The Trench Coat Mafia," 
as well as more widely spread labels of Goths, Raves, Skinheads, Jocks, and 
Wiccans. The commentary on school shootings was as much a cultural 
critique of adolescence and its baffling social landscape as it was a political 
concern for school violence. Folklorists as cultural professionals frequently 
working with teenagers began reviewing their positions. The Children's 
Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society opened discussion on the 
folkloristic response to Columbine at its meeting in 1999 and invited 
participants to share research that would shed light on the traditions of teens 
in modern society. The hope was to promote more studies that would offer 
folkloristic views on the publicized problems of teenagers and schools. The 
gathered panelists in 2000 spoke to a standing-room only crowd, and the 
heated discussion inspired this publication to continue the initiative for 
folkloristic inquiry into adolescent traditions-both dangerous and benign. 
Children’s Folklore Review, as a location for this folklore first, is appropriate 
because of its inclusion of developmental approaches to age-related folklore 
in its illustrious publishing run, but the essayists hope that other journals will 
subsequently take up the theme. 

The theme intentionally goes beyond Columbine and the issue of school 
violence to the cultural worlds of adolescence today. It has to integrate the 
folk culture that adolescents construct for themselves and the popular belief 
that adults express about naturally rebellious or violent youth. The essayists 
tackle the interconnections of identities that adolescents pursue and the 
threatened feelings about those identities that popular culture perpetuates. Bill 
Ellis, for example, considers the significance of "Hitler's Birthday" as an 
occasion for the rumors of school violence that circulated. JoAnn Conrad 
deals with the cultural implications of political reactions to violent youth in 
California. Responding to the public perception of the danger of "Goth" iden-
tity among school shooters, Allen Berres separates the esoteric lore of Goth 
identity that adolescents commonly practice and the exoteric beliefs about 
Goths in popular culture. Charlie McCormick reminds readers in his essay on 
"cruising" about precedents for the kind of discourse on the menacing 
adolescent encountered in school violence discourse. This issue's theme of 
"folklore that responds to Columbine and adolescence" is therefore both in 
the form of practice traditionalized by adolescents and narrative or belief 
expressed by 

19 



 

BRONNER 

adults. As evidence for a developmental study of culture and a reflection on 
folkloristic purpose, it reveals the coming of age. 

PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY 
MIDDLETOWN, PENNSYLVANIA 

WORKS CITED 

Ellis, Bill. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.  
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primi- 

tive Youth for Western Civilization. 1928. New York: American Museum of 
Natural History reprint, 1973. 

Public Agenda Foundation. "Kids These Days '99: What Americans Think About the 
Next Generation Survey." Roper Center at University of Connecticut Public 
Opinion Online. Accession Number 0328701. 3 May 1999. 

Thigpen, Kenneth A. "Adolescent Legends in Brown County." Indiana Folk- 
 lore 4 (1971): 141-215. 
Whelan, David. "Ink Me, Stud: Tattoos and Piercings Decorate 15 Percent of 
 American Bodies, But Even More Still Disapprove of Them." American 
 Demographics (December 200 I), 9-11. 
Zetlin, Steve. "Bang, Bang, You're Dead: The Play Paradox." New York Folk- 
 lore Society Newsletter (Fall/Winter 1999). 
 See http://www.nyfolklore .org/pubs/news/nlfw99/bang.html 

20 



 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY: RUMOR-PANICS IN THE WAKE OF 
THE COLUMBINE SHOOTINGS  

BILL ELLIS 

On April 20, 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, came to 
Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, armed with a variety of 
weapons and thirty homemade bombs. There they opened fire randomly, 
killing thirteen people before turning the guns on themselves. The date was 
the hundred-and-tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birthday, and police later 
found a handwritten diary showing that the attack was planned with this date 
in mind. The two youths were notorious at the school as being members of a 
misfit group that called itself the "Trench Coat Mafia" because they allegedly 
came to school wearing black clothing and sunglasses. (EmergencyNet News, 
1999). 

Rumor panics immediately broke out in many other high schools, na-
tionwide, on subsequent dates that were also said to be "Hitler's Birthday" or 
some such occasion for mayhem. By April 29, The Emergency Response and 
Research Institute reported that its Watch Center had been inundated with 
reports of scares coming from all parts of the United States and Canada. Such 
cases were especially prevalent in Eastern Pennsylvania, where at least 52 
threats in 22 counties were reported to the ERR! Watch Center. An informal 
poll of my students documented such scares in Easton, Pocono Mountain, 
Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, Berwick, Bloomsburg, Mountaintop, and Allentown. 
While the details of the rumors varied, in general they claimed that a group of 
students intended to come to school and open fire on students or detonate 
bombs. In many cases, a "hit list" of students to be assassinated was said to 
exist. In fact, nothing unusual occurred at any location, but here as 
nationwide the panic was used to justify tough new restrictions or harsh 
penalties laid out to students found responsible for some infraction at the 
time. 

The area had also been affected by rumor panics during the late 1980s 
and early 1990s. Previously, I have described events that were eerily similar, 
as they occurred in three local high schools in the spring of 1987. In this case, 
a "satanic cult" was said to have encouraged a local teenager to commit 
suicide. As their next act, they were rumored to be prepared to attend their 
high school's prom and commit a massacre there. An intense panic occurred, 
in the course of which two reputedly "weird" students were physically beaten 
by a mob, and unusual security measures, including the installment of metal 
detectors at the prom location, were instituted. One view of these panics, I 
noted then, was in terms of "hysteria" or "collective delusion," a rather 
deterministic approach that assumed that rumors provoke a contagious, 
illogical response from a group. Using con- 



 

ELLIS 

cepts drawn from Veronique Campion-Vincent (1988) and Joel Best (1989), I 
argued instead that such events were logically based on narrative themes 
existing, often unexpressed, in the worldviews of those involved. They are, I 
suggested, a means of telling a story in a structured format through real-life 
action rather than through oral narration. First, some social unrest or crisis 
must be present as an underlying cause. A "triggering event" dramatizes this 
unrest in an "exceptional and traumatic" way, and a following period of 
collective action embodies the community's reaction to the threat. This leads 
to a "showdown," or climactic moment in which the legend is "fulfilled." 
When such legend-derived panics occur, participants can adopt one of several 
stereotypical roles, and all such activities constitute a performance of the 
legend through ostension, or the patterning of real-life actions on a shared 
narrative model.l 

In the case of the 1987 Prom-Panic, I noted that the underlying stresses 
behind the panic were based on widespread assumptions that Satan was a real 
and influential supernatural force in the world and also that teenagers, in 
increasing numbers, were practicing Satanism. Hence when a real suicide 
occurred, it was logical that these beliefs would form the structure of the 
collective action that occurred in response. In fact, in 1996, another teenage 
suicide in the Wilkes-Barre area provoked another similar panic at Wyoming 
Valley West High School. This event led to public meetings, circulation of the 
usual danger signs of Satan ism, and a special workshop for local police on 
the threat of cults, held at the local Penn State branch campus (Aliens, Ghosts, 
and Cults 238-40). More disturbingly, on April 24, 1998, a 14-year-old boy 
did come to a prom in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, wounding 
two students and killing the teacher who was the event's organizer and 
chaperone. Questioned afterwards, he said only that he had intended to make 
the dance "memorable." 

Sociologist Jeffrey Victor has viewed such rumor panics as part of a 
moral crusade set in action by. interest groups with an ultra-conservative, 
often evangelical agenda. This approach is certainly valid and helps explain 
why certain themes (such as alleged satanic symbols in graffiti) appear 
repeatedly in the information circulated during such panics. However, the 
Wyoming Valley West scare was unusual in focusing on Satanism. A few 
years earlier, the Jim Thorpe Area Junior High School, in a more rural area 
south of Wilkes-Barre, experienced an intense panic based on a rumor that 
"the KKK and skinheads" were planning to commit a massacre. According to 
one student, it was surprising that the rumor reached the intensity that it did, 
because the school was mostly white, and no friction between them and the 
minorities who attended had been felt. Nevertheless, when a "suspicious van" 
was seen parked outside the school, tensions grew to the point that students 
began bringing weapons to school 

22 



 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY 

for self-protection, they claimed. "Teachers attempted to comfort students," 
the student recalled, "counseling was offered, and local police patrolled the 
hallways, to insure safety." While many students disregarded the story, he 
added, "Others were in a state of shock and fear, some were even crying." It 
took some two weeks for the affair and the community to settle down. 

A similar panic, complete with suspicious van, occurred in the South 
London suburbs in 1989. This scare focused on a gang called "The Chelsea 
Smilers," and officials blamed it not on Satanism but rather on violence 
inspired by fierce loyalty to football clubs (Roud, 1989). Since such panics 
have continued to occur, even after the Satanism scare died down, they 
probably are not caused by evangelical interest groups, though these factions 
can and do exploit them for their own purposes. Rather, it seems likely that 
rumor panics, like other kinds of narrative, have a structure and rule system 
of their own. Set on foot by existing stresses in the community, they express 
and incorporate these stresses in narrative logic. Satanism and ready access to 
guns have been blamed as causes for real-life massacres and the rumor panics 
that mimic them. But the content of such rumor-panics suggests that the core 
issue, as defined by the participants themselves, is the unresolved "jock/head" 
conflict as it has developed in American high schools. 

This paper will examine details from a number of these 1999 panics to 
study them as an emergent form of folk narrative. The gruesome details of 
the Columbine massacre created stress that the panics dissipated in an 
essentially therapeutic fashion. They involved a complex interplay of os-
tensive actions modeled after existing traditions. Many of these acts of 
ostension—perpetrating hoaxes and making bomb threats—were criminal in 
nature, but they did not involve violence, and the ordeals they gave rise to 
cleared the air and made most parties feel as though they had defeated any 
similar threat. However, as I argued ten years ago, rumor panics may 
communicate the seeds of the violence that they warn against. As folklorists, 
we need to be concerned about whether some forms of folk narrative might 
contribute to the social problems that give rise to them. 

The rumor panic took a number of forms when it occurred in North- 
eastern Pennsylvania. At Hazleton Area High School, "The rumor began . . . 
that it was Adolf Hitler's birthday and that this is the way they [the killers] 
were going to celebrate it. The shootings were supposed to occur during the 
lunch period." One version had it that "Supposedly there was going to be a 
bomb set off at 12:15 the one day, and someone was also supposed to open 
up fire and shoot people." Another added, "everyone at my school didn't want 
to go to school on Hitler's birthday because they were afraid someone is 
going to come and start shooting." At another 

23 



 

ELLIS 

local school, "The rumor was that two students much like the two that killed 
others were planning to bomb our school." 

As with the 1987 panic, school proms were frequently mentioned as 
"showdown" dates. At nearby Berwick Area High School, "Rumor had it that 
on May 4th someone was going to open fire in the school." Another student 
recalled, "There was a rumor that at our prom a group of younger students 
were going to shoot and kill all the senior football players and cheerleaders. 
There was supposed to be a list with all the names on it." Similarly, at 
Crestwood High School, a story held that "after the Columbine shootings that 
this one kid. . . made a hit list and was supposed to kill the certain few people 
whose name was on the list at the prom." In the Pittsburgh area, a similar 
rumor emerged, claiming that a bomb would be detonated at the prom at 
Highlands High School. Tensions increased when police arrived at the school 
on a routine drug search, locked students in classrooms and opened lockers. 
A school spokesperson emphasized that the prom would be more secure than 
ever, with security guards present to guard locked doors and, if necessary, use 
hand-held metal detectors. But students responded with skepticism and fear 
(Everett). At Easton Area High School, the date was an annual school-pride 
celebration called EAHS Day, during which a school king and queen would 
be chosen in a mass assembly. The morning of the event, the school received 
a bomb threat, stating "that since everyone in the school would be in the same 
place at the same time, they [the caller and his friends] would go on a 
shooting rampage and then set bombs off." 

At most locations, students and school officials reacted with concern. At 
Hazleton, the panic affected the entire district, and "the principal made 
announcements during the entire week of school that the students have 
nothing to worry about because the school is a very safe place and they have 
security walking around the hallways." Coughlin High School, in Wilkes-
Barre, escaped the bomb threats that affected local schools. But in a variation 
on the "satanic graffiti" theme, students came to school one day to find 
"DWBS" spray painted on the walls. "Nobody was sure exactly what it 
meant," a student said, "but it was rumored that the letters stood for 'Die 
Wilkes-Barre Students.''' 

At other locations, though, students engaged in a more disturbing form 
of ostension, calling in bomb threats and leaving death threats and even 
fabricated "hit lists" where they could be found. In response, school officials 
found students bringing weapons to school-knives, BB guns, and the sort-for 
self defense. At Pocono Mountain High School, for instance, "The rumor that 
circulated. . . was [that] on . . . Hitler's Birthday a handful of people picked 
out and put on a "hit-list" would be killed." These death threats tended to 
target "'jocks," especially at Berwick, whose foot 

24 



 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY 

ball team has won several regional and statewide championships. One of the 
members of the team recalled, "None of us . . . really cared that much but 
some of the cheerleaders where worried about it." He added, "Also, many of 
the faculty were worried about it. They were worried because we already did 
have a lot of bomb threats and they thought that maybe this would be real." 
At Allentown Central Catholic, another school with a highly visible athletics 
program, a list appeared of "football players, cheerleaders, and band 
members that people wanted to kill." A student recalled, "Myself and a lot of 
my friends were on the list." Likewise, at Crestwood, a student was found 
with a similar prom hit list. 

No actual incidents occurred in any of these cases. Most students 
claimed that they personally were not affected by the scare. A Wilkes-Barre 
student said, "Most people, including me, really didn't take this too seriously. 
. . . School went on as usual that day and nothing happened. It was apparently 
just more people trying to copy what went on at Columbine." But he noted 
that "there were some who were a little worried about it." Another said, 
somewhat cynically, "I wasn't on the [hit] list anyway so I didn't care." 
Nevertheless, at all locations many students stayed away from school on 
"Hitler's Birthday." At Hazleton, less than half the students showed up on that 
day, and when the school bell rang at 12:15, the predicted time of the 
massacre, one student recalled seeing one of his classmates dash for cover. 

At Berwick, the rumor caused a community-wide uproar, with both 
parents and students expressing concern. On the day of the prediction, over 
half the students in all grades, including elementary school, stayed away. The 
school also considered canceling the Prom, but relented when seniors 
objected. Bomb threats also were called in to Pocono Mountain, saying that 
explosives had been planted on school buses. A tennis match had to be 
cancelled because experts had not had time to inspect the bus needed to 
transport the team. 

On Easton's "EAHS Day," an elaborate rumor emerged that the public 
assembly was to be bombed. A student observed that as soon as students 
heard the rumor, they began to leave, group by group, and when the king and 
queen were crowned, only about a hundred of the school's three thousand 
students and faculty chose to attend. At another high school, the rumor 
circulated about two disaffected students who were said to be planning a 
Columbine-style bombing and massacre. On the predicted day, a bomb threat 
was in fact phoned in, supposedly from these two (who later turned out to be 
innocent). Nothing happened, but a witness recalled, "what I remember the 
most was the scared little face of the students in the middle school. After the 
bomb scare many of them went home because they were so scared." 

25 



 

ELLIS 

In most schools, the panic led to short- and long-range consequences. 
The Hazleton area schools imposed a set of new rules, the requirement of 
transparent or at least translucent book bags being the most visible. The new 
rule was imposed virtually overnight, forcing parents to travel to nearby 
cities to get legal book-bags when stocks in Hazleton disappeared quickly. In 
Berwick, students were subject to searches when they arrived at school, and 
there and in Wilkes-Barre, police were permanently assigned to patrol school 
entrances. 

Students found responsible for writing false "hit lists" or calling in bomb 
threats were frequently given unusually harsh punishments. In the case of a 
Crestwood student who fabricated a prom hit list, a classmate noted that 
"Normally nothing would have been done about it, but it was right after the 
Columbine shootings and so they gave him a three-day suspension." 
Ironically, though, the punishment was light enough that the student actually 
showed up later at the prom. A somewhat more severe penalty went to 
another student who 

was counting down the days until he saw Limp Bizkit (his favorite band) in 
concert. One day he came to school with a note on his shirt saying "3 more 
days!!!" In the midst of all the panic, he was falsely accused of being the 
kid that was making all the threats, and they interpreted the note as "3 more 
days until everyone dies in the school." He was suspended for 10 days. 

At Hazleton and at Allentown Central, students were expelled for bomb 
threats, and at a nearby New Jersey school two students were given a month's 
jail sentence for making such a threat. 

Such actions were not uncommon nationwide. In Chicago, metal de-
tectors were installed at the entrances of public schools in the wake of an 
incident in which a 15-year-old was caught trying to smuggle a gun into 
school. At the Indiana School for the Deaf in Indianapolis, fifth-graders were 
seen standing up in a cafeteria, pointing their fingers like guns, while one 
reportedly signed "I'm going to kill you." The group was suspended for five 
days under a new "zero tolerance" policy forbidding jokes about the incident. 
In several areas, black trenchcoats were outlawed, and the state of Delaware 
instituted a new policy under which teens making threatening statements 
were forced to undergo psychological evaluation and kept under detention 
until their parents could come and pick them up (EmergencyNet News, 
1999). 

Another immediate reaction to the panics was renewed agitation in the 
area to have religious statements placed in public schools. Attempts to 
institute public prayer, in some form, have regularly been blocked by courts. 

26 



 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY 

But the martyrdom story of Cassie Bernal gave local ministers renewed 
incentive to push for posting a copy of the Ten Commandments in public 
schools. The rationale, as one Lutheran pastor told his congregation, was that 
if God were kept out of schools by law, then inevitably Satan would enter in. 
This move linked the panic to many of the mythological concepts present in 
this area, which had motivated earlier rumor panics. But this development, as 
I suggested earlier, was probably an effort by religious groups to exploit 
public concern, in much the same way as political leaders used the event to 
advance gun control legislation. A closer look at the incidents suggests that 
neither God nor guns were central to the narratives being told. 

In my study of the 1987 Prom-Panic, I noted that so-called "satanic" 
activities were best seen in terms of a traditional "jock" (athletic-oriented) 
versus "head" (alcohol/drug-oriented) rivalry. Typically, "jocks" identified 
themselves with "all-American" crew cuts and clothing with patriotic 
symbols, while "heads" preferred a disheveled look, complemented by t-shirts 
with heavy metal or allegedly satanic symbols (Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults 
211). Kathleen Lowney, in her own study of teen Satanism, also noted that a 
self-defined "satanic" group in Georgia likewise defined its identity in 
opposition to groups that had gained approval from adults by participation in 
athletics or academics. In the case of the Columbine tragedy, and the rumor 
panic reactions it provoked, it seems clear that the main underlying stress was 
unresolved tension between such factions. Such an antagonism was clearly 
present in the notes left behind by Harris and Klebold, which included 
phrases such as "We want to be different, we want to be strange and we don't 
want jocks or other people putting us down. . . We're going to punish you" 
(EmergencyNet News, 1999). And the same tension has regularly emerged in 
other panics, where students who dressed in modes officially defined as 
"satanic" were subjected to official harassment. In the 1996 Wilkes-Barre 
Satanism panic, a 15-year-old girl was expelled from high school when, after 
two teens committed suicide, she came to school wearing a black outfit. It 
was intended as a protest against the current fad of wearing pricey clothes 
from The Gap, she explained, and her mother backed her claim that she was 
in no way involved with the occult. "I searched her room," the mother added 
(Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults 239). 

