April 8, 2026 • 14 mins
If you think Spring Break started with northern college kids heading to Florida to party, you'd be correct. But there's slightly more to it than that.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and everybody else's present in spirit, and this
is stuff you should know, short stuff. Where the boys are?
Is that the song? I think?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
So?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Huh? I always think of that Book of Love song.
I want to be THEO.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
What wait you say yours? I want to hear it.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Oh, I want to be where the boys are? But
I'm not loud. You've not heard that song.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I didn't know lou Reid sang a song like that.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Do I sound like lou Reid? I'll talk about you.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Kind of speak singing, which is lou Reid's deal.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, I do speak sing I can't put my all
into it.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Like, hey, man, like a lot of people have made
great careers out of speak singing.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
No shame, that's right, all right. I might tick you
up on that and become a speak singer, that's right.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I mean that's the gateway to being a white male rapper.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
So just be careful, okay, I will be careful. If
you see me with like three lines cut into my side,
the side of my head, maybe take me out for
some drinks and give me some the talking to.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I've done that accidentally.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Oh I have too, Well, you me did it accidentally
to me, But I'm talking intentional.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Okay, Yeah, all.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Right, so we're talking spring break. That's why you're saying,
can you sing it again? Please? Where the boys are lovely?
That is actually they think where spring break. The American
institution of going to warm places in the spring, usually
from northern universities and getting plastered for a week, came
(01:42):
from a book called what's it called Chuck?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Where the Boys are not bad?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
But okay, we'll speak singing. Uh, you gotta say where
the boys.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Are Okay, I just want to be in your group.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Oh yeah, we could do that. We could do speak
singing barbershop duo, not even a quartet.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, that's a such a great bad idea.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Oh we can also add the slide whistle you got
me too? Is like an extrast thing.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah yeah, I mean that's our only instrument as far
as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, so where the boys are?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
All right? So you mentioned where the boys are a
bunch and that that was sort of the big launching
point for spring Break. But we got to back up
a little bit to some sort of ground laying. I
guess people since the nineteenth century. Apparently, American college students
even way back in the eighteen hundreds would take little
weekend breaks during the spring to like hot springs and
(02:42):
maybe even to the coast to kind of you know,
get themselves right. And in the twentieth century, early in
the twentieth century, the road trip was born, and women colleges,
you know, women only colleges were born, and you pair
those things together, and you're gonna get girls going to boys.
And so all of a sudden, members of the opposite
(03:03):
sex were really hanging out with each other a lot more.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, this is when the fifth met Muffy.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
That's right. And then people started drinking a lot more,
like kind of out in public, Like if you went
to the military at eighteen, like it was okay to
you know, go to a dive bar and get drunk,
but that was kind of frowned upon in college. But
starting you know, around the early nineteen twenties or so,
college kids started drinking.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, that whole jazz age, I'm guessing right. Probably, So
there was an act of nature, a force of nature
that also plays into this pretty prominently, the Great Miami
Hurricane of nineteen twenty six that said try again Miami
and wipe Miami clean, and so the city had to
rebuild into the version we know today. But as a
(03:49):
part of this, the nearby city of Fort Lauderdale was like,
we need to get people back here, so we're going
to do the thing that cities have always done and
still continue to do to attract tourists, and that is
build an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yeah, I think it was more of a novelty at
the time because that was certainly the first one in
Florida in nineteen twenty eight, and not too long after,
like five or six years later, there was a swimming
coach from Colgate University in upstate New York, where it's
very cold, who said, hey, guys, it's very cold and
there aren't a lot of indoor training pools here, so
(04:28):
let's go down to a Florida. They built this wizbang
new pool in Fort Lauderdale. They went down there, they
trained in the spring, and by nineteen thirty eight, the
College Coaches Swim Forum was formed and word had gotten
around that it was like a good place to go train,
which accidentally coincided with an opening of sort of a
younger person's bar called the elbow room.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, in the Sea Breeze Hotel. It sounds like my
kind of place, man, a hotel bar. Love those same.