In the wake of publicity over the Columbine shootings, many non-
conforming high school students reported similar official persecutions. Jon 
Katz, an online supporter of free speech rights, received hundreds of mes-
sages from self-described "oddballs" who had suffered from similar acts of 
intolerance. One student from a southeastern high school described how a 
social studies teacher had initiated a discussion in class. The student said 

27 



 

ELLIS 

that, while he could not condone the killings, he understood the feelings of 
the killers: "Because day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after 
exclusion, you can learn how to hate." This discussion had an unexpected 
result: 

After the class, I was called to the principal's office and told that I had to 
agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be expelled from school, as 
I had expressed "sympathy" with the killers in Colorado, and the school had 
to be able to explain itself in "acted out." In other words, for speaking 
freely. . . I was not only branded a weird geek, but a potential killer. That 
will sure help deal with violence in America. (Katz) 

Another student, an enthusiast of online video games, was banned from the 
Internet in the wake of Columbine and referred to a school guidance 
counselor, who told the student that this was a chance to "re-invent" himself, 
to "mainstream." "This whole Colorado thing," the student commented, "it's 
given them an excuse to do more of what started this trouble in the first 
place-to make individuals and different people feel like even bigger freaks." 
"This is a whole new level of exclusion," a role-playing game enthusiast 
from New York City agreed, "another excuse for the preppies of the universe 
to put down and isolate people like me" (Katz1999). 

Again, this was no new reaction. After the local media had exploited the 
"satanic" element of the 1996 Wilkes-Barre panic, an anonymous caller left 
this message on the paper's "Say So" machine: 

You people are missing the mark once again, and making it harder and 
harder for young people to get help with the real issues they face. This 
sensationalizing is turning young people against each other in fear. It 
breeds paranoia, it stereotypes them, and it dilutes the real issues. . . . This 
amounts to using them and adding to their confusion about who to trust. 
Think about it. ("Satanic Déjà Vu" 8) 

In fact, an especially unsettling element of rumor panics is the way in which 
they actually polarize existing conflicts between the two groups. In the 1996 
Satanism panic, for instance, other students who regularly dressed in black 
received anonymous letters with messages such as "Die, freaks!" In 1999, 
this conflict emerged most dramatically at Central Columbia High School in 
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, where students had to deal with a double shock.3 
On April 19, they learned that a popular student, J. P. Cleaver, had been 
killed instantly in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. As usual, the event 
was marked with a moment of silence and the posting of memorial ribbons in 
J. P.'s honor. But the following days brought the effects of the Columbine 
tragedy, and the two reinforced each other to pro- 

28 



 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY 

duce an intense panic. The trigger event was an effort by two students to 
enact a similar tribute in honor of the two Columbine assailants: two days 
after the shooting became news, they came to school in black trenchcoats, 
playing allegedly "Satanic" music on their car stereo. They had been at odds 
with "The Militia," a group of athletics-oriented students that J.P. had 
belonged to, and the actions of the two provoked a series of confrontations 
with the dead student's friends, male and female. Rumors soon emerged that 
the two planned to murder members of the Militia, and the school was 
thrown into what one participant called "a state of total lockdown," with 
students' jackets and book-bags regularly searched for deadly weapons. 

As happened in the 1987 Hazleton panic, official sanctions were sup-
ported by vigilante justice. Three weeks later, a group of Militia supporters, 
who had been trailing the two "freaks," set an ambush for them on their way 
home from work. The two were seriously beaten and kicked, one suffering a 
broken jaw and ribs, the other, a concussion. In retaliation, the two students 
pressed charges against their attackers. But when one of them put up 
photographs of their assailants and their friends up on his website, labeled 
"Wanted, dead or alive," police interpreted it as a death threat. Instead of 
prosecuting those who attacked them, authorities ordered the two committed 
to a local hospital for psychiatric treatment. Even with the "freaks" 
temporarily out of school, rumors still circulated that one of them was 
intending to show up "with a bomb strapped to his back and was waiting 
until everyone was leaving school to set it off." The standoff continued until 
the end of the school year, with Militia posses escorting the threatened 
students to and from school and work and shadowing the two oddballs. 

Such, sadly, was the conclusion of many such reactions to the Colum-
bine shootings. Rather than dealing directly with the tensions that underlie 
such acts of violence, both official and unofficial actions drove existing 
factions further apart in a way that may sow the seeds of further massacres. 
Given the widespread nature of rumor panics and the way they adhere to a 
stereotyped narrative form, school massacres may in fact be best understood 
as a traditional means of performing these legends. 

For this reason, folklorists are socially responsible for recognizing the 
traditional elements in such violent actions and for connecting them to the 
less violent but still sociopathic elements in rumor panics that end in acts of 
hate and non-lethal violence. As free speech activist Jon Katz has stressed: 

People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones 
are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes 

29 



 

ELLIS 

assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values-unthinking school spirit, 
proms, jocks-are exalted, while the best values-free thinking, non-
conformity, curiosity-are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the 
Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure that this message got heard, by a 
society that seems desperate not to hear it. 

It is unfortunate that, given the political weakness and internal divisions of 
the folklore community, the people whose messages we should be hearing 
and interpreting for our culture largely remain unheard, except through 
bombs, bullets, and the distorting medium of the popular press. 

The Central Columbia panic, as ugly as it became, suggests another 
possible direction. While teachers and administrators, reportedly, were 
clueless as to how to resolve the matter, Meredith, a classmate of the feuding 
groups thought up a way of providing closure. In addition to J. P. 's death, 
sadly, a young girl had also passed away during her senior year, and 
Meredith suggested that both seniors could be quietly honored during the 
graduation ceremony. A local stationery store donated a box of stickers to the 
school, butterflies to honor the girl, Harley-Davidson logos to honor J. P. The 
latter symbol was an ingenious choice, as the logo could allude both to 
outdoor activities practiced by the Militia and to the motorcycle as a symbol 
of adolescent rebellion. In any case, the entire class, including the two freaks, 
graduated wearing both symbols. "I was totally shocked to the [the two] 
wearing them on their caps," a participant later commented to Meredith, 
adding, "I didn't know if it was a peace offering or just a fluke. . . . You 
would think that they would have just chosen not to do that." "I guess so," 
Meredith replied, "but then again it was our only way of incorporating them 
into the ceremony." 

Thankfully, cases like the Columbine massacre and the "memorable" 
Edinboro prom remain the exception rather than the rule. In many places and 
in many traditional ways students find ways of working through panics 
without resorting to violence. As folklorists we could find ways of looking 
positively at the rumor panics that provide one of the inspirations for such 
tragedies. There are models of ordeals that provide closure by incorporating 
all factions into a newly found sense of community, the experience that 
Victor Turner (1977) called communitas. In any case, if we ourselves wish to 
be more than the oddball faction of academia, we need to be aware of the 
ways in which our scholarly craft can contribute to understanding the social 
implications of emergent events such as these. 

PENN STATE HAZELTON 

30 



 

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY 

NOTES 

1. This paper was initially presented at the 1989 AFS meeting in 1989 and 
published as Ellis 1990. A revised version appears in Ellis 2001 : 199-219. 

2. BaptistFire: The Cassie Bernall Story http://www.baptistfire.com/ 
articles/other/cassie.shtml is a useful compilation of reactions, both skeptical and 
religious, to this story. A book, She Said Yes, was written by Cassie's mother Misty 
Bernall and has also been highly promoted in religious circles.  
See http://www.Cassiebernall.org/ 

3. Details on this panic come from a collection project written in April 2000 by 
Jess Shuman, a freshman at Penn State Hazleton, who was a close friend of many of 
the participants in this affair. My thanks to her for allowing me to use this material. 

WORKS CITED 

Best, Joel. "Bad Guys and Random Violence: Folklore and Media Constructions of 
 Contemporary Deviance." Contemporary Legend 1(1991): 107-21. 
Campion-Vincent, Veronique. "Complots et avertissements: legendes urbaines dans la 
 ville." Revue francaise de sociologie 30(1989): 91-105. 
Ellis, Bill. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 
 2001 
______. "Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder." Western 
 Folklore 48 (1989): 201-220. 
______. "The Devil-Worshippers at the Prom: Rumor-Panic as Therapeutic Magic." 
 Western Folklore 49 (1990): 27-49. 
______. "Satanic Deja Vu in Northeastern Pennsylvania." FOAFTale News 40-41 
 (1996): 4-8. 
 EmergencyNet News. "Summary of Real-time Reports Concerning a Shooting at the 
 Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado—04/20/99 to 05/01/99" (1999). 
 Available http://www.emergency.com/1999/col-shothtm . 
Everett, Wynne. "School Officials: Enough is Enough." [Pittsburgh, PA] Valley News 
 Dispatch. 7 May 1999. 
 Available: http://tribune-review.comlnews/valldisp/0507safe.html. 
 Katz, Jon. "Other Side of Littleton Story: Anti-Oddball Hysteria" Free: The 
 Freedom Forum Online. 26 April 1999. Available http:// 
 www.freedomforum.org/technology/1999/4/26katz.asp. 
Lowney, Kathleen. "Teenage Satanism as Oppositional Youth Culture." Journal of 
 Contemporary Ethnography 23 (1995): 453-84. 
Roud, Steve. 'Chelsea Smilers: Interim Report on a Gang-Violence Rumor."  
        FOAFTaleNews 15 (September 1989): 1-2. 
"Students arrested amid rumors". The [Sharon, PA] Herald. 29 April 1989. 
 Available http://www.sharon-herald.com/local news/recentnews/9904/ 
 ln042999b.html. 
Turner, Victor. "Liminality and Communitas. "In his The Ritual Process: Structure  
       and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1977.94-130. 

31 



 

ELLIS 

Victor, Jeffrey A. "A Rumor-Panic About a Dangerous Satanic Cult in Western New 
 York." New York Folklore 15 (1989): 23-49. 
______. "Satanic Cult Legends as Contemporary Legend." Western Folklore 49  
        1990): 51-82. 

32 



 

THE WAR ON YOUTH: A MODERN OEDIPAL TRAGEDY 
JOANN CONRAD 

The Janus-faced angelic/monstrous child is deeply etched onto the popular 
imagination. Adult attitudes towards children can be typified as ambivalent-
swinging between the dual images of the threatened child and the threatening 
child which mirror a fear/fantasy complex and which manifest in a confused 
and contradictory array of imagery, ideology, and policy. Literally 
emblematic poster children for the Missing Children's movement allow for a 
public show of concern and elicit calls for child protection which bolster 
America's self-image as caring and child-friendly, while the public voting 
record shows a steady tendency to gut the very social programs that would 
ensure the well being of millions of (faceless) children. Positive images of 
childhood and youth today appear stable, in fact, only in the imaginary past. 
There, good kids, nostalgic simulacra of now-aging Baby Boomers, live 
relatively uncomplicated and safe lives in the good old days that never were; 
the promise of the future insured by the uncontested adult-controlled social 
order. 

The conceptual category of "adolescence" or "youth" as a differentiated 
age group, one which is governed by special rules, restrictions, and 
protection, only fully emerged in the U.S. public imagination in the post-
WWII period, when the economic and ideological requirements of peace 
time demanded a longer period of "immaturity," fostering more dependency, 
leisure, and consumerism—an about-face reversal of the practice of 
determining young males to be psychologically mature to satisfy the 
demands of war time conscription (Enright 541-59). Adolescence thus 
constituted the third leg of the triangulated American nuclear family—
"purified of toxins [and] fully adapted to the requirements of discipline 
within an advanced capitalist system" (Ivy 97). Adolescence, however was 
an inherently volatile, fertile, and ambiguous site-the source of adult 
fascination and emulation as well as fear. The boundaries of adolescence 
were also flexible and permeable, difficult to fix and maintain. 

If, in this period, we can say that adolescence represented an extension 
of the privileged space of childhood, with a few additional freedoms, the 
concept a "juvenile criminal justice system" also provided for a legal and 
vernacular space for "wayward" youth that sought to protect them from the 
adult judicial and penal systems. But the very articulation of the category of 
"juvenile delinquent" provided the basis for an official discourse on youth as 
potentially falling into the category of deviant which was threatening to the 
institution of the American family. Public imagery reflected a dual 
epistemology in which youths within the normative sphere were extended the 
same privilege as their younger siblings, while both children and youth 
outside this racially and class-segregated sphere were 



 

consistently denied access to the protected space of childhood. Policy 
responses to this dual system hinged on the concept of "containment"—the 
increased control, management, observation, and restriction of movement of 
all youth—in the maintenance of the separate normative and pathological 
spheres. 

Real-life children and youth today don't "conform to the imperatives of 
adults and mainstream culture," and have become "alien and sometimes 
hazardous in the public eye" (Giroux 13), embodiments of a racial, eco-
nomic, social, and cultural future which appears threatening and foreign to 
many adults. In the past two decades, significant demographic shifts and 
economic restructuring have signalled a crisis in our collective under-
standing of youth—the "face" of the future is increasingly multicultural, and 
children, once thought of as economic assets are now seen more as liabilities 
or as competitors for an ever-shrinking resource pool. This paper is about the 
ideological response to this crisis—those mediated and narrated 
reconfigurations of the adult-youth relationship which can be seen as 
recuperative strategies which encompass all youth into the potential 
pathological sphere. In addition, this paper seeks to investigate the 
convergence of public perception, ideology, media, and politics which has 
emerged as a generalized and naturalized discourse on youth, and which is 
manifest in the educational and criminal justice systems. The paper is based 
on the premise that contemporary popular representations of youth are a 
dominant form of cultural politics which reinforce the normalization of 
certain adult-based violent behavior as they demonize and commoditize 
youth, validating the claim that those relegated to childhood and adolescence 
–disenfranchised minors—are consistently denied voice and power in 
contemporary American culture. 

On April 20, 1999, two students from Columbine High School in 
Littleton, Colorado, opened fire on their school mates, killing 15 people 
(including themselves) and wounding 23 others. This, the deadliest school 
massacre in U.S. history, coming at the end of a series of similar-appearing 
school shootings beginning in October 1997, has been portrayed as the 
watershed mark for American youth. Events and policy implementation are 
conceptualized as being "pre-" or "post-Columbine." We are now in the post-
Columbine age-a new era of "killer kids" and "zero tolerance" where a 
generalized "Columbine Effect" determines school policy.l But this kind of 
rhetoric suggests a causality inherent in the event itself. Rather, I would like 
to suggest that the event makes the story but the story conceptualizes the 
event (Oring). In other words, the meaning that accrues around the event is 
dependent on the particular representation of it. Representations of 
Columbine, thus, constitute the event, and the ways in which we make this 
event meaningful, the ways in which it is narrativized and represented, 

CONRAD 

34 



 

THE WAR ON YOUTH 

are dependent on an already in-place communicative system, a set of cul-
turally agreed-upon signifying practices. Additionally, the consumers of such 
images are implicated in the production of meaning, and this shared cultural 
map pre-exists in an ideological and discursive field which is hospitable to a 
particular representation of these school shootings. 

In this ideological field, contemporary youth have been collectively 
demonized, with individual instances of violent behavior generalized and 
presented as trends or epidemics. This growing "epidemic" of juvenile 
lawlessness, addiction to violence, drug abuse, and general monstrousness 
has been presented by politicians, lawmakers, and news media, and has 
sedimented into public consciousness—into the stories we tell and the ways 
in which we order reality. These stories have helped to construct a generation 
of deviants through what Foucault has called a "literature of criminality," 
affirming that an "ever-present [juvenile] criminality is a constant menace to 
the social body as a whole" (Foucault 142). 

- More and more teenagers, acting individually or in gangs, are 
running amuck. 
-. . . juvenile crime appears to be more widespread and vicious than 
ever before. 
- Adolescents have always been violence prone, but there are 
horrendous crimes being committed by even younger adults.  
- The teen crime wave flows across all races, class and lifestyles 
(Toufexis 52), 
-Crime may be down, but juvenile crime is way up (Alter 30).  
- Juvenile offenses have soared since the mid-1980s, while adult 
violent crime rates have remained fairly steady (US News and 
World Report 29). 
- In the last three and one-half years, the crime rate is down, but the 
violence among young people under eighteen is up (Males 82). 

This public belief in the growing problem of violent youth, which is dis-
proportionate to current statistical information,2 and which is, furthermore, in 
contrast to most adults' actual experiences, should be seen as what Lawrence 
Grossberg calls an "affective epidemic;" a fetishized site, disconnected and 
disproportionate to its actual worth, ideological in intent, and fed by the 
"daily economy of saturated panics" (Acland 284). 

Since 1997, the highly-exposed and repetitively-aired school shootings 
in more suburban, or rural, middle-class white schools have been conflated 
with the already-existing category of the inner-city gang in a perverse 
affirmative action which criminalizes all youth. The serialized, repetitive 

35 



 

CONRAD 

presentations of this violence in the news imply that it is "routine," ubiqui-
tous, and is occurring at younger and younger ages. Pathologizing and 
marginalizing such youth by means of psychological analyses and after-the-
fact profiling and typologizing transforms individuals into "types," their 
behavior into "patterns," obscuring the common social and cultural milieu in 
which these events not only arise, but in which they become newsworthy, and 
denying the fact that violence is "jointly constructed through the interaction 
of agent and institution, individual and society" (Devine 3). 

We need to read these moves to fix the meaning of youth as ideological, 
but we also need to understand the processes by which these cultural 
constructs have become so natural, so commonsensical in popular perception. 
The narratives which organize our everyday experiences are increasingly 
being guided by the visual logic of mass media. That is, visual pop culture 
regulates "conventional" meanings and social practices. Thus visual imagery, 
and the visual logic of commercial media which relies on shallow but 
repetitive impact which is "cognitively diminished but emotionally charged," 
provides the basis for our cognitive and narrative categories. We need to 
interrogate the repetitive, serialized images of school shootings, particularly 
of Columbine—how do these images, embedded in periodic news stories that 
revisit the sites, tend to attenuate affective response while they build 
consensus through volume, through constant repetition? The naturalization of 
such ideological and cultural constructions of youth tend to carry over into 
policy when the organization of reality that is increasingly structured 
according to a mediated logic carries over into other areas of public life, 
notably the educational and criminal justice systems. 

The representation and popular perception of children and youth as "out 
of control" and antagonistic toward, if not dangerous to, adults and adult 
privilege is politically potent, and has spawned a host of mean-spirited, 
ideologically conservative, racist and ageist policies and pedagogies that are 
far ranging in scope, but singular in purpose—the repression and restriction 
of youth. The public perception that youth generally constitute a threat to 
society has resulted in predictable "solutions" that are increasingly punitive,3 
and which call for greater restrictions and surveillance of all kids, such as the 
imposition of curfews and the use of metal detectors and surveillance cameras 
in schools, the early identification of "problem kids," and their subsequent 
institutionalized removal from the social sphere, either through the use of 
psychotropic drugs or through incarceration—"zero tolerance no nonsense 
tough love." The latest of these "solutions" is California's Proposition 21. 

36 



 

THE WAR ON YOUTH 

On March 7, 2000, Californians voted 62% to 38% in favor of Proposi-
tion 21, known as the "Youth Crime Initiative," or "Gang Violence and 
Juvenile Crime Prevention Act," but perceptively dubbed the "War On 
Youth" by its opponents, most of whom were under-age teens of color. 
Riding the crest of the public panic about "killer kids" that was spectacularly 
brought to prominence by school shootings such as Columbine, this 
redundant, punitive initiative targets youth—particularly loosely-defined 
"gangs" lowering the age at which youths accused of serious offenses would 
automatically be tried and sentenced as adults to 14,4 and the age at which 
they could be incarcerated in adult prisons to 16, while it stiffens many of the 
penalties for crimes committed by gang members, although the definition of 
"gang" is nefariously vague and racist in implementation. Prop 21 effectively 
rolls back a 100-year-old juvenile criminal justice code that sought to protect 
and rehabilitate children and youths more than it sought punishment or 
retribution, and more generally follows a growing California tendency of 
building prisons while gutting the educational system, so that today there are 
more youths in the penal system than there are attending the University of 
California. The rhetoric surrounding the initiative is generally presented in 
terms of "us versus them," those with power versus those without, and adults 
against youth. Former California Governor, Pete Wilson, who sponsored 
Prop 21, spoke to voters' visceral fears of "kids gone bad," and framed the 
initiative in clearly generational (and false) terms, saying: "While adult crime 
has been falling dramatically, the same cannot be said for youth violence and 
gang violence" (Ellis B4). 

Prop 21, and its run-away support by voters, is the latest in a series of 
measures that are fed by special interests and by fear mongering, but that also 
gain strength and credibility, in part, by tapping into a pre-existing cultural 
landscape of sedimented folklore, belief, and popularized psychology which 
aggregate around the intergenerational strife narrative—Oedipus. The 
Oedipal complex was primary to Freud and his "family romance," and Freud, 
and a vernacularized Freudian psychology, has been thoroughly imbricated 
into popular American consciousness in the second half of the 20th century. 
Accordingly, Oedipus has become, according to Marina Warner, a "dominant 
tale in our time" (Warner 68). The privileging of this tale, and the subsequent 
silencing of others that place more emphasis on murderous, cannibalistic, and 
rapacious fathers, and the dominance of the Freudian reading of the Oedipal 
tale itself, which obscures the original crime of Oedipus's father Laius, is a 
master plot of the late 19th and 20th century, and is echoed in contemporary 
"get tough" policies toward youth. 

We have to reintegrate this master plot of the symbolic imagination into 
the cultural and ideological context out of which it emerged. The 

37 



 

CONRAD 

Oedipal complex as a by-now naturalized psychoanalytic construct is his-
torically situated within the discourses of modern capitalism, and in this 
sense, the Oedipus complex is the "figurehead of imperialism" (Foucault 
xx), one of the most persuasive agents in the modern micro-physics of power. 
Seen in this light, we can begin to divest the Oedipus tale of its 
individualistic family romance status and read it as a metaphor for society. 
Freudians and folklorists alike become complicit in their unquestioned 
reaffirmation of the patriarchal privilege in their embrace of this tale and its 
normalizing interpretation which are reinscribed in the legal, social, and 
political complex that emerged in the early modern period which naturalized 
paternal authority, infantilized citizenship, and bifurcated the concept of the 
child, who could be either incorporated or incarcerated in the maintenance of 
patriarchal privilege. Today's rhetoric in support of measures such as Prop 21 
seemingly upholds such a Freudian Oedipal logic and is also putatively 
defensive: protecting us from "the most violent juvenile criminals and gang 
offenders" (California Voter 48), justifying the escalation of draconian 
measures directed against youth. 

The classic Oedipus begins with a prophecy, as do contemporary 
narratives which flow from our oracle, the media, and from our prophets, the 
"experts." According to Time's cover article on "Teen Age Time Bombs," 

They are just four, five and six years old right now, but already 
they are making criminologists nervous [. . .]. By the year 2005 they 
will be teenagers—[. . .] "temporary sociopaths—impulsive and 
immature," in the words of Northeastern U. criminologist James 
Alan Fox. (Zoglin) 

Similarly, under the headline "The Coming Mayhem," LA Times editor Ri-
chard Rodriguez echoes Oedipus's banishment in his demands to incarcerate 
contemporary youth: 

. . . a growing population of teenage boys will mean an increase in murders, 
rapes, and muggings. A new type of criminal is emerging. . . Remorseless, 
vacant-eyed, sullen-and very young. . . We are entering a Stephen King novel. 
We are entering an America where adults are afraid of children. Where children 
rule the streets. Where adults cower at the approaching tiny figure on the 
sidewalk ahead," (Rodgriguez 36) 

Vladimir Propp's observation that the Oedipal "Prophecy does not 
determine the outcome; rather the outcome determines the prophecy" (Propp 
83) perhaps illuminates a paternal animus that is occulted in the dominant 
Freudian Oedipal interpretation. The naturalized status of the Oedipal 
complex in modern discourses has, in fact, reaffirmed this animus 

38 



 

THE WAR ON YOUTH 

by only focusing on some aspects of the Oedipal plot and rejecting or 
ignoring others. This is the tyranny of Oedipus in which analysis is prior to 
data. The current focus on a generation of killer kids likewise tends to ignore 
obvious contemporary statistics to the contrary: not only are many more 
adults killed by other adults than by children each year, but more children are 
killed by adults than adults by children and youth in any given time period-
including the 2,000 to 3,000 children and youths reported murdered by their 
own parents every year (Males 99). Couple this with staggering figures of 
child poverty, neglect, and abuse, along with the systematic abandonment of 
children in both the social and educational systems, and the case for paternal 
animus becomes fairly persuasive. Clearly there is a generational tragedy, but 
its story is just as clearly topsy-turvy. 

The stories we tell and the narrative paradigms we use to construct them 
both derive and shape perceptions about our relationships as human beings, 
and "reality" is constituted and acted upon according to such conceptual and 
narrative models. Contemporary representations simultaneously project youth 
as the object of adult violence and rage, the object of adult moralistic anti-
violence campaigns (violently implemented), and the object of adult desires. 
In our contemporary narratives about collective fears of monstrous youth, and 
the affective crisis that these narratives have engendered, what we can see are 
the machinations of hegemony (Acland 19), in a recuperative narrative 
strategy. Like the Family Romance, "Family Values," that thin smokescreen 
for a conservative economic drive in which "capital has taken upon itself the 
relations of alliance and filiation (Deleuze and Guattari 263)," is more 
appropriately seen as an adult fantasy which has "exonerated the real exterior 
family of any wrongs. 
. .[by] posit[ing] autonomous repression [as] independent of social re-
pression. . ." Abandoning the child in order to "substitute the individual 
fantasy that makes the real parents into so many innocents or even victims 
(Deleuze and Guattari 270)." 

NOTES 

1. See for example: "The Columbine Effect: 'Zero Tolerance' Sounds like a 
Good Way to Treat Violence in our Schools. But Does it Go too Far?" Time v154, 
n23 (Dee 6, 1999):51+. 

2. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle dated Oct. 18, 1999, entitled 
"Arrests for Juvenile Crimes Drop Across Nation," (A2), FBI "figures" are reported 
to indicate that "juvenile arrests for serious and violent crimes fell nearly 11 percent 
from 1997 to 1998." 

39 



 

CONRAD 

3. For example the "Juvenile Superpredator Incapacitation Act," which passed in 
the House of Representatives on May 8, 1997. by a vote of 286 to 132 and which was 
supported by President Clinton. Rep. Bill McCollum (R) Florida sponsored the 
punitive bill by stating, ". . . there's so many new and increasing and alarming 
numbers on violent crime among teenagers. . . We need to provide a change, a repair 
in a broken juvenile justice system in this nation we have one out of every five 
violent crimes in America being committed by those under 18 years of age..." [not 
mentioning that 4 out of 5 are therefore over 18, but are not also a superpredator age 
group]. 

4. In California, prior to Prop 21, it was legally possible to try a 14-year-old as 
an adult, but on a judge's recommendation, whereas after Prop. 21 this is at the 
recommendation of prosecutors. 

WORKS CITED 

Acland, Charles R. Youth, Murder, Spectacle. Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1995. 
Alter, Jonathan. Newsweek (28 April 1997): 30. 
"Argument in Favor of Proposition 21." California Voter Information Guide for 

Primary (7 March 2000):48. 
Clinton, Bill. Speech. 11 June 1996. Albuquerque, NM. 
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 
 Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 
Devine, John. "Violence; The Latest Curricular Speciality." HFG Review 2.1 (1997). 
 From «www.hfg.orglhtml/pages/devine.htm» 
Enright, Robert D., Victor M. Levy, Jr., Deborah Harris, and Daniel K. Lapsley. 
 "Do Economic Conditions Influence How Theorists View Adolescents?" 
 Journal of Youth and Adolescence 16.6 (1987): 541-59. 
Ellis, John. "Wilson Seeks Stiffer Juvenile Terms." The Fresno Bee: Metro (4 
 February 2000): B4. 
Foucault, Michel. "The Dangerous Individual." In Michel Foucault: Politics, Phi- 

losophy, Culture. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 1988. 121-51.  
______. "Introduction." Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. xx.  
Giroux, Henry. Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth. New York: Routledge, 
 1996. 
Ivy, Marilyn. "Have You Seen Me?" In Children and the Politics of Culture. Ed 

Sharon Stephens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. 79-104. 
Oring, Elliott. "Legend, Truth, News." Southern Folklore (1998): 163-77.  
Males, Mike. Framing Youth. Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1999. 
Propp, Valdimir. "Oedipus in the Light of Folklore." In Oedipus: A Folklore 

Casebook. Eds. Alan Dundes and Lowell Edmunds. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 
1995.76-121. 

Rodriguez, Richard. "The Coming Mayhem." Los Angeles Times (21 Janu- 
 ary 1996). Quoted in Mike Males, Framing Youth, 36. 
Toufexis, Anastasia. "Our Violent Kids." Time (12 June 1989): 52ff. US News & 
World Report (25 March 1996): 29. 

40 



 

THE WAR ON YOUTH 

Warner, Marina. No Go the Bogeyman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999. 
Zoglin, Richard. "Now for the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb." Time (15 
 January 1996). From: «www.time.com/time/magazine/...e/1996/dom/ 
 960115/cover.teens.html» 

41 



 

"EVERYBODY IS THEIR ENEMY":  
GOTHS, SPOOKY KIDS, AND THE AMERICAN 

SCHOOL SHOOTING PANIC  
ALLEN BERRES 

One of the earliest details to leak out about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold 
following their horrifying shooting spree at Columbine High School was that 
they were supposedly members of a clique that called itself "The Trench 
Coat Mafia." This name was readily snapped up by the journalists covering 
the story, and by the evening following the shootings, numerous news 
organizations were running pieces about this group in an attempt to shed 
greater light on the reasons why Harris and Klebold killed thirteen people 
and themselves. Although the Trench Coat Mafia clique was confined to 
Columbine High School, journalists quickly pointed out many supposed 
links between this clique and two larger music fan cultures whose members 
occasionally wear black trench coats that are found in almost every 
American high school: goths and Marilyn Manson fans. A wave of anti-goth, 
anti-Marilyn Manson sentiment immediately followed this over-hasty 
association, motivated by the overwhelming fear that any member of these 
black-clad legions could turn out to be the next school shooter. 

The label "goth" (an abbreviation of "gothic") was adopted by a culture 
of music fans that started in the late 70s and early 80s as an offshoot of 
punk. Goths are fans of a variety of generally gloomy bands, including the 
Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Cure. They 
are also known for favoring black clothing, ranging from lacy gowns to 
biker jackets to band t-shirts. One of the bands that is occasionally included 
in the list of goth musical acts is a band named Marilyn Manson. Marilyn 
Manson is led by a front man of the same name, an Ohio native originally 
named Brian Warner. Manson has received more radio and MTV exposure 
in the 90s than any other goth-associated act, and as such he has spawned a 
horde of young devotees who are not yet aware of the wider range of gothic 
music. Manson fans, sometimes called Spooky Kids after the original name 
of the band, Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, also often wear black. 
Some goths are Marilyn Manson fans (this researcher included), but many 
goths despise Manson for his popularity, and many young Manson fans will 
stop listening to Manson and follow some other musical fad in a year or so 
without ever expanding their tastes to other goth musicians. In fact, as of the 
publication of this paper Marilyn Manson's status as the bad boy of MTV 
seems to have been usurped by the rapper Eminem; Manson's third album, 
released in 2000, produced only two MTV- 



 

BERRES 

broadcast videos; the first video was only in rotation for a few weeks, and the 
second has been nearly invisible. 

Although the Trench Coat Mafia apparently included some students who 
were Marilyn Manson fans, Klebold and Harris were fringe members of the 
group at best. According to Dave Cullen of Salon.com, they did not like 
Manson's music or image, and there has been absolutely no credible evidence 
to the contrary (Cullen 4). There is also no evidence that they were members 
of the goth scene; the closest connection is that the two were fans of 
industrial music, a genre that has a lot of fan crossover with goths, especially 
the German bands KMFDM and Rammstein. It has been cynically noted by 
many commentators (including Marilyn Manson himself) that Mr. Manson 
(and, by extension, the goth scene that he is often wrongly equated with) 
became the center of the post-Littleton controversy only because of his 
previously established controversial reputation (he was a favorite target of 
former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman and his conservative cohort 
William Bennett) and the extensive conservative Christian protests against his 
concerts. These later revelations, however, were no help in preventing the 
anti-goth media panic over the days immediately following the shootings. 

Two news articles which were published on April 21, 1999, initiated the 
association of the Trench Coat Mafia with goth culture. One, "'Trench Coat' 
Mafia Spun Dark Fantasy," appeared the Washington Post and was written by 
Marc Fisher It maintained that 

The shooters who turned Columbine High School into an unspeakable 
landscape of carnage yesterday were members of a small clique of outcasts 
who always wore black trench coats and spent their entire adolescence deep 
inside the morose subculture of Gothic fantasy. (Fisher 1) 

Fisher goes on to explain that 

Black trench coats are a consistent theme in the Gothic subculture that has 
attracted many teenagers to the poetry, music, and costumes of a scene that 
ranges from benign fantasy to violent reality. Inspired by fantasy games 
such as Dungeons and Dragons, Gothic has become a fascination of many 
American high schoolers, some of whom simply dress and paint their 
fingernails black while others immerse themselves in a pseudo-medieval 
world of dark images. (Fisher 1) 

We can see a number of propositions here that remained prominent through-
out the post-Columbine goth panic: 1) All goths are teenagers, 2) All goths 
are prone to confusing fantasy and reality, and 3) Their immersion in dark 
images has a strong potential to lead goths to participation in murder 

44 



 

EVERYBODY IS THEIR ENEMY 

sprees. Fisher, apparently inspired by reports of the killers' fascination with 
German fascism, also associates goths with neo-Nazis, noting that 
"Yesterday [the 20th] was Hitler's birthday, an occasion for demonstrations, 
mock funerals, and other macabre celebrations among both neo-Nazis and 
parts of the Gothic scene" (Fisher 1). In my six years of involvement in goth 
culture, I have never heard anything about Hitler's birthday celebrations; 
where Mr. Fisher got his information is anybody's guess, as he does not cite a 
source, 

The second article, "Opinions Run Gamut on Suspects Among Neigh-
bors, Friends," by Jim Hughes, is from the Denver Post. Hughes states that a 
classmate of the boys 

said Klebold adopted the "goth" –short for Gothic—appearance in the past 
year, wearing black clothing and growing out his once-short hair. The 
"goth" scene draws from satanic worship and medieval Europe [sic] 
barbarism. (Hughes 17) 

In Hughes' article we see the first post-Columbine association of goths (and 
Klebold and Harris) with satanism. This accusation had an extremely long 
life prior to Columbine; it is primarily due to the fact that goths wear black 
clothing, which is also supposedly the favored color of witches and 
satanists. While there are satanist goths and gothic satanists, the two 
identities are by no means synonymous. Hughes also seems to confuse our 
modern goths with Goths, such as the Ostrogoths or Visigoths, the tribes of 
barbarians active at the time of the fall of Rome (for a full discussion of the 
evolution of the modern use of "gothic," ask any scholar familiar with the 
development of the gothic novel). In any event, Hughes' picture of the latest 
barbarians at our gates associates goths with violence, ignorance, and, in a 
vein followed by many other commentators, the fall of civilization. 

A third news article completed the foundation of the anti-goth narrative; 
it was a segment on the television news show 20/20, broadcast on the 
evening of the 21st. This segment, rich in Marilyn Manson concert footage, 
featured a police officer from the Denver Police Department named Steve 
Rickard. The segment introduces Rickard as follows: 

. . . for the last seven years, Steve Rickard of the Denver Police Department 
gang unit has been trying to spread the word of how the so-called Gothic 
Movement has helped fuel a new kind of teenage gang - white suburban 
gangs built around a fascination with the grotesque and with death. (Ross) 

Brian Ross, the segment's reporter, claims that "There have been a series 

45 



 

BERRES 

of violent episodes around the country linked to teenagers who call them-
selves Goths" (Ross). Rickard portrays goths as a new, even scarier form of 
gang: 

With traditional gangs, their enemies are pretty well-defined. With sub-
urban groups, their enemies are not defined. I think everybody is their 
enemy. . . . anybody who would gel in their way, I think they would 
potentially kill. (Ross) 

In this scheme, the goth is even scarier than the usual (ethnic) gang member 
in that they could attack and kill anyone, presumably even white kids who are 
apparently minding their own business. 

In an apparent attempt to be fair, Ross states that "For most Goths, it's 
just an act, but apparently not for all" (Ross), and Rickard notes that "All 
Gothic young people are not the same. There's the Gothic scene where kids 
are just dressing the part, listening to the music" (Ross). "Just an act" and 
"just dressing the part" imply that the goth identity is essentially a violent one 
or that the goth is intentionally dressing to intimidate or threaten outsiders. 
According to this logic, dressing like a goth or listening to gothic music and 
then not engaging in violent or hateful behavior is thus a shallow act, devoid 
of its original meaning: a goth is either a murderer or a poseur. 