I don't even drink anymore, and I still love a
good hotel bar.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
They're great.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
So yeah, these college athletes, these swimming, these swim teams
now had a place to be Florida and a place
to party, the elbow Room, And it's just started to
kind of get back that, like, hey, there's this really
fun thing that the swim teams are doing. Other swim
teams kind of took part in this too, and this
idea kind of spread beyond swim teams, college swim teams
(05:23):
to just college students who started to come down to
Fort Lauderdale and droves.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah, like I like to drink, I like to to flirt.
I like to be in the sun.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
I like a farmer's hand.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
That's right. So maybe that's a great place to take
a break. And we'll be right back with where.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
The boys are. Where the boys are.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Want to learn a thing or two from Josh cam Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, shot.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Stop?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yes, uh so, yeah, I guess we're finally at where
the boys are, right, because things have been kind of
picking up steam through the forties and the fifties. But
then in nineteen fifty eight there was an English teacher
from Michigan State University. His name was Glendon Swarthout, and
(06:32):
he said, hey, kids, I want to hang with you.
Let's go down to spring Break. I'm going to follow
you around and I'm just going to write about your escapades.
And apparently it was debaucherous enough and just crazy enough
that he managed to write a book out of like this,
essentially this week in Fort Lauderdale with some of his students,
and the name of that book was Unholy Spring, Unholy Spring,
(06:59):
Unholy Spring.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
That's right, he changed the name to Where the Boys Are.
Of course, the book was a pretty big hit, but
the movie really put it on the map when MGM
put that out not too long after, and that's what
really changed things. All of a sudden, Florida was on
display as like where, well, where the boys are and
where the girls are and what you need to be
doing every spring. And you know, we got some loose
(07:25):
numbers here. I'm sure it's kind of hard to put
great numbers on the nineteen sixty spring Break growth, but
they said that you know, basically tens of thousands of
students started coming after that movie came out, and by
the mid nineteen eighties, like close to four hundred thousand
students were going just to Fort Lauderdale.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Man, in Fort Lauderdale, I mean, it's a city in Florida,
but you had three hundred and fifty thousand extra people
for over the course of like a month. Probably, Like
that's that's an impact.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
For sure, a bad impact at times.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, Like that's the thing. If you trace the history
of spring Break, it's like fun, fun, fun, fun, it's
awful now and then murders and rapes, fun, fun, fun,
fun awful, fun fun fun awful, And from what I
can gather, Chuck, it turns awful when the middle aged
dudes show up. That's when it turns awful because they
should not be there. They have no business being there.
(08:22):
Spring Break is for college kids. When the older dudes
show up, that's when things get dark and bad.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Yeah, although high school kids, I went in too Panama
City in high school, and it was dark and bad
with high school kids. I can assure you of that.
I did too, because I was a good kid at
the time.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I was not a good kid at the time.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Yeah, I mean I was there. I was at those parties,
but uh, you know, I was drinking my apple juice.
I was pretending like I was drinking beer.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Oh really, were you really? That's awesome.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
I was very cringey to look back upon that, but.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I think it's sweet and really charming.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Actually, yeah, I commit that. Now. I'm going to be
fifty five this weekend. All bets are off.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I know, how do you feel? Well?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I feel like I'm fifty three.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
You should have said spring break.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
So spring break is going bad in Florida. In Fort Lauderdale,
the town obviously gets together and this seems to be
sort of the rule and say, all right, we got
to start curbing some drinking laws. The mayor goes on
Good Morning American says you need to start going to
other places, and they did so all of Florida became destinations.
Panama City where I went, like I said, senior year
(09:27):
eighty nine, and then Daytona Beach was another big one,
and Daytona really grew after MTV in nineteen eighty six
started broadcasting live for their MTV spring break party stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yes. The first year in nineteen eighty six they had
live musical performances that was just a part of everyone.