On the April 22, the Denver Post ran an article documenting various 
threats made against goths in the Denver area. The article features a doctoral 
student at the University of Denver, Derek Sweet, who is quoted as stating 
that his research on goths indicates 

They're not violent. They're not racist. They're not into this whole hate 
mentality. . . . These are not people who are out looking for trouble. They're 
just looking for a place to hang out and have fun. . . . But now this group is 
really scared. And they are angry that they're being alienated and attacked 
once more just for being different. (Briggs and Greene 11) 

Although most of the article defends goths from the threats being made 
against them, the article ends, however, on a much more sinister note, 
quoting Yvonne Peterson, a San Antonio nurse: "I don't think the gothic 
movement created this situation at the school. But. I do think that the gothic 
movement can give teachers in the future some tips. These kids are in 
trouble. . . . They're looking for attention" (Briggs and Greene 11). In other 
words, even if goths aren't murderous, they are mentally ill and a threat to 
themselves. 

The strongest example of this anti-goth attitude can be found in articles 
consulting or written by anti-Satanist Carl Raschke immediately fol- 

46 



 

EVERYBODY IS THEIR ENEMY 

lowing the shooting. With only the sketchy information about Klebold and 
Harris that was available following the first few days of media coverage, 
Raschke concludes the Klebold and Harris were part of the youth Satanist 
movement that he has been writing about since the early nineties. In an 
editorial piece he wrote, published in the Rocky Mountain News on April 25, 
Raschke maintains that the Columbine attack was "carefully planned and 
superbly executed terrorist violence" and goes on to explain that 

These types of disquieting adolescents have been a routine item in suburban 
high schools and urban dance clubs since the early 1980s. They have gone 
by diverse and sundry names - punkers, stoners, metalheads, skinheads, 
headbangers and, now, "goths." They are the minions of a flourishing youth 
anti-culture, which from year to year, concert to concert and album to 
album finds novel and creative ways of celebrating the emblems of 
apocalyptic violence and trashing minimal standards of human decency. 
They think of it as fashion, if not "art." "Revolutionary" art. They aim to 
frighten and to shock. (Raschke 1B) 

In Raschke's view, goths and Marilyn Manson fans set out to "frighten and 
shock" the moral and decent world, and as such they are terrorists just as 
much as Klebold and Harris were terrorists; he bitterly claims that Columbine 
administrators ignored the "obvious" threat posed by the Trench Coat Mafia 
because had they acted, "they would be branded by various educated 
apologists for teenage excess as too authoritarian and intolerant of those who 
opt for 'alternative lifestyles'" (Raschke 1B). 

It is not too difficult to see Raschke's plan for preventing future school 
shootings in this complaint: make the "misfits" conform to mainstream 
conceptions of normalcy. They are not protected by free speech or any other 
protections because they are supposedly using their freedoms only to oppress, 
threaten, and harass normal people. Showing sympathy towards goths or 
excusing them as troubled or mentally ill just perpetuates the problem; 
Raschke declares that 

We are so mesmerized by the saccharine rhetoric of the "human services" 
professions, which has convinced us there is always an excuse for 
someone's outrageous criminal behavior, that we can't imagine a set of 
circumstances when someone is self-conscious about what they are doing 
and, as Saint Paul once put it, without excuse. (Raschke 1B) 

In this scheme, even those whom Ross and his informant Rickard would 
regard as harmless poseurs or Yvonne Peterson would classify as mentally ill 
and needing therapy are an "anti-culture," deadly threats to social order and 
civilization itself. 

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BERRES 

A plausible explanation for the widespread insistence on goths as a 
convenient explanation for the school shooting crisis is offered by Robert 
Snyder in an essay for Anthropology News: 

The typical narrative for suburban teens might thus go as follows. One 
should grow up to be a good student, athletic, monetarily care free (in a dual 
income household), religious and bound [or college. Suburban, middle-class 
teenage "massacre" does not fit the traditional narrative that has been 
socialized into North American society. The Littleton massacre is a prime 
example of media attention to an event that does not follow a "traditional" 
social narrative. . . . High tech video games, sci-fi movies and Goth 
subculture are created as the primary social pressures that corrupt middle-
class suburban teenagers. (Snyder II) 

This "corruption through invasion" metaphor is prominent in Carl 
Raschke's work, but there are other examples as well. In June 1999, the 
conservative publication The New American ran an article referring to 
"Manson's anti-hero acolytes Harris and Klebold," describing Marilyn 
Manson as "an androgynous creature who works at being as repulsive as 
possible (and succeeds wildly!) [parenthetical aside in original]" whose 
'''music' revels in nihilistic rebellion, rage, alienation, death, and despair" 
(Jasper). The article goes on to comment that "the Columbine killers and their 
fellow teen sociopaths imbibed deeply of the toxic waste that courses through 
the culture of death now engulfing our whole society"; this "toxic waste" has 
filled "the God-shaped vacuum" created by "the militant secularists of 
academe, the decadent culture vultures of Hollywood, and the left-wing 
activists in the courts and legislatures" (Jasper). Manson, at the head of a 
phantom army of drooling, psychotic fans, serves here as a powerful symbol 
of an invading force that is the ultimate cause of everything that is wrong with 
the United States. 

Another call for action against the goth menace is She Said Yes, the story 
of the supposed martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, one of Klebold and Harris' 
victims, as written by her mother, Misty Bernall. It was widely believed 
following the shooting that one of the shooters had approached Cassie and 
asked her if she believed in God; she was said to have said yes, and that is 
when she was killed. The way Misty tells it, Cassie was a basically good 
child until she fell in with an ill-behaved, black-wearing, pink-haired friend 
named Mona (a psuedonym) in her early high school years. One of the key 
signs that Misty and her husband, Brad, focused on as an indication of trouble 
was the music that Cassie and Mona were listening to: 

I don't know exactly when it was, but at some point Brad began examining 
some of Cassie's music and realized that it wasn't "just" entertain- 

48 



 

EVERYBODY IS THEIR ENEMY 

ment. Despite the innocuous covers, the lyrics themselves often carried an 
unmistakable message. (Bernall 45) 

Misty then includes a brief sample of lyrics from one of Marilyn Manson's 
songs, claiming that the group was "a favorite of the two boys at Columbine 
who killed [Cassie]." The quoted song is "Get Your Gunn," the two n's on 
"Gunn" referring to a murdered abortion doctor, David Gunn (Manson). 
Misty misquotes the song's lyrics, however, transforming the song's refrain 
from "get your gunn" (as indicated clearly in the album's liner notes and on 
any internet listing of the song's lyrics) to "get your gun" (Berna1l45). With a 
slight misrepresentation of its lyrics, the song is transformed from an ironic 
commentary on a murder committed by pro-life zealots into an apparent 
endorsement of gun violence. 

The possibility that Cassie and Mona posed an immanent danger to Brad 
and Misty's lives is confirmed for Misty when she discovers a series of 
letters from Mona that Cassie was hiding in her room: 

There was endless talk about the "sexiness" of black clothes and makeup, 
the "fun" of contraband alcohol, marijuana, and self-mutilation, and the 
adventures of a classmate whose girlfriend went to "this satanic church, cult 
thing where you have to drink a kitten's blood to get in." Several of the 
letters advised Cassie to do away with us and thus solve her innumerable 
problems. One ended, "Kill your parents! Murder is the answer to all of 
your problems. Make those scumbags pay for your suffering. Love you, 
me." (Bernall 38-9) 

Misty and Brad see these letters as a sure sign that Cassie is up to no good, 
and they report the children to the police. At a meeting with a police 
detective and the Bernalls, Mona's parents don't see what the big problem is. 
Misty reports that Mona's mother "could not understand why we had the 
need to bring [the letters] to the attention of the law, or to involve her 
husband in the matter," but that 

Thankfully the detective and the investigator took the situation as seriously 
as we did, and supported our desire for a restraining order to bar Mona from 
further contact from Cassie. Among other things, the sheriff told Mona's 
parents that the letters were the worst he had seen during more than a 
decade in juvenile crime, and he warned them that if Mona had had any sort 
of prior record, she would have been called before a judge. Still they 
showed no surprise or remorse. (Bernall 52-3) 

The narrative we see developing here is one insisting on parental authority, 
specifically that Misty and Brad Bernall were right in splitting up Mona and 
Cassie's friendship. Mona's parents are presented as gullible, over 

49 



 

BERRES 

indulgent monsters; Misty reports that she was traumatized by their behavior, 
claiming 

I can still feel their cold, level stares. Nor will I forget how Mona's mother 
walked her back to their car after our meeting, rubbing her shoulder and 
reassuring her, as if to say "Oh, honey, it's okay, the Bernalls are just mean 
people." (Bernall 52) 

The proof that the Bernalls acted appropriately comes in the actions of other 
black-clad trouble children. Although Mona is never referred to again after 
her exorcism from Cassie's life, Misty mentions a case in 1997 when a 
fourteen-year-old from a nearby suburb "said he was going to kill his parents" 
and then subsequently stabbed his father the next day. Misty notes that "After 
the stabbing, satanic carvings and other Goth trappings were discovered in 
the boy's bedroom" (Bernall 61). She maintains that "In a time when 
supposedly peaceful middle-class suburbs like ours are breeding children 
capable of such things, you begin to realize that talk is never just talk" 
(Bernal1 61). 

The ultimate proof that the Bernalls acted in Cassie's best interests is that 
Cassie was a devout, genuine born-again Christian by the time she was killed 
at Columbine High School by the very type of black-wearing, Marilyn 
Manson-listening, murderous freaks that she could have ended up being. This 
is demonstrated when Misty sympathizes with the Klebolds and Harrises after 
she receives an apology letter from the Klebolds: 

Even if Cassie were still alive, we would be able to understand their hurt 
and humiliation. Before she changed directions, we agonized over her in the 
same way the parents of her killer surely agonize over him now. And even 
if we could never compare the weight of our separate griefs, we have at 
least one comfort: the knowledge that our daughter died nobly. What balm 
do they have? (Bernall13l) 

Misty Bernall's message to parents is that they must intervene when children 
rebel; even a minor rebellion or demonstration of a warning sign can have life 
or death consequences. 

The overt anti-goth panic has largely disappeared now, more than two 
years after the Columbine shootings. A series of pro- (or at least not anti-) 
goth news articles that followed the anti-goth articles discussed here was 
partially responsible for the shift, and it didn't hurt matters that the media, for 
the most part, decided that the gun control issue was going to be their primary 
target issue. With this is mind, however, the image of the immanent threat 
posed by the gothic rebel child still retains its power in the discussion of 
school safety. A particularly vivid example appeared in April 

50 



 

EVERYBODY IS THEIR ENEMY 

2001 in an AP article by Dan Elliott, "Columbine Killers Icons to Some." 
Although most of the article discusses Klebold and Harris's appeal to generic 
"angry, disaffected youth," James Gerbarino, author of Lost Boys: Why Our 
Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them is quoted as saying, 

Thirty-five years ago, if a kid walked into your school with body piercing 
and black makeup, almost certainly somebody would say, "We've got to 
find out what's troubling this kid. . . . Adolescent culture has taken on this 
foray into the dark side. For troubled kids, this feeds their trouble. (Elliott) 

Here we see the use of the goth as a potent visual metaphor; even though 
neither Klebold or Harris, or any other school shooter to date, fit the 
description above, the personal style of the goth is still specifically invoked 
as a symbol of sociological and psychological dysfunction and, 
simultaneously, as a sort of supernatural evil, as using the phrase "the dark 
side" inevitably conjures up both Darth Vader of the Star Wars trilogy and 
legends of satanic worship. 

With the latest bout of school shootings following the shooting at 
Santee High School in California, however, most of the media's focus has 
shifted to a call for greater surveillance to spot potential troublemakers. A 
series of researchers have tried to create a typical profile of the school 
shooter, much in the same way that profiling is used to pursue serial killers. 
These profilers, especially profilers working for the Secret Service and FBI, 
appear to be very careful about dismantling certain stereotypes about serial 
killers, among them the anti-goth concerns discussed here. For example, a 
paper written jointly by members of the Secret Service and the Department 
of Education for a 2001 issue of Psychology in the Schools states: 

Decision makers who rely on characteristics that appear to be more typical 
or representative of the category, to determine whether an object belongs in 
that category, may inadvertently render faulty decisions. . . . For example, a 
school administrator who believes she should be concerned about a 
particular student because the student wears a black trench coat similar to 
the ones worn by the shooters at Columbine High School would be relying 
inappropriately on such information to determine risk. (Reddy et. al. 163) 

While this article points out that while a student's making threats should 
be taken seriously, it also maintains that a student making a threat is not 
always going to become a school shooter (Reddy, et. al. 168). Since 

51 



 

BERRES 

the Santee shooting, however, threats issued by students are popularly 
believed to be an accurate indicator of potential trouble. An AP article 
written by Greg Toppo, for example, ends with the following passage: 

John Kotnour, a police officer with the Overland Park, Kan., police 
department, works in Shawnee Mission South High School. He said his 
job often makes him feel like "a small-town sheriff." The most effective 
deterrent to school violence, he said, is a staff that makes students feel 
comfortable sharing their fears. "Most of the people here at South don't 
want the liability of letting a rumor go unchecked," he said. Among the 
most important conversations he has with students and teachers, he said, 
are those that begin with these five words: "This may be nothing, but. . 
." [ellipses in original]. (Toppo) 

Among school administrators and local law enforcement, the fear of being 
held legally responsible for a school shooting because a threat was not taken 
seriously is very strong, and also very understandable, given the lawsuits 
filed after the Columbine shooting against Columbine High School and the 
Jefferson County Sheriff. In such an environment of fear, the caution advised 
by the federal authorities is likely to be abandoned in the same way that local 
authorities ignored national, official skepticism regarding satanic crime in the 
1980s and 1990s (as documented in Jeffrey Victor's Satanic Panic, among 
other sources). As such, I am reluctant to declare the goth panic dead; as 
demonstrated by the previous examples, the anti-goth panic immediately 
following the Littleton shooting is probably best understood as part of a 
larger move to cement parental control over adolescents and over society in 
general. It is likely that as long as there are goths, anti-goth sentiment will 
continue. 

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 

WORKS CITED 

Bemall, Misty. She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall. 
 Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1999. 
Briggs, Bill, and Susan Greene. "Suspects Embraced World of Darkness: Com- 
 fortable Suburbs Harbor Troubled Teens." The Denver Post. April 22, 1999, 
 A-11. 
Cullen, Dave. "Inside the Columbine High Investigation." <http://www.salon.com/ 
 news/feature/1999/09/23/columbine/index.html> (March 16,2000). 
Elliott, Dan. "Columbine Killers Icons to Some." Associated Press. April 16, 
 2001. 
Fisher, Marc. "Trench Coat Mafia Spun Dark Fantasy." The Washington Post. 
 April 21, 1999: A-1. 

52 



 

EVERYBODY IS THEIR ENEMY 

Hughes, Jim. "Opinions Run Gamut on Suspects Among Neighbors, Friends." 
 The Denver Post. April 21, 1999: A-17. 
Jasper, William F. "Lessons From Columbine High." The New American. <http:/ 
 /www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1999/06-07-99/vol5no12_lessons.htm> 
 (December 8,1999). 
Manson, Marilyn. "Columbine: Whose Fault is It?" Rolling Stone. <http:// 
 rollingstone.tunes.com/sections/new> (August 31, 1999). 
Raschke, Carl. "The Ultimate Outrage as Our Shock Tolerance Rises, Disaffected 
 Youth Raise the Stakes." The Rocky Mountain News. April 25, 1999: lB. 
Reddy, Marisa, et. al. "Evaluating Risk for Targeted Violence in Schools: Compar- 
 ing Risk Assessment, Threat Assessment, and Other Approaches." Psycho-l 
 ogy in the Schools 38.2 (2001): 157-172. 
Ross, Brian. "The Goth Phenomenon" from 20/20, Wednesday, April 21, 1999. 
 <http://www.abcnews.go.com/onair/2020/transcripts/2020_ 
 990421_shootings_goth_trans.html> (April 24, 1999). 
Snyder, Robert. "Consider the Littleton Narrative" Anthropology News 41:2, 
 February 2000: 11-12. 
Toppo, Greg. "Schools Tighten Security, Open Ears." Associated Press. March 
 13,2001. 

53 



 

A FEAR OF ADOLESCENT CRUISING: ADULT REACTIONS 
TO A TRADITION THAT WON'T GO AWAY  

CHARLIE MCCORMICK 

Growing up in Snyder, Texas, my friends and I spent our Friday and Satur-
day nights cruising—what we referred to as "making the drag." We drove 
down College Avenue-Snyder's main strip, turning around in the Bar-H-Bar 
parking lot on one end of our circuit and at the Sonic Drive-In on the other 
end. Were I able to go back and interview myself as I was then, I think I 
would describe those hours I spent on the drag as being "really cool." 
Whatever the phrase lacks in articulateness, its connotation is unmistakable. 
Cruising was important to me. It was important for lots of reasons but 
especially because of how it changed me: it made me feel tougher while I 
was out there commanding a few thousand pounds of metal to drive me 
around; it made me feel older than my years sneaking smokes and sipping 
beer from a can; it made me feel like I had sexual potential as me and my car 
full of male friends imagined—incorrectly as it turned out that the young 
women out cruising found us desirable and sexy; and it made me feel 
connected to something larger than myself since I knew from hearing them 
recount their own experiences on College Avenue that my older sisters, 
cousins, and parents had made the drag when they were in high school. 
"Really cool," indeed. 

These days, my interests in cruising are much less experiential than they 
are intellectual, but I still find cruising "pretty cool." Apparently, some 
towns and cities across the U.S. do too since cruising remains as traditional 
today as it has been for the last fifty years in these places. I have been 
surprised, however, to find that in an increasing majority of locales around 
the nation, this folk performance has come to be regarded by many adults as 
the scourge of their community.1 I explain these differing adult perceptions 
of adolescent cruising by arguing that as adolescent cruising-one of the 
traditional and informal performances of white middleclass adolescents due 
to its socialization and enculturation potential (McCormick)-became 
appropriated by those outside the target audience (i.e. ethnic minorities and 
those presumed to be in the lower class) its legitimacy was attacked. 
Therefore, when cruising the mall emerged as a new means of facilitating 
socio-cultural reproduction among middle-class adolescents, many 
communities had voices calling for the criminalization of the performance 
and its performers. Ultimately, then, these differing perceptions of 
adolescent cruising—as traditional activity and as criminal activity—have 
much less to do with the performance's changing nature and much more to 
do with the fear of middle-class adults that they will be 



 

McCORMICK 

unable to make the adolescents for which they are responsible grow up to be 
middle-class adults. 

In explanation of this position, let me briefly sketch the relevant datain 
this case a sequence of events which traces the development of adolescent 
cruising on the strip—on which I base my argument.2 Cruising's golden days 
began in the mid-1950s due—in large part-to the entertainment industry's 
strategic use of the hot rod culture as a marketing tool. A flood of movies like 
Rebel Without a Cause, Drag Strip Girl, Hot Rod Gang, and Ghost of Drag 
Strip Hollow; songs like I Get Around, Little Old Lady from Pasadena, Little 
Deuce Coupe, and Mustang Sally; and even texts like the Hot Rod Happy 
comic strips all exploited the taboo of the hot rod culture in the hopes of 
attracting a newly emerging and potentially powerful market segment: baby 
boom teenagers. In doing so, the idea of a tripartite performance of 
adolescents, automobiles, and commercial strip was aggressively marketed to 
these teenagers. It became so attractive, in fact, that by the mid-1960s 
adolescent cruising on the commercial strip had become an increasingly 
traditional way for adolescents to spend some of their non-institutional time. 
By about 1975 (though I don't mean for any of these dates to be precise, 
they're meant to be touchstones which give the historical sequence a rough 
placement in time3), adolescent cruising on the commercial strip began to be 
transformed. The oil embargo and the rise of the regional shopping mall were 
two economic reasons for this transformation, but social and cultural 
forces—which I will address momentarily—were also at work. By 1985, the 
future of adolescent cruising on the commercial strip was no longer just in 
jeopardy, it was being actively dismantled in newspapers and local political 
meetings around the nation. None of this is to say that cruising is dead or 
dying, because it certainly isn't. In fact, adolescent cruising was reborn in the 
shopping mall. Interestingly, cruising the mall seems to have followed the 
same sort of development as cruising on the commercial strip. It was 
accepted by the middle-class—if not eagerly than at least willing—as an 
appropriate way and place for their teens to hang out, it was traditionalized, 
and very recently, cruising the mall has begun to show signs of having its 
legitimacy challenged by voices in the local community. 

Given this data, adolescent cruising on the strip appears to have de-
volved unidirectionally through time. In fact, letters, editorials, and articles in 
newspapers from around the country seem to indicate that, in today's 
performance of adolescent cruising on the commercial strip, kids hurt each 
other—even kill each other—and property is damaged. The seemingly level-
headed response to these charges would be to keep adolescent cruising from 
occurring. But the level-headedness of this response can be challenged by 
correlating the perception of cruising's increasingly dark 

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A FEAR OF ADOLESCENT CRUISING 

menace with its shifting demographics: from a performance which was 
controlled primarily by white, middle-class adolescents to a performance 
which is increasingly being adopted by those outside the white middleclass. 
Examining cruising's receptions in their historical context suggests that as 
adolescent cruising becomes increasingly performed by those outside the 
white middle-class, the white middle-class apparently finds adolescent 
cruising less effective at reproducing its target population, and it therefore 
has no reason to perpetuate the performance. 

Make no mistake, I understand that it seems like I am, at best, making an 
argument that is purely academic or, at worst, naive. Cruising, after all, has 
been and is the venue for fearful activities: assault, rape, homicide, drug 
abuse, and property damage. This is all well documented (if, I believe, 
exaggerated in terms of its epidemic proportions and endemic nature). But 
my reading of the performance suggests that cruising has always had the 
specter of menace hovering around it.4 The significance of this menace-
whether it is seen as pranksterism or as criminal—I believe, is contingent on 
whether or not the performance is perceived as achieving its reproductive 
potential. 

In Paul Lyons' book, Class of '66, the perception of white, middle-class 
adolescent menace as pranksterism in a white, middle-class town in New 
Jersey is evident. He reports these memories from a middle-age, middle-class 
informant: 

".We hung the assistant principal in effigy the first week he was at school. . 
. . He was a real nice guy, Mr. Turner; it was just that we disliked the idea 
of having an assistant principal. About two weeks after he arrived, we 
passed the word that we were packing guns, and within two or three days, 
they did a complete search of the whole school building—we didn't have 
any guns." Dave, roaring with laughter, tells of boyish pranks: "We did a 
mock shooting on the steps of the local diner. Davy Hunter had a '57 
Chevy; he pulled up in front of the diner and got out, and we had these cap 
guns, but they were real loud; [Davy] pulled it out, pulled up in front of the 
diner, shot this guy on the steps, ketchup packets all over, picked him up off 
the steps—this was Saturday night, busiest night of the week," he interjects, 
"threw him in the trunk of this car, and sped off. . . we drove [the cops] 
crazy." (46) 

Even more relevant to my argument, Howard and Barbara Myerhoff reported 
on the way in which the menace of adolescent cruising—menace as 
pranksterism—was handled by the authorities in early 1960s California. 
They wrote that 

[t]here is a mischievous, often amusing overtone to all these incidents; they 
are not the kind likely to be malicious or violent. Rather, they are 

57 



 

MCCORMICK 

spontaneous and gratuitous, proving nothing but providing "kicks." An 
incident was observed in which a boy was picked up for drinking and 
curfew violation. In the patrol car he expressed his concern lest the occasion 
jeopardize his chances for entering college. The officer, who had until that 
point been rather surly, hastened to reassure the boy that such a possibility 
was quite unlikely, and implied that nothing would come of the visit to the 
station. (285-86) 

In these examples, the menace of adolescents—while frustrating to adults—
is finally laughable—even capable of evoking nostalgic remembrance some-
time later—because it appears to be developmental: it was simply what kids 
did when growing up. Therefore, adolescent menace was considered 
pranksterism rather than criminal behavior. 

Today, however, cruising and the menace which surrounds it is not 
viewed as pranksterism; instead, it is perceived as a much darker and more 
dangerous sort of threat. Adolescent cruising on Salt Lake City's State Street 
provides an example of adolescent cruising having its menace transformed 
into criminal behavior. Reporter Rebecca Walsh described the cruising on 
State Street in 1999 as 

a night club on asphalt. Site of a mating dance of sorts, punctuated 
by stops for drinks at the Chevron, where tailing is flirting, and two 
drivers exchanging phone numbers can reduce traffic to gridlock. 
It's a social, at times violent, tradition Salt Lake City police want to 
end. Using two murders in two years as a catalyst, city police claim 
cruising State has spun out of control. Decades of harmless fun has 
taken on a sinister cast. ("Tracking taillights . . . ") 

Shortly after her report, the Salt Lake City City Council passed a ban on 
cruising State Street (Egan 1999: Online). Reading the newspaper accounts 
leading up to, during, and following the elimination of adolescent cruising on 
State Street, it becomes clear that the cruising menace which was once 
pranksterism had become criminalized. Assistant Police Chief Roy Wasden 
described his changing perception of the activity like this: "[Cruising has] 
changed a lot in 25 years. . . . There's just a lot more of everything: more 
traffic, more weapons, more violence" (Walsh, "Tracking taillights. . . "). Salt 
Lake City resident Don Steiner, in his public forum letter in the Salt Lake 
Tribune, supported this position as well. He asserts that State Street cruising 
"was not American Graffiti, where cute little kids honk at each other for 
attention; it had become a continual crime scene on weekends. I applaud Salt 
Lake City for its efforts to make State Street once again safe 

58 



 

A FEAR OF ADOLESCENT CRUISING 

for all citizens" (Steiner). Because of cruising's transformation into a criminal 
menace, it seemed self-evident that the performance had to be abolished. 
Therefore, when Salt Lake City decriminalized many traffic violations, it left 
cruising State Street—along with drunken driving, excessive speeding, and 
reckless driving—"a  more serious criminal offense" (Kennedy). 

The logic of cruising's criminalization, however, has been challenged by 
individuals who fear that criminalizing cruising only appears to be an 
appropriate response to cruising's menace. In Salt Lake City, it was among 
others—ACLU Legal Director Stephen Clark who urged City Council 
members to proceed cautiously with criminalizing cruising. He argued, "I'm 
very concerned about how the cruising ordinance will be implemented and 
enforced. It's one more opportunity for people who are marginalized in our 
community to be targeted and harassed" (Walsh "New SLC Law . . . "). And 
in Denver, for instance, it was Hispanic voices who noted in an article in La 
Voz that "[ w]hat the media failed to see, but what was clearly evident to 
anyone on Federal [Street] over the weekend, was in its so-called "random" 
stopping of vehicles, the DPD [Denver Police Department] systematically 
pulled over and impounded vehicles driven by people who were young and 
brown or who displayed Mexican flags. Anglos drove by untouched" 
("Crusade for Justice. . . "). 

These voices of dissent argue that it seems to be part of human nature to 
fear that which is different and that is what is driving the criminalization of 
cruising. Researcher Doreen Massey concurs with the general principle: 
"Attempts to forbid behaviour which is different have always been part of the 
armoury of those who insist on establishing their own behaviour as 'normal' 
and 'natural', and therefore by some leap of logic to be conformed to by 
everyone" (127). The implication would be, then, that if cruising's performers 
were homogeneous they would not elicit the same sort of fear that a 
heterogeneous group of cruising performers would. According to this 
reasoning, cruising should have been much more homogenous when its 
menace evoked, at best, frustration than it is now when its menace evokes 
fear. James Bradley's 1971 master's thesis in sociology on a relatively 
unthreatening performance of adolescent cruising in San Leandro, California, 
seems to confirm this condition. In San Leandro, for instance, there were 
"few Mexican-Americans" (51) and no Blacks (49-50) who cruised. In other 
words, a lack of difference correlated with a lack of threatening menace. 
According to this theory, then, as cruising becomes a more diverse activity 
(as it had on Salt Lake City's State Street), fears would begin to surface. Tim 
Lucas unpacks the process through which the white middle-class fear of 
cruising becomes a public policy which criminalizes cruising. First, he 
argues, the word "gang" becomes confused 

59 



 

MCCORMICK 

with "race" (146-47). Next, the media creates a moral panic around "gangs" 
(that is, "minority youth") so as to titillate an audience which assumes it is 
being informed (152). Finally, Lucas argues that this moral panic leads to the 
"terrifying visions of white suburbanites. . . of the migration of drive-by-
shooting gangbangers in South-Central (LA) to the more prosperous (white) 
peripheral neighbourhoods" (152). To stop this migration, cruising becomes 
outlawed. 

Compelling as this explanation of the adult fear of cruising which is 
characterized by its difference is at first glance, cruising seems less about the 
performance of difference than it is about different people coming together 
to perform the same thing. In fact, cruising is arguably much more about 
assimilation than differentiation. Certainly, there are good reasons for those 
adolescents outside the white middle-class to want to participate not only in 
cruising but in all sorts of middle-class leisure activities. As Regina Austin 
argues in an article on governmental restraints on black leisure in Southern 
California Law Review, the appropriation of middle-class leisure spaces and 
practices results in the creation of "real and symbolic capital" by those non-
middle-class adolescents who appropriate them. 

But assuming assimilation is trying to be achieved, the question remains 
why adults—and white, middle-class adults in particular—would criminalize 
cruising if difference was not heightened but diminished during the 
performance. Barbara Ehrenreich suggests an answer when she argues that the 
middle-class (she claims an interest in the "professional" middle-class alone, 
but I think her argument applies to a greater or a lesser extent to the middle-
class generally) is not concerned with those who are different per se but about 
losing its own status. She writes that the middleclass is "insecure and deeply 
anxious. . . . It is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of 
misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide. . . . Whether the middle class 
looks down towards the realm of less, or up toward the realm of more, there is 
the fear, always, of falling" (15). If cruising is one of the traditional 
mechanisms for reproducing middle-class behaviors and values, then when 
this mechanism runs the risk of becoming either "clogged" by too many users 
or too effective at moving others into the middle-class (which results in either 
kicking others out or limiting the participation of all those involved), the 
mechanism itself comes under attack. Don Merten offers a brilliant case study 
of how this process is initiated when a burnout becomes a cheerleader. He 
argues that 

having a burnout as a cheerleader was so problematic. . . . [because] it 
violated an implicit assumption that the hierarchies of status categories and 
activities were congruent. But at a far more fundamental level, sta- 

60 



 

A FEAR OF ADOLESCENT CRUISING 

tus categories and activities not only identified types of people but also 
separated types of people. Since status categories and activities were 
expected to be hierarchically congruent, people who were near the bottom 
of the status hierarchy were not supposed to be in high-prestige activities. 
Having a burnout as a cheerleader was not just an isolated violation of this 
expectation but rather, like a taboo violation, threatened the integrity of 
these two categorical systems and their assumed congruence. . . . In other 
words, if a burnout could be a cheerleader, was there any limit as to what 
could happen; were any expectations valid? (65) 

Likewise, when cruising became perceived as inefficiently socializing and 
enculturating middle-class adolescents, it became feared, criminalized, and 
dismantled. 

Still, though, the need to socialize and enculturate middle-class ado-
lescents remained; therefore, new mechanisms were constructed to achieve 
these ends. Enter cruising the shopping mall, a landscape which serves as an 
escape from and defense against intrusions from outsiders—just as the 
commercial strip once did. I suspect that the recent challenge to cruising the 
mall's legitimacy as a middle-class leisure activity is a result of middleclass 
fears over the efficacy of the performance's ability to reproduce middle-class 
values and behaviors within the target population. 

Given what I've learned about adolescent cruising, I don't think this will 
be the blow that finally destroys the performance. As much as middle-class 
adults fear cruising's menace, they also seem to fear the loss of its 
reproductive potential. Cruising, after all, changes people. I know that from 
personal experience. This is precisely why middle-class adults have a 
love/hate relationship with the performance. And because of the power in 
this traditional performance, people change cruising. 

CABRINI COLLEGE  
RADNOR,  PENNSYLVANIA 

NOTES 

1. For example, I was surprised to find that in Abilene, Texas—my fieldsite—
cruising has begun to come under attack. This, in fact, was what originally caused me 
to look to other attacks on cruising around the nation so as to understand the 
motivations for this attack. 

2. This is not to suggest that cruising exists as some sort of transcendent, 
universal (or national) tradition. Rather, adolescent cruising is always localized from 
popular culture representations even as these localizations build the popular culture 
representations. This does not, however, preclude me from making general 
statements about the phenomenon. 

3. For example, in my fieldsite of Abilene, Texas, it is only now—in the late 
1990s—that this transformation to the tradition of adolescent cruising is becom- 

61 



 

MCCORMICK 

ing manifest in the local government as it considers whether to enact adolescent 
curfews on the weekend. 

4. This inherent menace is a result, at least in part, of the inherent menace in 
adolescent themselves. As ambiguous figures, adolescents pose a threat to the 
normative order, and their activities—however tame they may actually be—have at 
least the specter of this menace hovering around them. 

WORKS CITED 

Austin, Regina. "'Not Just for the Fun of it!' Governmental Restraints on Black 
 Leisure, Social Inequality, and Privatization of Public Space." Southern Cali- 
 fornia Law Review 71 (1998): Available Lexis-Nexis. 
Bradley, James P. Cruising the Strip: A Report on Youth. Thesis for M.A. in Soci- 
 ology at California State College, Hayward (1971). 
"Crusade for Justice Angered by Actions of Denver Police." La Voz May 14: 6, 
 Available Northern Light's Special Collection, 1997 
Egan, Rick. "Welcome to S.L., and No, You Can't." The Salt Lake Tribune June 
 1999, B1, Available Tribune Archive Online. 
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New 
 York: HarperPerennial, 1990. 
Kennedy, Kelly. "Gotten a Routine Traffic Ticket? You're no Longer a Criminal in 
 SLC." The Salt Lake Tribune (Final) Nov. 12 1999: B5. Available Tribune 
 Archive Online. 
Lucas, Tim. "Youth Gangs and Moral Panics in Santa Cruz, California." In Cool 
 Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, Eds. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valen- 
 tine. New York: Routledge, 1998. 145-60. 
Lyons, Paul. Class of  '66: Living in Suburban Middle America. Philadelphia: 
 Temple UP, 1994. 
Massey, Doreen. "The spatial construction of youth cultures." In Cool Places: 
 Geographies of Youth Cultures, Eds. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine. New 
 York: Routledge., 1998. 121-29. 
McCormick, Charlie. "The Origins of Adolescent Cruising: Reconciling Popular 
 Belief and Local History." Journal of the American Studies Association of 
 Texas 31 (2000): 64-81. 
Merten, Don E. "Burnout as Cheerleader: The Cultural Basis for Prestige and Privi- 
 lege in Junior High School." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 27.1 
 (1996): 51-70. 
Myerhoff, Howard L., and Barbara G. Myerhoff. "Field Observations of Middle 
 Class 'Gangs.'" In Juvenile Delinquency: A Book of Readings, 2nd Edition. 
 Ed. Rose Giallombardo. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972.279-89. 
Steiner, Don. Public forum letter: "Cruising Law Needed." The Salt Lake Tribune 
 (Final) July 14, 1999: A12. Available Tribune Archive. 
Walsh, Rebecca. "New SLC Law Brings Tradition of Cruising to a Screeching 
 Halt." The Salt Lake Tribune June 9, 1999: DI. Available Tribune Archive. 

62 



 

A FEAR OF ADOLESCENT CRUISING 

______. "Tracking taillights on State Street, Cops to Discontinue Thrill Seekers on 
the Prowl, Cruising State Street Now Discouraged." The Salt Lake Tribune May 
23. 1999: C1. Available Tribune Archive. 

63 



 

REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 
JESSE GELWICKS 

On a shady street in a California Central Valley college town stands a tan and 
brown two-story house. Out in front of the carport rises a low basketball 
hoop; beside it lies a square of scruffy grass. Scattered around the house are 
the signs of children: a basketball, a bicycle helmet, some candy wrappers 
and a well-worn skateboard. Two boys aggressively bounce a ball back and 
forth while two others stand nearby. The ball skids past the legs of one boy, 
causing a boy in line to shout, "He's smokin' your butt like cheese macaroni," 
which sends all but one of the boys into shrieks of laughter. The first boy in 
line replaces the boy who missed the ball and the game continues. Unlike 
similar driveway games going on around the neighborhood, this game is not 
played in front of a family home. These boys, whose names I have changed 
to protect their anonymity, live in a group home I will call Redwood Grove. 

From fall of 1999 through the spring of 2000, I worked part-time at 
Redwood Grove. The following summer I increased my hours to full-time. 
As a staff member I cooked and served the boys meals, helped them with 
their homework, read to them, took them to the park, and played with them. I 
also enforced rules, gave "time-outs," and occasionally restrained them. My 
role as researcher was secondary to my role as a caretaker; therefore, I could 
not be a completely neutral observer. Most likely I could never escape the 
relationship of staff to ward. On the other hand, the boys knew I cared for 
them, and they grew to trust me. I was a part of the staff/ ward hierarchy; 
however, my familiarity with the boys enabled me to see their everyday lives 
and behavior, as opposed to the behavior the boys presented to visitors. 