But in that year they had performances by the Beastie
Boys and Starship.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah. I mean who else would you get? What else
goes together better?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
And I bet we can guess what song Starship performed
stare up.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, yeah, and we built the city.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Those are the two that we built the city though,
is what also appears in one of the better Simpsons
episodes where the family goes on spring break and I
really keep singing that song the whole time. That's really
funny and what's cool. I just can't not mention it.
That's the second spring break episode the Simpsons did. The
first one was where Bart and Milhouse and Nelson and
(10:24):
at least one or two other kids like just ran
away and went on spring break and ended up wearing
wigs that they got out of the top of the
sunsphere in Knoxville. And it's a good one.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
That's fun.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Okay, So go watch those two, I think is the
point of this episode.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
That's a takeaway. So spring break's going big in Florida, MTV.
Is there in the eighties and eighty six, like I said,
but before that, in nineteen eighty three, a very key
thing happened right here in the atl when some black
college students got together. And we have some great historical
black colleges and universities here in Atlanta, and not all
(10:59):
of them went somewhere else for spring break. So one
year and eighty three they got together and said, hey,
we're stuck here on campus. Let's have a big picnic
and a big party. This is coming off of you know,
the song La Freak by Chic a few years earlier,
and of course the song super freakd from Rick James
was big and it was a picnic, so they called
it Freaknick. And Freaknick became a huge mangus deal in
(11:23):
Atlanta and with people coming from all over the country
and world even but it blew up Atlanta for about
a decade or so.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of people, ostensibly black college
students mostly just came to Atlanta and shut the town
down because the main thing of Freaknick was cruising right,
and you just all of a sudden had an extra
few hundred thousand cars on the main drags throughout Atlanta,
(11:54):
and like it would take you hours to get places
that it should take you ten fifteen minutes because there
were so many cars just stopped in the middle of
the road. That was Freaknick. It was nuts.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, I mean people started saying home and you know,
white people were terrified because there were black young black
people having a lot of fun out in the streets,
and the incidents of crime were here and there, but
nothing like it was being portrayed in the news as
like this sort of you know, lawless situation happening. There's
a great documentary that I can't recommend enough that was
(12:29):
out a couple of years ago on Hulu called Freaknick
The Wildest Party. Never told that Atlanta's own germane to
pre produce. But it's it's great. How they recommend watching it.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, I think it actually did start to get pretty
dark in the in the final years. It did, but
and again because middle aged dude showed up. But one
thing you can do if you want to crack down
on spring break is make one or two new laws
and it'll completely choke the life out of it. For Freaknick,
they passed a lot about cruising and like that basically
(13:02):
broke it up because that was the point of freaknik.
Panama City Beach where we both went for spring break.
That was for a very long time that accepted the
spillover from Fort Lauderdale and became a spring break mecca
in and of itself. And in twenty fifteen it got
really bad. There was like a it was just I
(13:22):
think it was like how it normally was, but just
some really ugly stuff got out on social media. There
was a girl who was unconscious and sexually assaulted and
there was a video of that that made its round.
Eight people were shot in one house at one point.
So Panama City got some really bad rep right then,
and they did something about it. They said you can't
(13:43):
drink on the beach anymore, and that was that took
care of it from that point on.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yeah, there's still a band, it's only in March, which
is generally when spring break is ours is in April,
but there it usually is in March. So yeah, that
kind of did away with it, and you know, that's
kind of deal with spring break. There are definitely a
lot of universities now that do alternative things, like programs
where you can say, like hey, don't go out and
just get drunk on the beach, Like, go volunteer for
(14:10):
Habitat for Humanity and they're a collegiate challenge, or you know,
go work for HIV advocacy. So plenty of other options
besides the traditional spring break for sure.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
For sure. But yes, no matter what you're doing, whether
it's working for Habitat for Humanity or you're you know,
staggering around Fort Lauderdale every ten twelve minutes, you have
to shout spring break. That's right. Short stuff? Is that.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Stuff you should know? Is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and everybody else's present in spirit, and this
is stuff you should know, short stuff. Where the boys are?