This ethnography examines the seven boys who lived in the group home 
over the course of eleven months (during which time one boy left and another 
filled his slot). The number of participants in the study limits my ability to 
make major generalizations about children's lives in group homes. On the 
other hand, the small number of subjects allowed for informal and formal 
interviews and in-depth observations over the course of a year. My study 
builds on previous studies and research on children in institutions by 
psychologists and folklorists (see, for example: Polsky, Cohen and Eilersten, 
Horan, and Mechling). 

In this paper, after a brief introduction to the group home and the rules 
and structure that govern it, I discuss the way behavior is charted and the way 
the staff imposes hierarchy. I then show that the boys in the group home 
constitute a folk group that creates a social hierarchy of its own in opposition 
to the one created and maintained by the staff. Then I 



 

GELWICKS 

explore the various ways the boys construct frames and how their framed 
relationships create and maintain a social hierarchy. Following that section, I 
present two folk performances—storytelling and teasing—that the boys use 
for maintaining their hierarchy. Then I present two examples of the staff's 
influence on the folk culture. 

In the second half of the paper I present a photography project in which I 
gave the boys the assignment of taking photographs of their important 
material possessions. I detail the process of taking the photographs and then 
situate the boys' photographs and perceptions of their material culture in the 
context of the group home culture and hierarchy. 

This is a case study of male preadolescent and early adolescent folk 
culture. Perhaps because these boys live in a group home and must cope with 
an unusual, stressful living situation, they employ an intensified version of the 
ways children use folklore. Part of the lesson here is that boys sometimes try 
to use folklore and it fails. Those areas of failure are instructive. By looking at 
the successes and failures, adults have the opportunity to monitor the feelings 
and tensions the boys cannot express explicitly. Adults can learn about how 
boys see and react to the world around them and how that affects their male 
friendship group hierarchies. 

REDWOOD GROVE 

Redwood Grove is one of two houses run by a small nonprofit organi-
zation that operates group homes for children between the ages of eight and 
thirteen. The six boys at Redwood Grove were placed there by the California 
juvenile court because their parents used drugs or because the boys were 
abusive sexually, physically, or emotionally (the abuse often accompanies the 
drug use). Some of the boys were born with drugs in their systems. F our of 
them took daily behavior modifying medication. All were first put into foster 
care, which did not last because of behavior problems. 

The facility was designed as a Level 11 group home. The level of the 
group home indicates the degree of supervision and structure provided for the 
children-the levels range from 8 to 15, with the highest being the most 
heavily structured and supervised. This group home aims to put structure into 
the boys' lives by regulating their behavior, providing constant supervision, 
making sure they have regular meals and snacks, and giving them group and 
individual counseling, all within a safe and supportive environment. 

While psychologists such as William Pollack believe that many boys 
experience premature separation from their mothers, the boys at Redwood 

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REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 

Grove are the extreme cases; their emotional deficits are much greater than 
normal. The group home staff assists in repairing self-esteem and self-
confidence. They attempt to curb the negative behaviors and self-hate, but 
because the group home is an institution with paid employees, not surrogate 
mothers, the boys must learn on their own as well. One way the boys deal 
with their past and present situations is through their folklore. From the 
games they play with each other and staff, to social hierarchies they create, to 
stories they tell about each other and staff, they are learning to cope with the 
psychological and social stresses in their lives. 

Redwood Grove is similar to what Erving Goffman labels a "total in-
stitution," except that the boys are not completely shut off from the wider 
society. They go to public school, occasionally participate in city sports or 
recreation programs, and (depending on their behavior) go out in the town to 
buy toys, visit friends, or play in the park. Apart from school, all outside 
activities are opportunities that they must earn based on their behavior. Most 
of the time the boys are at Redwood Grove interacting with Redwood Grove 
staff and residents. Each day is tightly structured, "with one activity leading 
at a prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being 
imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of 
officials" (Goffman 6). The activities, from the type of education to 
counseling to daily interactions, are designed to meet behavior modification 
goals set for the boys. 

Weekdays during the school year are the most heavily structured days. 
From the moment the staff wakes them, the boys follow a tightly scheduled 
routine posted in the hallway, including school, daily chores, tutoring, meals 
and bedtimes. They earn free time in the afternoon if they finish their 
homework. If they have been behaving well, they can play outside. After 
dinner, they have free time until it is time to take a shower and go to bed. 
Bedtime is determined by their level on the behavior chart. Those who are 
behaving well that week stay up later and, consequently, earn more free time. 

Before coming to Redwood Grove the boys had little structure or 
stability in their lives, while at the same time they had limited control over 
their lives. In some cases they took care of younger siblings. In the group 
home, they have both structure and stability, but almost no control. "Children 
are an underclass perpetually in the one-down power position" and "nowhere 
is this more true than in the residential institutions established for children" 
(Mechling 273). Staff create and enforce the rules that the wards live by. The 
boys act out and rebel against the rules and the staff react accordingly. 

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GELWICKS 

POINTS AND PRIVILEGES 

A central element in molding the boys' behavior is a behavior chart on 
which the staff keep track of the boys' privileges and the amount of super-
vision they require. At any time upon entering Redwood Grove, staff can 
immediately determine each boy's behavior by consulting the chart in the 
dining room. The boys' initials are printed in erasable pen next to their step 
and level, which correspond to certain privileges; the three most important 
deal with supervision, video game time, and bedtime. 

The chart was devised as a series of incentives to entice the boys to try to 
follow the rules. The boys can move up or down the chart each day depending 
on their behavior. The staff record how they behave on a point sheet. The 
boys' behavior is constantly scrutinized. Almost everything they do, from peer 
interaction, to following directions, to going to bed on time, has a 
corresponding point value. If they do their daily chores, they earn three 
points. If they make their beds, they earn one point. If they have good peer 
interactions during dinner, they earn four points. When they go to school, 
they turn in a behavior log to the teacher, who fills out points, grading them 
on their school work, homework, classroom behavior, and recess behavior. If 
they talk back to staff or will not follow directions, they cannot earn all their 
points. 

The boys are often scattered across the behavior chart, although they 
more regularly tend to occupy the bottom half. Occasionally, one boy will be 
a level or two above the rest and enjoying privileges and freedom the others 
are not. At other times, the boys are grouped together closely. The disparity 
between the boys' levels and privileges creates a hierarchy in the group. This 
staff-monitored hierarchy competes with another hierarchy, created by the 
boys, which is based on power rather than good behavior.  Just because a boy 
behaves well does not mean that he has much influence over the other boys; 
in fact, they often resent his superior position. 

The boys' social hierarchy works counter to the staff-monitored hier-
archy, minimizing the privilege of a high position on the behavior chart. The 
group can exclude a boy high on the behavior chart or induce him to 
misbehave in hopes that he will be caught and brought down with the rest of 
the group. While the boys' hierarchy does not directly break the rules, it is 
part of what Mechling describes as the "folk offensive in the political 
struggle over 'whose institution is this, anyway?"'(Mechling 276). 

The social hierarchy created by the boys structures the group home 
culture and frames the social interaction between boys. The boys develop the 
frames in their everyday interactions, such as playing games, arguing, 
sharing, teasing, excluding and including others. Their tacit understanding of 
frames and the manipulation of frames cannot be underestimated. While 

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REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 

they may not be able to articulate the behavior, they understand the subtle 
nuances and body language that send the metamessages such as "this is play" 
and "this is a competition that looks like play." 

POGO AND CREATING FRAMES 

One afternoon Jerod, age twelve, and I were outside playing Pogo, the 
boys' version of the classic schoolyard game Two-Square. Although the 
structure of the game was traditional, the boys' names for certain hits and rule 
variations identified Pogo as their own folkgame. After two games, Jerod 
asked if I wanted to keep score. Keeping score was a common device the 
boys used to transform a simple Two-Square game into a more complicated 
and competitive game in which each time one person got the other "out" they 
won a point. They played either to a set number or until one finally gave up. 
The boys could only keep score when nobody stood in line; otherwise, the 
line rotated in with each "out." 

During the first game, Jerod "played on" for my benefit when I made a 
mistake, and in return I "played on" for his, thus establishing the frame of a 
friendly game. I tried to continue that frame by "playing on" some of his 
questionable "scizzards," the boys' name for a fast and low hit that almost 
skids across the ground. He did the same for me. At the same time we were 
playing hard, "scizzarding" and "babying," a common name for the smallest 
hits, all over the court. Our play established that, although this was a friendly 
game frame, it was also competitive. I won a couple of games and got ahead 
of Jerod. As our scores reached the "teens" (near game's end), Jerod stayed 
just two behind me. I tried to tone down my playing a bit, but he would not 
let me lose enough for him to catch up. We both played hard, but we also 
made stupid mistakes to let the other win. We played "the twenties" harder, 
and finally, Jerod pulled ahead when I said I would play only three more 
games. 

I realized Jerod planned out the whole game. Jerod had let me win 
before, but never as cleverly as this. I thought I was playing in a particular 
frame that we had both established, but really Jerod was creating that frame 
and manipulating it as we played. He was playing this game to keep me 
playing as long as I would. He manipulated me through the frame, just as a 
con artist might hustle a sucker; only instead of money, all Jerod wanted was 
one-on-one attention. 

Boys often connect with others through actions such as initiating a game 
with a boy with whom they want to become friends (Pollack 182). Jerod 
sought connection with the other boys and staff through Pogo. For a period of 
eight to nine months the boys played Pogo more than any other 

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GELWICKS 

game in the house. Jerod often initiated those games, asking another boy or 
staff to come outside with him after he finished his homework. Pogo provided 
a medium for interaction. 

Jake, age eleven, approached Pogo differently than Jerod. Jake was 
extremely competitive. Jerod, who loved to play Pogo, would often try to 
adapt to whomever he was playing—to play at the same level of competi-
tiveness. One afternoon Jake and Jerod were playing Pogo and Jake took 
more advantage of the rules concerning lines, "do-overs" and interference 
than did Jerod. Jake was quick to point out when Jerod's hit was out of 
bounds, and Jerod was willing to go along with that. Jerod did not mention 
when a ball should have been called "interference" or "out back boundary" or 
"liner" or any of the other ways the boys identified when they should "redo" 
the point. Jake manipulated the frame so that he was winning. Jerod 
manipulated the frame so Jake continued to play; Jerod's desire for 
connection superseded his desire to win. 

Play involves a negotiation of frames, and games can be personal or 
impersonal, depending on the frame the players establish. In some cases, the 
play frame extends beyond the single game and is reflective of the players' 
relationship. In the example above, the game was situated in the middle of a 
restructuring of the boys' social hierarchy. Jake was vying for the opening 
position at the top the hierarchy as Joshua, age thirteen, was leaving. Jerod, 
who was older than Jake, did not make any strong attempts at that position. 
Similar to the way he played Pogo, Jerod took a less competitive approach to 
the social hierarchy. Through Pogo, Jerod developed methods of interaction 
he could use outside of the folkgame. 

SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE: JOSHUA AND THOMAS 

The boys maintained and challenged their socially constructed hierarchy 
every day in the way they interacted with each other. In turn, the hierarchy 
framed their interactions. As they stayed within the frames created by the 
hierarchy or reinforced those frames, the hierarchy's structure strengthened. 
In the following examples, the boys construct and maintain those frames 
through a series of interactions. 

One Friday, all the boys, except for Thomas, age eleven, who was 
staying at the house due to his poor behavior, were in the van about to go to 
their weekly counseling group for victims. Before the van could pull out of 
the driveway, Thomas ran out to the van to try to join the group. Thomas and 
Joshua started exchanging words. Joshua, who was sitting in the front seat, 
lunged through the window with his fists clenched and screamed at Thomas 
that he was going to "kick his ass." Joshua knew that 

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REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 

he could not attack Thomas (the car door was in the way), but he could make 
a dramatic display by lunging out of the open window at Thomas yelling and 
waving his fists. 

Joshua displayed his power and potential for violence in front of the 
other boys without risking much. He would lose peer interaction points and 
perhaps drop a level for threatening behavior, but he did not actually make 
contact with Thomas. Joshua was playing the role of the "tough guy" without 
actually having to prove it, a behavior characteristic of what Pollack 
describes as the "mask" of masculinity. Joshua's stylized performance of 
aggression may actually be "an invisible shield, a persona to show the outside 
world a feigned self confidence and bravado, and to hide the shame he felt at 
his feelings of vulnerability, powerlessness and isolation."(Pollack 5). 

Joshua's display left the other boys to decide whether it was a bluff or he 
actually was that mean and vicious. Joshua framed the boys' relationship with 
him in terms of his own projected violence, thereby taking the dominant role 
in their future interactions. This frame would help Joshua maintain his 
position at the top of the social hierarchy, rewarding him for his masculine 
image. 

THOMAS AND FRANCISCO 

The week following Joshua's display of aggression, another incident of 
symbolic violence took place. On the way to group, Thomas, who was 
having yet another horrible day, provoked Francisco, age 10, into exchanging 
rapid insults. Before the van had left the home block, the name-calling had 
escalated to the point where Thomas was lunging at Francisco, who was 
sitting in the seat in front of him. I was sitting next to Thomas, so I easily 
held him back, just as the car door had held back Joshua. 

The previous week's events made an impression on Thomas. He tried to 
recreate the dangerous and powerful image that Joshua had created without 
actual physical violence, just as Joshua had done. Thomas followed the same 
pattern by choosing a target lower on the social hierarchy than he and by 
choosing a time when he would be held back from actually making contact. 

The stylized symbolic violence by Joshua and Thomas sent a message to 
the other boys about potential actual violence, as well as a message about the 
structure of the social hierarchy. Joshua demonstrated symbolic violence as 
an effective means of displaying power. When Thomas copied Joshua's 
behavior he did not move up the social hierarchy as much as reinforce 
people's existing positions within the social hierarchy. He solidi- 

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fied his position over Francisco as well as reinforcing Joshua's behavior and 
position. 

MAINTAINING THE HIERARCHY: THOMAS AND THE OLD 
CEREAL 

One of the various ways of maintaining position in the social hierarchy 
at Redwood Grove was teasing. The teasing was structured around the boys' 
fears, which were translated into negative attributes that induced shame, the 
fundamental control mechanism boys use to create and maintain their group 
culture (Pollack 33). Insults about being gay, feminine, weak, contaminated, 
dirty, different, or without friends, were rooted in the boys' fears about 
sexuality, masculinity, safety, inclusion, protection, love, and the shame of 
being identified as having any negative or unmasculine characteristics. 

A reoccurring theme in their teasing was centered on the boys' fear of dirt 
and of being contaminated by their food. This particular fear of contamination 
manifested itself in two ways at the group home. First, the boys were 
uncertain of the purity of their food. They rarely saw it prepared, and they 
were not given a choice about what they would like to eat. They were also 
uncertain about what it would do to them. They had only a vague 
understanding of the cause and effect of eating spoiled food. Second, the boys 
used that uncertainty to control. They exercised control by not eating foods 
they felt were spoiled. 

The control exercised by one boy upon another, exemplified in their 
teasing, is a form of social exclusion. The next few examples trace a particular 
tease from its possible conception and show how that tease was modified over 
time and became absorbed into the boys' folklore. 

One morning, when Thomas was on the highest level and also the last to 
the breakfast table, he poured himself some cereal that was past its expiration 
date, which he did not notice. The other boys had already seen the date and 
avoided the cereal. They waited until Thomas had taken a bite and then 
chimed in together about how he had eaten old rotten cereal. They went on 
and on. "Moldy cereal! How could you eat that?" Thomas left the table crying 
and would not eat breakfast. 

For the rest of the day, the boys continued to tease Thomas, their teasing 
ranging from overt to more cryptic forms in which the boys would merely 
mention a single word that referred to the morning's events. They inserted the 
words "cereal," "mold," and "rotten" at the end of sentences, or they just 
casually said the word alone. The boys manipulated and advanced the tease so 
that it was only apparent to those in the group. A staff 

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person arriving for the afternoon shift might not pick up anything until 
Thomas reacted to the teasing. Only through close observation of the boys' 
behavior could a staff member recognize the teasing. 

The tease ostracized Thomas from the group and in doing so united the 
group against him. While the group as a whole, all six boys, may not have 
grown stronger, the group of five did. Despite any previous conflicts, they 
connected by ostracizing one. They could all agree that he was not worthy of 
being part of the group because the old cereal contaminated him. They were 
also united by level. Thomas was higher on the behavior chart than everyone 
else. He was at the top of the adult-regulated hierarchy. The group reminded 
him that he was not better than the rest. While he might be at the top the 
hierarchy on the behavior chart, he was, at least for that situation, at the 
bottom of the folk social hierarchy. 

As teases, such as the Thomas cereal tease, lasted beyond the incident 
and beyond the day of the incident, they entered the group folklore. Like a 
story that everyone in the group knew, the cereal tease became a tease that 
everyone knew, remembered, and reacted to. As long as they used some 
version of the tease, it stayed alive. Because everyone knew it and because it 
had already been encoded on the first day, it was easy to maintain. When the 
boys teased Thomas about the old cereal, they did not need to recite the 
whole tale, just enough for Thomas to know what they were teasing him 
about. 

THOMAS AND THE NAPKIN 

A perfect example of how this encoded tease was carried on happened 
when the boys were eating dinner a few weeks after the initial event. Joshua 
and Bobby, age 10, were both on the lowest level of privileges and seated on 
the perimeter of the room, while Francisco, Jerod and Thomas were eating at 
the table. Thomas asked for the salt. Joshua and Bobby chimed in asking for 
some too. A staff member gave the salt to Thomas and asked him to pass it 
on to them when he was finished. He walked over and handed it to Bobby. 
Instead of just taking it from Thomas, Bobby held a napkin so as not to touch 
the saltshaker. Jerod and Joshua erupted into laughter, and Thomas ran 
crying out of the room. The effects of the napkin tease were the same as the 
initial event: Thomas left the room crying. But the actual teasing was limited 
to a simple action rather than a barrage of remarks. The tease was just as 
powerful even though it was simplified. 

Thomas later explained what happened. The teasing had begun earlier in 
the week when Joshua started acting as if Thomas were contaminated, and he 
would not touch objects Thomas had touched. Bobby only partici- 

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pated in the teasing for the first time at that meal. At some point the boys had 
made a big deal about Thomas and his contamination, so much so that they 
only had to act out part of it—the napkin grab and the laughter—to send 
Thomas into tears. 

The napkin incident was not completely a direct result of the cereal 
incident. Once the cereal incident became encoded and became part of their 
folklore and folk culture, the boys mixed that event with other similar events. 
The events previous to the cereal incident laid the foundation for the cereal 
tease to be as powerful as it was. The cereal may not have been the beginning 
of the tease, but the spoiled cereal theme became part of an ongoing and 
developing folklore about contamination and Thomas. 

JOSHUA AND STORYTELLING 

Around the same time, a story emerged that Joshua told. It may have 
been told before or may have been created on the spot for the particular 
situation. Its validity is uncertain. Joshua recalled how Thomas had been 
forced to dig in the trash by an older boy when Thomas had first moved in. 
Joshua described Thomas's action with disgust and contempt. As he told it, 
the other boys began to remember the incident and some tried to add details, 
but Joshua kept control of the story, repeating or dismissing what they added. 
Even Bobby, who had not been there, thought he remembered the event. 

Joshua told the story to illustrate Thomas's contamination. The story was 
characteristic of other folklore that had grown out of past events at Redwood 
Grove. Joshua told the most stories or, rather, the most successful stories. He 
was the oldest and had been at Redwood Grove the longest. He was also at the 
top of the group hierarchy. His perspective could not be disputed. Often the 
stories were exclusive. They were a roll call of who was there, unifying and 
empowering those included, a reward for their time spent at Redwood Grove. 
Thus, when Bobby remembered the event, he was ridiculed because he was 
not there and therefore not part of the group that could remind Thomas, 
though he could still laugh at Thomas's behavior. 

The stories would often go back to a time when a few of the boys were  
not there yet, such as the time one of the old residents threw a bike on the roof 
or when all the residents were on the highest level on the behavior chart at 
one point the previous summer. The bike incident would be recalled to make 
comparisons to current behavior, to show that although Francisco punched 
and hit staff, his behavior was not nearly as bad as the behavior of previous 
boys. The "high-point-in-behavior" story would 

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be recalled when they were dealing with difficult times on the behavior chart 
during school. And, of course, there were stories used to tease. The stories 
served Joshua well, reminding the other boys that he was on top in size, age, 
and time served, and that those could not be challenged. 

When Joshua left, storytelling, for the most part, died. Jake tried to 
revive it to help maintain his position at the top of the group hierarchy. While 
Jake was the strongest, he was not the oldest, and he had only come a month 
before Thomas, so his exclusive stories were limited. He never developed his 
storytelling skills, so he resorted to other methods. 

CREATING NEW WAYS TO TEASE 

While the boys were dealing with each other and their social organi-
zation, they also had to deal with the staff, who were constantly observing 
and intervening. The boys' teasing and storytelling had to work around the 
staff. Teasing in general was not condoned and usually punished, but 
impossible to stop. When the staff picked up on teasing, the teasers were 
given appropriate punishments, often separation for a short period of time. 
Staff would also try to squelch continual teases such as the cereal tease and 
negative storytelling, both of which were virtually outlawed by increasing the 
penalties for whoever repeated them. 

Limited by his lack of storytelling ability and outlawed forms of teasing, 
Jake created a new form of teasing. One day at the table during afternoon 
snack, Jake began quizzing the other boys in spelling or mathematics. He 
aggressively questioned Thomas, and brought Thomas down, as he stumbled 
over the answers. The other boys were questioned as well. As they struggled 
to come up with answers, Jake positioned himself at the top of the hierarchy. 

At the time, Jerod and Francisco were both at the bottom of the behavior 
chart and were not allowed to interact with the group, which was fortunate 
for Jake, since they were two of the smarter boys and Jerod was a grade 
ahead of Jake. The second time Jake tried quizzing the boys, Jerod was able 
to participate and Jake's questioning was less effective because Jerod knew 
the answers. 

The new approach stood out in contrast to other forms of teasing because 
it positioned one boy more or less opposed to the rest of the boys. A less 
powerful boy could have the group turn on him, ostracizing him from them. 
As it was, Jake manipulated the situation to put others down and build 
himself up by comparison. Although he was neither the oldest nor (probably) 
the smartest, he was able to make himself seem the smartest by not allowing 
himself to be questioned. As long as he controlled the questions, he always 
had the right answer. 

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UNEQUAL POWER RELATIONSHIPS: "STEVE" FOLKLORE 

The fears the boys dealt with ranged from abstract—such as abandon-
ment—to the immediate fears about particular people and places. The way the 
boys dealt with unequal power relationships was similar to the way they dealt 
with fear; they incorporated it into their folk culture. The following example 
illustrates how the boys of Redwood Grove integrated a power conflict with a 
staff member into their joking and teasing. 

One staff member, Steve, had a very confrontational manner. He con-
stantly displayed his power over the boys by the way he told them to do their 
chores and pick up their things, bossing them around rather than asking. He 
made extra rules, like not letting boys on the lowest behavior levels change 
the television channel. Steve induced fear in the boys, not by hurting them, 
but by wielding his authority punitively. If they came in conflict with him, 
they received harsh consequences, often the extreme consequence for the 
behavior. 

Steve got results, but at the expense of shoving the boys' powerlessness in 
their faces. The boys dealt with Steve by incorporating him into their 
vernacular folklore. The boys talked about Steve when he was not around. His 
name was used most commonly as an insult, aimed at each other as well as a 
staff member. For instance, one boy would tell the other that he was "as fat as 
Steve" when they commented on how much they were eating, which was a 
comical insult most often heard around the table at meals. An awkward 
movement, like hitting a ball poorly, was mocked by saying the person hit the 
ball so badly, he hit it "like Steve." The boys diminished Steve's power by 
making him the object of their jokes and insults. Steve was a negative figure 
that the boys could agree on. When he was on his shift, they might obey his 
orders, but when he was not around, he was mocked. While the boys 
complained when other strict staff came on shift, the other staff were not 
ridiculed the way Steve was. 

Ridiculing Steve, the boys felt powerful. Like all children in institutions, 
the boys at Redwood Grove were able to find power in seemingly powerless 
situations. They found satisfaction in distorting the adult authority. Where 
there was little power available to them, they invented new forms, such as 
when Jake asked a few of the boys seemingly legitimate questions in math 
and spelling, knowing they wouldn't be able to answer them. He might have 
been attempting to recreate the power relationship he felt between the teacher 
and student. 

Storytelling and teasing are time-honored ways children establish a 
social hierarchy outside adult control. The power of them is heightened in a 
group home setting where the boys spend almost all their time together and 
have so few other possibilities for participating in alternative social 
hierarchies. 

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Behind the boys' hurtful teasing, I believe, is their anxiety about the 
behavior-chart hierarchy. The behavior chart draws attention to the boys' 
positions in relation to one another, creating a competitive atmosphere that 
promotes social ranking. They react to the behavior-chart hierarchy 
established by the adults, and in an attempt to undermine it, they create a 
new social organization in its image. Rather than the boy at the top being 
rewarded by his peers for his good behavior, the rest of the group punishes 
him. He is also encouraged to play the role of the victim, for if he stands up 
for himself, responding with anger or aggression towards the teasing, he risks 
dropping on the behavior chart. 

Adults can intervene and impose control based on behavior charts and 
points, but the social hierarchy framed by the boys is also a very powerful 
force in shaping the children's experiences. 

MATERIAL CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 

Along with the social frames that regulate the boys' experience is the 
material setting that is the background for their interactions. From the house 
they live in to the coveted Gameboy games in their toy chests, their material 
environment effects their social culture and hierarchies. When I first entered 
the group home, I began to make a list of what seemed to be the important 
items in the boys lives: the round red rubber ball, video games, bicycles with 
shocks, Pokémon paraphernalia, batteries, and other items that could be 
borrowed or traded. The most easily identifiable items of importance were 
those in highest demand. The importance of personal items of comfort and 
pleasure, such as teddy bears and worn action figures, were harder to judge 
since they were largely ignored by all the boys except the owner. 

As I became aware of their material culture at Redwood Grove, I sought 
to answer the question posed by Jon Wagner in a recent edition of the journal 
Visual Sociology, namely, "What aspects of their own material and social 
circumstances do kids notice and why?" For a researcher to answer that 
question, he or she must feel confident in having a child's perspective. To feel 
confident I had the perspective of the boys in the group home, I relied on 
three methods of obtaining information: observation, interviews, and 
photography. The boys' photography allowed me to see through their eyes, 
and the interviews gave the boys an opportunity to explain what they saw. 

The object of my project was to have the boys record the toys, memo-
rabilia, gifts, and mementos that were important using their own camera. 
Rather than observe what toys were played with the most, what objects 

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were the most treasured and valued, I placed the decisions into the hands of 
the children. 

I built upon the questions raised and approaches taken by photographers 
Jim Hubbard, Lauren Greenfield (see Levin), Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, 
Wendy Ewald, and the young photographers they worked with. These 
professional photographers sought to empower youth by giving them control 
of the camera to capture their world on film and speak to people through their 
photographs. Osofu Washington, a young photographer who worked with 
Greenfield on Picture LA, said "if people can understand our landmarks, they 
can see things from our point of view" (Levin 4). The premise of my 
photography project was based on Washington's words. By following the 
steps of seeing the photograph and understanding the photograph, then 
hopefully it is possible to see things from the child's perspective. 

The boys at Redwood Grove faced specific restrictions, which set the 
parameters of the photography project. They faced behavior-level restrictions, 
such as limitations on where they could go, what items were available to 
them, and when they could take the photographs. Items left with their parents 
were unobtainable, as well as items confiscated by staff. The boys on the 
lowest behavior level had most of their toys confiscated. Some of the boys 
could not leave the house or the yard. They were also limited to thirty-six 
photographs. 

The boys may have also decided not to take some pictures because they 
would be sharing these photographs with other people. They may have 
selected their photographs to suit what they thought their audience might want 
to see. They may have been ashamed to identify belongings that they felt were 
not masculine enough, even though those items were important to them, 
similar to the way the boys in Pollack's study felt ashamed of expressing 
emotions and feelings they felt were feminine. 

I explained the project to the boys in short information sessions right 
before giving them the disposable cameras. They were told to focus on 
"stuff," not people, but they could include people as they saw fit. I asked 
them to take photographs of the things that they felt were important to them. 
They were given no extra supervision when they used the cameras and 
possibly even a little more freedom by the staff. When they completed their 
roll of film, they returned the cameras to me, and I took the film in to be 
developed. Before I brought the photographs back to the boys, I went through 
them and made a list of the photographs. Once I had gone over their pictures 
a couple of times and made myself familiar with them, I went back to 
Redwood Grove and interviewed the boys as we looked over their pictures. 
The interviews were taped and then transcribed. After the interviews, the 
boys were given their photographs in a flipbook to keep. I 

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followed up on the project by checking to see how they manipulated their 
booklets. 

TAKING THE PHOTOGRAPHS 

On the day the boys received the cameras, they came into the office in 
twos. Jake and Bobby came first. They listened to the directions and ex-
pectations, and then I asked a couple of different times and in a couple of 
different ways if they understood. I could see their ears turned off as their 
minds started racing with ideas of what they would photograph. When they 
saw the cameras, they became restless and fidgety, their eyes darting about 
excitedly; their complete attention was on the yellow cardboard camera in my 
hand. They immediately wanted to touch the cameras, fool with them, and 
begin taking pictures. Their reaction was similar to the reaction Hubbard 
(Shooting Back) received when he worked with children at a shelter. They 
also wanted to know if they would get to keep the cameras and were 
disappointed when they heard the cameras were disposable. As I explained 
how to use the flash, they were bouncing in their seats, anxious to leave the 
office and take pictures. Finally, I opened the door and they ran out clicking 
and winding through the hallway. 

Nicholas, age 8, and Thomas came in next. Nicholas, who had already 
seen Jake and Bobby run out with cameras, was anxious to get his. Thomas 
came into the office immediately exclaiming that he had not done anything 
wrong. Obviously, sitting in the office with a staff member created a certain 
frame for the situation, possibly augmenting the boys' anxiousness to leave 
and take pictures. Nicholas and Thomas were just as excited as Bobby and 
Jake. The boys did not want to listen to any directions. The power they would 
have with the camera seemed intoxicating. 

Unfortunately, Jerod and Francisco were not on high enough levels to 
receive cameras; both were at the bottom of the behavior chart. It took Jerod 
two days to move up to a high enough level to receive a camera. Unlike the 
other boys, Jerod was much calmer and did not bounce around, and he asked 
questions. Jerod's approach may be reflective of his age and maturity or the 
diminished excitement of the group now that most had completed their roll of 
film. 

It took Francisco two weeks before he raised himself from the bottom 
level and could participate in the project. Unlike Jerod, Francisco wore his 
excitement on his face; his eyes and his grin widened when he saw the 
camera. 

The first four boys finished within the day, three within the first one to 
two hours, one within the first half-hour. When Francisco finally received 

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his camera, he finished it within the day, probably within a couple of hours 
judging from the photographs he took. When I picked up Jerod's roll, five 
days after I initially gave it to him, he still had a couple of pictures left, 
which he promptly took. 

The younger boys finished their rolls of film more quickly than the older 
boys. Nicholas, the youngest, finished his first. Jerod, the oldest, finished 
last. What led the boys to take their photographs so quickly? Jake's roll in 
particular captured a stream of consciousness perspective, as if the viewer of 
his photographs was looking through his eyes for five minutes. The boys' 
excitement and desire surrounding the taking of photographs took on an 
almost libidinal quality—the instant gratification of taking a photograph, 
each one exciting and satisfying in its own right. Rather than seeming in 
competition with one another, the boys seemed to feed off each other's 
energy. After taking a photograph of the toys on his dresser, Nicholas raced 
outside to the bike rack, on the way snapping a photograph of Francisco 
posing holding a Pokemon. 

The desire to snap off as many pictures as possible may also be linked to 
the uncertainty the boys felt about how long they would have the cameras. If 
they dropped to the bottom of the behavior chart, the cameras, along with their 
other toys, could be taken away. If they shot quickly, there would be nothing 
left for staff to confiscate. 

Unlike the other boys, Jerod may have savored the experience, or he 
simply was not caught up in the excitement and forgot about the last few 
pictures. 

During the interviews, which I did individually, a couple of the boys 
behaved differently than usual Two of them used sweet baby voices and 
attitudes while answering the questions. They all demonstrated their best 
behavior, although Bobby became a little silly during parts of his interview. 
Their behavior may reflect their enjoyment of one-on-one attention from a 
staff member as well as feeling safe from ridicule from others when they 
were explaining their photographs. In addition, they knew an unknown 
outside audience would see and hear the results of the project, and they 
wanted to display their best behavior. 

ANALYZING AND INTERVIEWING 

Not surprisingly, none of the boys followed the directions completely. 
Rather than a collection of photographs of toys and other items the boys' 
treasured, their photographs ranged from a dead rat to another boy's "special 
friends" (adults from the community who act as personal mentors), from 
pictures of other boys to pictures' of their toys, from the staff at 

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Redwood Grove to Redwood Grove itself. Surprisingly, the photographs that 
proved the most descriptive about the boys' material culture, their social 
culture, and their experience at Redwood Grove were the photographs that 
fell outside the originally stated guidelines. 

Nicholas took twelve pictures of other people's stuff, their toys, their 
rooms, and their posters. While some of the pictures included those boys who 
owned the stuff, making it unclear as to the focus of the picture, the pictures 
were still of items that did not belong to Nicholas. It is possible that Nicholas 
was merely taking photographs of his environment—the other boys and their 
stuff are major parts of that environment—but the interview revealed 
possibly another motivation. 

When asked why Jake's Red Version Pokémon Gameboy game was 
important to him, Nicholas answered, "Because it is very important to me 
and I'll probably get it. . . for my birthday," which was untrue. Nicholas's 
statement translates to "I want it." Besides the Red Pokémon game's being a 
highly valued item in the house, Jake first took Nicholas under his wing 
when Nicholas moved in, letting him play his Pokémon games and 
Gameboys whenever Nicholas wanted. For Nicholas, the game may have had 
a double importance; it is fun to play, everyone likes playing it, and it also 
symbolizes his friendship or at least connection with Jake, the most powerful 
boy in the house. 

Nicholas similarly describes a photograph of Thomas's radio. "I took a 
picture of that because I want that." He nodded when asked if he wanted 
Francisco and Nathaniel's bikes. This theme continued as he talked about and 
explained the rest of his photographs. Real insight came when he was 
explaining a photograph he took of some of Bobby's toys on Bobby's dresser. 
While listing the items in the photograph, he ended the list by saying "I want 
deodorant" and when asked, "You don't get deodorant?" he responded by 
blurting "Yes, I will!" While obviously Nicholas misunderstood the question, 
his outburst reveals his desire for deodorant goes beyond material desire. The 
deodorant represents more than just another boy's object. Nicholas is the 
youngest in the house. He is smallest, the last to arrive, and at the bottom of 
the social hierarchy. The deodorant represents growing up and becoming 
bigger like Jake and Jerod, who are entering puberty. Deodorant represents 
one of the signs that he is bigger, older, and more powerful. Boys towards the 
top of the hierarchy wear deodorant. 

The boys took over forty percent of their photographs of people. Those 
pictures fall into three categories: those of themselves, those of other boys in 
the house, and those of adults such as staff and special friends. The two boys 
who took the most pictures of other boys in the house were Nicholas and 
Thomas. Eighteen out of twenty-four of Thomas's photographs were 

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photographs of people, and eleven of those eighteen included other boys. 
Nine of Nicholas's photographs were of people, and six of those were of the 
other boys. The rest of the boys only took one picture with other boys in it. 
Jake represents the other end of the spectrum; he took only one photograph of 
other boys out of eleven that were of people. 

The two boys lowest on the hierarchy took the most pictures of the boys, 
and the highest on the hierarchy took the least. Jake may not have felt like he 
had to "suck up" or even show that he liked the other boys because he was at 
the top. He may not have even thought to take pictures of them, although that 
is unlikely since they all were clamoring to be photographed. It did not matter 
if they liked him. He was the strongest and the toughest. Nicholas and 
Thomas, on the other hand, were not particularly tough or strong, and both 
were struggling to move up the social hierarchy. Nicholas and Thomas may 
have been trying to build connections with Jake and the other boys by 
demonstrating their friendship. They may also have admired the other boys 
and wanted the power they had. 

Thomas devoted two of his photographs to Jake and Jake's special 
friends, and then just Jake's special friends alone. While Jake may be im-
portant to Thomas, Jake's special friends are not. They do not spend much 
time around Redwood Grove playing with the other boys; instead, they take 
Jake out somewhere, to their house or the movies. Unless Thomas enjoyed 
Jake's absence, the special friends had no relationship to Thomas. In the 
interview, Thomas could not articulate why he took the photograph beyond 
saying "Jake's special friends are important because they're someone. . . [and] 
every living thing is important." Thomas did not even have a reason why they 
are special to him. 

Why would Thomas take the photographs? Thomas has his own special 
friends. In fact, he has the most special friends of any of the boys in the 
house. Jake and his special friends may be Thomas's picture of the 
relationship between a boy and his special friends, a type of relationship that 
Thomas valued. Jake's special friends represent Thomas's special friends. He 
could have waited until later that week to take a picture of his special friends, 
but decided not to wait. On the other hand, Thomas's photographs may be 
similar to Nicholas's photograph of Jake's Gameboy game; Thomas may have 
been trying to please Jake. 