Is that the song? I think?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
So?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Huh? I always think of that Book of Love song.
I want to be THEO.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
What wait you say yours? I want to hear it.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Oh, I want to be where the boys are? But
I'm not loud. You've not heard that song.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I didn't know lou Reid sang a song like that.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Do I sound like lou Reid? I'll talk about you.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Kind of speak singing, which is lou Reid's deal.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, I do speak sing I can't put my all
into it.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Like, hey, man, like a lot of people have made
great careers out of speak singing.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
No shame, that's right, all right. I might tick you
up on that and become a speak singer, that's right.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I mean that's the gateway to being a white male rapper.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
So just be careful, okay, I will be careful. If
you see me with like three lines cut into my side,
the side of my head, maybe take me out for
some drinks and give me some the talking to.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I've done that accidentally.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Oh I have too, Well, you me did it accidentally
to me, But I'm talking intentional.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Okay, Yeah, all.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Right, so we're talking spring break. That's why you're saying,
can you sing it again? Please? Where the boys are lovely?
That is actually they think where spring break. The American
institution of going to warm places in the spring, usually
from northern universities and getting plastered for a week, came
(01:42):
from a book called what's it called Chuck?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Where the Boys are not bad?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
But okay, we'll speak singing. Uh, you gotta say where
the boys.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Are Okay, I just want to be in your group.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Oh yeah, we could do that. We could do speak
singing barbershop duo, not even a quartet.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, that's a such a great bad idea.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Oh we can also add the slide whistle you got
me too? Is like an extrast thing.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah yeah, I mean that's our only instrument as far
as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, so where the boys are?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
All right? So you mentioned where the boys are a
bunch and that that was sort of the big launching
point for spring Break. But we got to back up
a little bit to some sort of ground laying. I
guess people since the nineteenth century. Apparently, American college students
even way back in the eighteen hundreds would take little
weekend breaks during the spring to like hot springs and
(02:42):
maybe even to the coast to kind of you know,
get themselves right. And in the twentieth century, early in
the twentieth century, the road trip was born, and women colleges,
you know, women only colleges were born, and you pair
those things together, and you're gonna get girls going to boys.
And so all of a sudden, members of the opposite
(03:03):
sex were really hanging out with each other a lot more.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, this is when the fifth met Muffy.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
That's right. And then people started drinking a lot more,
like kind of out in public, Like if you went
to the military at eighteen, like it was okay to
you know, go to a dive bar and get drunk,
but that was kind of frowned upon in college. But
starting you know, around the early nineteen twenties or so,
college kids started drinking.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, that whole jazz age, I'm guessing right. Probably, So
there was an act of nature, a force of nature
that also plays into this pretty prominently, the Great Miami
Hurricane of nineteen twenty six that said try again Miami
and wipe Miami clean, and so the city had to
rebuild into the version we know today. But as a
(03:49):
part of this, the nearby city of Fort Lauderdale was like,
we need to get people back here, so we're going
to do the thing that cities have always done and
still continue to do to attract tourists, and that is
build an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yeah, I think it was more of a novelty at
the time because that was certainly the first one in
Florida in nineteen twenty eight, and not too long after,
like five or six years later, there was a swimming
coach from Colgate University in upstate New York, where it's
very cold, who said, hey, guys, it's very cold and
there aren't a lot of indoor training pools here, so
(04:28):
let's go down to a Florida. They built this wizbang
new pool in Fort Lauderdale. They went down there, they
trained in the spring, and by nineteen thirty eight, the
College Coaches Swim Forum was formed and word had gotten
around that it was like a good place to go train,
which accidentally coincided with an opening of sort of a
younger person's bar called the elbow room.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, in the Sea Breeze Hotel. It sounds like my
kind of place, man, a hotel bar. Love those same.