None of the boys took photographs of traditional folk toys or toys of 
their own creation besides Bobby's photograph of his rock collection and 
Francisco's photograph of a feather. Either they did not value the folk toys 
they played with, or they thought the toys were inappropriate. As Simon 
Bronner notes in his article recalling his own favorite folk toy, the Gropper, 
"For several years, Gropper held an honored place among my other toys-cars, 
Teddy Bears, blocks, and soldiers-but at some point I 

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became self-conscious and a bit embarrassed about my fantasy and discarded 
Gropper, bag and baggage" (251). The boys may simply have been ashamed 
of their folk toys, too ashamed to show anyone. Bronner explains, "Yet often 
such creativity eludes the watchful eye of the parent, no less the curator or 
ethnographer. The child commonly keeps the creation private" (251). The 
boys may also have been taking photographs of items that they thought the 
ethnographer would want to see. 

The boys play with their own creations, often alterations of mass-
produced toys, such as action figures without an arm or a head. Bronner 
explains the importance of that type of folk toy—"Such experiences em-
phasized their control, their personalizing of things around them" (264). The 
boys also reused broken toys as if they were brand new-transformational 
toys, as Bronner would call them. They are also observed playing with 
creations of the imagination, such as in the sandbox or turning a stump into 
an action figure's hideout. These acts of autonomy may not be shared easily. 

Children's folk culture may be too private. The boys have very little 
autonomy in the group home setting and may seek to create separate envi-
ronments in their own imagination, environments that may be shared with 
another boy or kept completely to themselves. Although the group home at 
times seems to be overflowing with people, there are times when the boys are 
expected to play by themselves, especially if they are acting out and their 
toys have been confiscated and their socializing limited. 

If any boys were ashamed of the things that were important to them, 
they might not have taken a photograph of it to avoid ridicule. Pollack 
identifies a rigid "boy code" that leads boys of all ages to hold back emotions 
and behaviors for fear of acting feminine (21). While the boys own stuffed 
animals and other toys that could reveal tenderness, thoughtfulness and 
creativity, they might not feel comfortable sharing that side because they feel 
that those items and emotions make them appear weak. They are afraid of 
others' ridicule. Thomas had a pile of Teddy Bears on his bed most of the 
time, but they were only included in a larger picture of his room. Those 
Teddy Bears might not have been masculine enough to be the focus of a 
picture. They might be very important to him, but he could not reveal that 
importance to the other boys. 

One photographic subject most of the boys were not afraid to take a 
picture of was themselves. Everyone except Jerod took a picture or had a 
picture taken of him. Jake, Bobby, Thomas, and Francisco had multiple 
pictures of themselves. Hubbard provides insight into children's photographs 
of themselves. "On more than one occasion we have found that these kids 
carry the photographs of themselves every day to show others. Though they 
didn't take the pictures, the photographs are important none 

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GELWICKS 

theless. They proclaim: 'Here I am, I am real, I am of value' to the rest of the 
world"(Shooting Back from the Reservation xiii). Although the children 
Hubbard writes of are Native American, it is not a stretch to apply their 
feelings to the group-home boys. In many ways the two groups are very 
similar. 

All the boys at Redwood Grove come from environments and life cir-
cumstances that destroy children's self esteem. When they enter the group 
home, staff try to continually remind them of their worth, to build them up 
from their negative self-images. The boys have pictures of their families or 
members of their families to remind them. Those photographs are treasured 
because in some cases those are the only connections they have. People in 
photographs are important, and the pictures the boys took of themselves are 
their way of reaffirming their importance. 

One continual theme throughout the interviews with the boys was how, 
practical the object was. For example, Jerod described his photographs of the 
house, "the house, so we have a place to live in," and the washing machine, 
"the washing machine is important 'cause otherwise we couldn't wash our 
clothes and they would be stinky." Francisco also focused on the practicality 
of things, such as the bus; "I took a picture of the bus because it is kind of 
important. So if we didn't have a car we could go on the bus" and one of the 
staff's cars, "I took a picture of Andre's car cause, well, so we can move 
around quickly and so we don't have to walk or ride the bus and without the 
bus we would have to walk." This method of describing objects reflects the 
lack of importance of the object outside of its practical role. 

The practical descriptions continued when the boys talked about their 
Pokémon toys and cards. Jerod, as well as the other boys, were very involved 
with the collecting of Pokémon cards. Jerod took five pictures of his cards, 
but none of them was of a specific card. When asked why he liked them he 
answered, "Cause I like to trade' em." He identified their importance as 
social. They provided entertainment in trading and prestige in having 
particular cards, but the particular card did not matter. His attitude was 
similar to Francisco's description of a photograph of Jerod's Pokémon toys. 
Francisco's description parallels Jerod's perspective on Pokémon; "These two 
are Charzards and Blastoids in Jerod's room 'cause I really like Pokémon." 
When I asked "Are those toys important to you?" he answered, "The 
Pokémon, not the toys. I don't really care about them." To Francisco the 
symbol of Pokémon was important. Pokémon affected the power relations 
within the house as well as at school, as having cards and games provided 
prestige to the owner. 

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REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 

AFTER THE INTERVIEWS 

The photography project was not finished when I gave the boys their 
flipbooks with their pictures inside. Bobby, who had the least amount of 
pictures turn out, filled his book with other photographs that he had. At first 
he was a little bashful when I asked him to show his book, possibly since he 
thought I might be offended that he had removed all of the pictures I had 
developed for him. He explained who everyone in the pictures was and 
included a short anecdote with a couple of them. All the photographs Bobby 
added were of his family. A week later Bobby had removed almost all of the 
photographs he had taken and replaced them with all the photographs he 
already owned. Though he did not need the space, he may have been 
ashamed of his photography skills since he was unhappy with the way his 
photographs turned out, many of them dark and blurry. Of course it also 
could have been that the photographs he just took were not as important as 
those of his family. 

Nicholas also added to his flipbook, placing his Polaroid of himself on 
Santa's knee at the back of his book. When Jake, the last boy interviewed, 
finished with the interview, he asked in as sweet a voice as I had ever heard 
him use if he could add pictures to his album. The photographs of the 
important material culture and the books I gave them were becoming material 
culture. 

The boys did not demonstrate an overwhelming desire for material 
possessions. The important material items in their lives were physical links 
between themselves and others, symbolic of the connection they shared. 
Material items were also described in practical terms—cupboards holding the 
snacks or Pokémon to be traded. 

The boys' lack of consuming commodity goods reflects their relationship 
to material culture. Outside the occasional pack of Pokémon cards, the boys 
bought very little. They did not have much disposable income, and they had 
very few opportunities to spend the little they had. Also, the uncertainty that 
surrounded their lives included uncertainty about how long they would 
possess a toy. The toys they had when they lived at home were gone. The 
toys they had at the group home were regularly confiscated, creating an 
uncertainty that may have decreased the desire for material possessions. 

CONCLUSION 

This is a case study of the folk culture of preadolescent and early 
adolescent boys living in a total institution. Although these boys live in an 

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GELWICKS 

unusual setting, they use the same-but more intensified versions of strategies 
boys employ in resolving their social and psychological tensions. Their 
folklore develops around common childhood experiences, such as when they 
created the game Pogo, and also around their need to deal with specific group 
home situations, such as when they used Steve's name as an insult in response 
to his inappropriate use of power. 

The folklore sometimes creates the solution, as when the boys use a 
game frame to establish contact with a staff person or another boy, and the 
folklore is sometimes the problem, as in teasing. A game frame enables Jerod 
to establish meaningful relationships when his primary relationships have 
been damaged or destroyed, and the experience of connecting and creating 
those connections is empowering. 

Teasing as folklore goes beyond playfulness and allows the boys to 
subvert the intent of the behavior-chart hierarchy established by the staff. The 
amount of energy and creativity that goes into teasing reveals the importance 
of this form of expression to the boys. 

The boys' photographs of their material culture reveal a continual focus 
on each other and each other's possessions. Certainly, the other boys and their 
toys are a significant part of the material setting of the group home for each 
boy, but the items the boys value are also symbolic. They can be symbols of 
friendship or connection to a more powerful boy. In other instances, the 
important material items themselves symbolize age and power, as with the 
deodorant. 

Studies of children's folklore such as this one can be instructive to adults 
working in children's institutions, revealing unintended consequences and the 
success (or failure) of strategies for modifying and shaping behavior. 
Attempting to see the world through children's eyes enables adults to examine 
the role of friendship groups, teasing, and playing beyond whether the 
behavior is obedient or disruptive. Having an awareness of the anxieties 
children experience, such as in response to the adult imposed behavior chart 
hierarchy, may lead adults to reevaluate and redesign the structure of 
children's institutions. 

NOTE 

I would especially like to thank the boys of the Redwood Grove for their participation, 
energy, and hope, and Professor Jay Mechling for his continued guidance and support. 

WORKS CITED 

Bronner, Simon J. "Material Folk Culture of Children." In Children s Folklore: A 

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REDWOOD GROVE: YOUTH CULTURE IN A GROUP HOME 

Source Book. Ed. Brian Sutton-Smith, et al. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 251-71. 
Cohen, David, and John Eilersten. "Folklore and Folklife in a Juvenile Correc- 
 tions Institution." Western Folklore 44 (1985): 1-22. 
Ewald, Wendy. Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of 
 the Appalachians. London: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1985. 
Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients 
 and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Press, 1959. 
Horan, Robert. "The Semiotics of Play Fighting at a Residential Treatment Cen- 
 ter." Adolescent Psychiatry 15 (1988): 367-81. 
Hubbard, Jim. Shooting Back: A Photographic View of Life by Homeless Chil- 
 dren. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999. 
______. Shooting Back from the Reservation: A Photographic View of Life by 
 Native American Youth. New York: New Press, 1999. 
Levin, Jeffery, ed. Picture LA: Landmarks of a New Generation. Los Angeles, 
 CA: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1994. 
Mechling, Jay. "Children's Folklore in Residential Institutions: Summer Camps, 

Boarding Schools, Hospitals, and Custodial Facilities." In Children’s Folklore: A 
Source Book. Ed. Brian Sutton-Smith et al. Logan: Utah State University Press, 
1999. 273-91. 

Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich. "Space and Place in an Urban Landscape: Learning from 
Children's Views of Their Social Worlds." Visual Sociology 14 (1999): 73-89. 

Pollack, William. Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. 
 New York: Random House, 1988. 
Polsky, Howard W. Cottage Six: The Social System of Delinquent Boys in Resi- 
 dential Treatment. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1962. 
Wagner, Jon. "Editor's Introduction." Visual Sociology 14 (1999): 3-5. 

87 



 

CFS: 2001 ANNUAL MEETING 

President JoAnn Conrad called the breakfast meeting to order at 7:05 AM in 
the Prudhoe Bay Room of the Anchorage Hilton Hotel, Anchorage, Alaska. 
A quorum was present. 

Minutes of the Columbus meeting were approved as published in the 
CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE REVIEW, Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2001. 

REPORTS 

There was only one submission for the OPIE Prize. The Executive Com-
mittee deemed it best to withhold the awarding of the prize for this year. We 
really need to solicit more submissions in the future. 

The AESOP PRIZE Committee (B. Ellis, J. Houpt, J. Conrad) reviewed a 
short list of nominations. The AESOP PRIZE winners were: 

Fiesta Femenina: Celebrating Women in Mexican Folktales 
 Retold by Mary-Joan Gerson, Illustrated by Maya Christina Gonzalez, 
Barefoot Books, 2001. 

Marela the Clever  
Retold by Margaret Read MacDonald, Illustrated by Tim Coffey, Albert 
Whitman and Company, 2001. 

The AESOP ACCOLADE went to: Daisy the Doll by Michael Mendearis 
and Angela Shelf Mendearis, Painting by Larry Johnson, Family Heritage 
Books, Vermont Folklife Center, 2000. 

 Chip Sullivan reported on the Journal: 
A. Multiple copies of the JOURNAL known as the "Hertiage   
       Collection" have been sent to libraries. 

 B. North Carolina has been giving us $2500 per year, but this amount 
          will be cut back to $2,000 per annum due to increasing budget con- 
          straints. 
 C. Perhaps it may be advantageous to go from 2 issues per year to one 

  larger volume. We should also plan putting together a special    
        anniversary issue to commemorate our 25th year. 

           D. An Index for our 25 years would also be appropriate for consider- 
          ation. 

88 



 

Joe Edgette reported the balance in our general fund is $3,522.40. The 
Newell Prize balance is $7,789.86; the OPIE Prize at $2,846.93. 

The cost of the Breakfast this year came to $100 which the membership 
voted be paid from the Section's general fund. We should also consider using 
the Breakfast Meeting as a recruiting tool. 

NEW BUSINESS 

Potential topics for a Children's panel for next year were suggested:  
A. Games and Analysis 
B. Imagery of Children 

-"Rock, Scissors, Paper" 

Next year Jacqueline Thursby will be the Section's President. 

Joe Edgette announced that he will be stepping down as Secretary/Treasurer 
effective with next year's Meeting. 

Margaret MacDonald was elected unanimously as a member to the AESOP 
AWARD Committee. 

The meeting was adjourned at 8:05 AM. 

Respectfully submitted, 

J. Joseph Edgette 
 Secretary 

89 



 

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 

The Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society annually 
offers the W.W. Newell Prize (which includes a cash award) for the best 
student essay on a topic in children's folklore. Students must submit their own 
papers, and published papers are eligible. Instructors are asked to encourage 
students with eligible papers to enter the competition. 

Papers must be typed, double-space, and on white paper. On the first 
page include the author's name, academic address, home address, and tele-
phone numbers. Deadline for each year's competition is September 1st. 
Submit papers or write for more information: Dr. C. W. Sullivan III, English 
Department, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4353. 

The XV International Sociological Association's World Congress of Soci-
ology will be held in Brisbane, Australia, 7-13 July 2002. The ISA Research 
Committee on Sociology of Childhood has organized 11 sessions on various 
aspects of the sociology and culture of childhood. For further information, 
contact RC53 Programme Coordinator Leena Alanen, University of 
Jyvaskyla, Finland. E-mail: lalanen@edu.jvu.fi 

Information about the conference, "Designing Modern Childhoods: Land-
scapes, Buildings, and Material Culture," is now available at the following 
website: http://www.hum.sdu.dk/proiekter/ipfu/designing-childhoods/. The 
conference will be held at the University of California at Berkley, 2-3 May 
2002. 

Sheffield University Press announces the publication of Scared of the Kids? 
Curfews, crime and the regulation of young people (ISBN 0 86339 929 0), an 
examination of the lives of and relationships between young people an adults 
within communities today. A key question the author addresses is, "How 
should those of us working in the community deal with the levels of fear and 
insecurity that exists between the generations?" Telephone: 0114-225-4702. 
fax: 0114-225-4478. E-mail: shupress@shu.ac.uk 

Blackwell Publishers announces the publication of A History of Childhood: 
Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times by 
Colin Heywood. The aim of this book is to place the history of children and 
childhood firmly in its social and cultural context. The author explores the 
changing experiences and perceptions of childhood from the early Middle 
Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century. 

90 



 

The CHILDE website, which is the culmination of the European Commis-
sion funded CHILDE project has now been launched. The site contains, 
among other things, a searchable library of over 1,000 digitised images from 
the project partners collections of historic children's books. The site can be 
viewed at www.bookchilde.org. 

London Play's website is now available at http://www.Londonplay.org.uk. 
Though London focused, the website extends across geographical bound-
aries. 

The Australian Children's Folklore Collection, now a part of the Museum 
Victoria, is available at http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/ and when the site is 
open, type in Australian Children's Folklore in the search box on the left-
hand side. Three sites are listed; the third gives an information sheet about 
the ACFC. 

Barbara Boock announces that Deutsches Volksliedarchiv-Arbeitsstelle für 
internationale Volksliedforschung plans to publish materials from the Col-
lection of Children's Songs in the German Folksong Archives. There is a 
page at the website showing part of the titles in the planned bibliography; the 
address is: www.ruf.uni-freiburg.de/liedarchiv. If you click on "Archiv" you 
find on the page in blue, "Kinderlied," if you click there, you will get the 
Children's Songs page. 

There is an actualized bibliography on children's play, games, and toys in 
North Africa and the Sahara available in English and French on the following 
website: http://www.hh.se/ide/ncfl/Publications.html. 

Laurie Bauer, Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington 
announces that the "three-year project undertaken by Laurie and Winifred 
Bauer from the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Study at 
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has just come to an end. 
The purpose of the project was to find out whether there were different 
dialects discernible in primary school playgrounds in different parts of New 
Zealand. In brief, the research showed that there are three main dialect areas, 
and a great deal of social variation was also demonstrated. As a byproduct of 
the research, quite a lot of material was gathered about children's games and 
chants. A website has been established with almost 1200 pages of working 
documents. . . and . . . a list of paper publications which have resulted from 
the projects. The address is: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/lip." 

91 



 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 

ALAN BERRES is a PhD student in English at Ohio State University. He 
specializes in contemporary legend and belief studies, particularly those 
legends and rumors dealing with Satanism, role-playing games, or gothic 
culture. He has also conducted fieldwork in the Columbus BDSM com-
munity. His dissertation, dealing with the Columbine shooting from the 
perspective of social drama, should be finished by Fall 2003. 

SIMON BRONNER is Interim Director of the School of Humanities and 
Distinguished University Professor of American Studies and Folklore at Penn 
State Harrisburg. He is the author is many books on American folklore and 
cultural history, including titles on youth culture such as American 
Children’s Folklore and Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student 
Life. He is past president of the Children's Folklore Section of the American 
Folklore Society and current president of the Mid-Atlantic American Studies 
Association. He was elected to the Folklore Fellows of the American 
Folklore Society and now serves on the Executive Board of the Society. He 
is the editor of the Material Worlds Series for the University Press of 
Kentucky and the Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series for Penn 
State Press. 

JoANN CONRAD is a folklorist and self-styled cultural critic who teaches 
in the bay area and is on leave for the spring of 2002. She has published on 
the intersection of the category of childhood and folklore in several articles 
and is currently researching racist representations in ordinary objects and 
racist ideologies in American culture. She is also the current president of the 
Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. 

BILL ELLIS is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at 
Penn State Hazleton. He is the author of Raising the Devil: Satanism, New 
Religions, and the Media and Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. 
He has served as president of the Children's Folklore Section and the Folk 
Narrative Section of the American Folklore Society. 

JESSE GELWICKS graduated with honors from the University of 
California, Davis, with a bachelor's degree in American Studies. He currently 
teaches at a minimum-security correctional institution for young men. He 
will attend George Washington University in the fall in pursuit of a master's 
degree in American Studies. 

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CHARLIE MCCORMICK is Assistant Professor of English and 
Communication at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. He studies 
unofficial and informal youth culture (with a particular interest in leisure and 
recreation) as well as rites of passage in the contemporary world. He is 
currently completing a book-length manuscript on adolescent cruising on the 
commercial strip. 

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