I don't even drink anymore, and I still love a
good hotel bar.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
They're great.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
So yeah, these college athletes, these swimming, these swim teams
now had a place to be Florida and a place
to party, the elbow Room, And it's just started to
kind of get back that, like, hey, there's this really
fun thing that the swim teams are doing. Other swim
teams kind of took part in this too, and this
idea kind of spread beyond swim teams, college swim teams
(05:23):
to just college students who started to come down to
Fort Lauderdale and droves.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah, like I like to drink, I like to to flirt.
I like to be in the sun.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
I like a farmer's hand.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
That's right. So maybe that's a great place to take
a break. And we'll be right back with where.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
The boys are. Where the boys are.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Want to learn a thing or two from Josh cam Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, shot.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Stop?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yes, uh so, yeah, I guess we're finally at where
the boys are, right, because things have been kind of
picking up steam through the forties and the fifties. But
then in nineteen fifty eight there was an English teacher
from Michigan State University. His name was Glendon Swarthout, and
(06:32):
he said, hey, kids, I want to hang with you.
Let's go down to spring Break. I'm going to follow
you around and I'm just going to write about your escapades.
And apparently it was debaucherous enough and just crazy enough
that he managed to write a book out of like this,
essentially this week in Fort Lauderdale with some of his students,
and the name of that book was Unholy Spring, Unholy Spring,
(06:59):
Unholy Spring.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
That's right, he changed the name to Where the Boys Are.
Of course, the book was a pretty big hit, but
the movie really put it on the map when MGM
put that out not too long after, and that's what
really changed things. All of a sudden, Florida was on
display as like where, well, where the boys are and
where the girls are and what you need to be
doing every spring. And you know, we got some loose
(07:25):
numbers here. I'm sure it's kind of hard to put
great numbers on the nineteen sixty spring Break growth, but
they said that you know, basically tens of thousands of
students started coming after that movie came out, and by
the mid nineteen eighties, like close to four hundred thousand
students were going just to Fort Lauderdale.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Man, in Fort Lauderdale, I mean, it's a city in Florida,
but you had three hundred and fifty thousand extra people
for over the course of like a month. Probably, Like
that's that's an impact.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
For sure, a bad impact at times.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, Like that's the thing. If you trace the history
of spring Break, it's like fun, fun, fun, fun, it's
awful now and then murders and rapes, fun, fun, fun,
fun awful, fun fun fun awful, And from what I
can gather, Chuck, it turns awful when the middle aged
dudes show up. That's when it turns awful because they
should not be there. They have no business being there.
(08:22):
Spring Break is for college kids. When the older dudes
show up, that's when things get dark and bad.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Yeah, although high school kids, I went in too Panama
City in high school, and it was dark and bad
with high school kids. I can assure you of that.
I did too, because I was a good kid at
the time.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I was not a good kid at the time.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Yeah, I mean I was there. I was at those parties,
but uh, you know, I was drinking my apple juice.
I was pretending like I was drinking beer.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Oh really, were you really? That's awesome.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
I was very cringey to look back upon that, but.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I think it's sweet and really charming.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Actually, yeah, I commit that. Now. I'm going to be
fifty five this weekend. All bets are off.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I know, how do you feel? Well?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I feel like I'm fifty three.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
You should have said spring break.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
So spring break is going bad in Florida. In Fort Lauderdale,
the town obviously gets together and this seems to be
sort of the rule and say, all right, we got
to start curbing some drinking laws. The mayor goes on
Good Morning American says you need to start going to
other places, and they did so all of Florida became destinations.
Panama City where I went, like I said, senior year
(09:27):
eighty nine, and then Daytona Beach was another big one,
and Daytona really grew after MTV in nineteen eighty six
started broadcasting live for their MTV spring break party stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yes. The first year in nineteen eighty six they had
live musical performances that was just a part of everyone.
But in that year they had performances by the Beastie
Boys and Starship.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah. I mean who else would you get? What else
goes together better?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
And I bet we can guess what song Starship performed
stare up.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, yeah, and we built the city.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Those are the two that we built the city though,
is what also appears in one of the better Simpsons
episodes where the family goes on spring break and I
really keep singing that song the whole time. That's really
funny and what's cool. I just can't not mention it.
That's the second spring break episode the Simpsons did. The
first one was where Bart and Milhouse and Nelson and
(10:24):
at least one or two other kids like just ran
away and went on spring break and ended up wearing
wigs that they got out of the top of the
sunsphere in Knoxville. And it's a good one.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
That's fun.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Okay, So go watch those two, I think is the
point of this episode.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
That's a takeaway. So spring break's going big in Florida, MTV.
Is there in the eighties and eighty six, like I said,
but before that, in nineteen eighty three, a very key
thing happened right here in the atl when some black
college students got together. And we have some great historical
black colleges and universities here in Atlanta, and not all
(10:59):
of them went somewhere else for spring break. So one
year and eighty three they got together and said, hey,
we're stuck here on campus. Let's have a big picnic
and a big party. This is coming off of you know,
the song La Freak by Chic a few years earlier,
and of course the song super freakd from Rick James
was big and it was a picnic, so they called
it Freaknick. And Freaknick became a huge mangus deal in
(11:23):
Atlanta and with people coming from all over the country
and world even but it blew up Atlanta for about
a decade or so.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of people, ostensibly black college
students mostly just came to Atlanta and shut the town
down because the main thing of Freaknick was cruising right,
and you just all of a sudden had an extra
few hundred thousand cars on the main drags throughout Atlanta,
(11:54):
and like it would take you hours to get places
that it should take you ten fifteen minutes because there
were so many cars just stopped in the middle of
the road. That was Freaknick. It was nuts.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, I mean people started saying home and you know,
white people were terrified because there were black young black
people having a lot of fun out in the streets,
and the incidents of crime were here and there, but
nothing like it was being portrayed in the news as
like this sort of you know, lawless situation happening. There's
a great documentary that I can't recommend enough that was
(12:29):
out a couple of years ago on Hulu called Freaknick
The Wildest Party. Never told that Atlanta's own germane to
pre produce. But it's it's great. How they recommend watching it.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, I think it actually did start to get pretty
dark in the in the final years. It did, but
and again because middle aged dude showed up. But one
thing you can do if you want to crack down
on spring break is make one or two new laws
and it'll completely choke the life out of it. For Freaknick,
they passed a lot about cruising and like that basically
(13:02):
broke it up because that was the point of freaknik.
Panama City Beach where we both went for spring break.
That was for a very long time that accepted the
spillover from Fort Lauderdale and became a spring break mecca
in and of itself. And in twenty fifteen it got
really bad. There was like a it was just I
(13:22):
think it was like how it normally was, but just
some really ugly stuff got out on social media. There
was a girl who was unconscious and sexually assaulted and
there was a video of that that made its round.
Eight people were shot in one house at one point.
So Panama City got some really bad rep right then,
and they did something about it. They said you can't
(13:43):
drink on the beach anymore, and that was that took
care of it from that point on.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yeah, there's still a band, it's only in March, which
is generally when spring break is ours is in April,
but there it usually is in March. So yeah, that
kind of did away with it, and you know, that's
kind of deal with spring break. There are definitely a
lot of universities now that do alternative things, like programs
where you can say, like hey, don't go out and
just get drunk on the beach, Like, go volunteer for
(14:10):
Habitat for Humanity and they're a collegiate challenge, or you know,
go work for HIV advocacy. So plenty of other options
besides the traditional spring break for sure.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
For sure. But yes, no matter what you're doing, whether
it's working for Habitat for Humanity or you're you know,
staggering around Fort Lauderdale every ten twelve minutes, you have
to shout spring break. That's right. Short stuff? Is that.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Stuff you should know? Is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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