March 11, 2019 • 26 mins
The origin of spring break dates back to a Colgate University swim coach, and Fort Lauderdale was the first spring break capitol. Tune in to learn more about spring break, along with the relationship between spring break and sexual health.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, this is Annie, and you're listening to stuff I'll
never told you. Spring has sprung here in the United
States kind of as as I record this, yesterday was
(00:27):
spring forward, which I detest with the passion, but you
know that's me. Um and this also means it's time
for students to flock south or to coast around the
States for the annual migration that is spring break. Now,
I never did spring break successfully. In heavy quotes, I
(00:48):
somehow is never around during that time, I would I
would say I was doing arguably more enjoyable things for
me personally, Like I took my first trip to Europe
for school, um and, which was my first time on
a plane, I remember. But I only managed to do
the the beach spring break thing once um and there
was a cold snap so there was no swimming to
(01:09):
be had. We, like all, stayed indoors. We did get
matching airbrush spring Breake shirts, which I occasionally busted out.
Another popular thing to do for spring break where I'm
from is to go to Savannah for St. Patrick's Say Parade.
It usually happens around the same time and if you've
never been never heard of it. It is a party.
It is a huge party. My best friends did it
(01:31):
every year in high school. UM. I only made it
once and it was to march in the parade, so
again not really spring breaking it. I did later go
in college and I don't really have time to go
into the story. Now. It's a good one. Uh. It
involves the board games, Fatigo, a failed account of Billy
Buddy system, and dead cell phones. Um. And one year
(01:54):
I was away working or or something, UM, and my
friends may a cardboard cutout of my head called it
the Spirit of Annie, and it appeared in all of
their pictures and they tagged me and all of their
pictures because I was there in spirit. Anyway, for those
of you who are planning your spring break, we hope
(02:16):
that you have a fun, safe one. UM, take care
of yourselves, and here are some history facts to annoy
your friends with on the trip. Welcome to Stuff Mom
Never told you from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
(02:37):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. Kristen,
if I had asked you a week ago what you
thought were the origins of spring break, what would have
been your guests? Someone had a hose and someone was
wearing what a T shirt what T shirt contest? Maybe
And yeah, someone ran through a sprinkler on a beach
(02:59):
some and someone was serving jello and accidentally like whoops,
and lazy poured a lot of vodka into it. I
like it that that's creative, but it's not at all
close to the origins of spring break in real life.
Not not a bunch of just happenstance mistakes that lead
to drunkenness and and wet T shirts. Not a series
of happy accident more like one happy accident. And then
(03:23):
once upon a time, we had the Casino Pool in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And so backing up a little bit,
I'm getting ahead of myself. It was cold up at
Colgate University, and the swim coach did not want his
students to get out of shape over Christmas break. So
one of his students father, suggested that the team come
down to Fort Lauderdale and practice at the Casino Pool,
(03:45):
which was the first Olympic sized pool in Florida. It
had been built in the nineteen twenties, and so he did. So.
All these swimmers come down to Fort Lauderdale, and they're
enjoying the warm weather and the warm welcome, and as
it tends to do, we're spread among college students that
this was a cool thing to do, and the spring
break was born. And this is in nineteen thirty six
(04:08):
that Ingram first springs that Colgate University swim team down.
I had no idea that spring break. Yeah, in the thirties,
even though some might say that, hey, you know, the
idea of a spring celebration can be traced back to
Greek and Roman times with the bacchanals and the changing
of the seasons and it's getting warm, let's pour a
(04:30):
bunch of wine, um and but really in the United
States it started more in the thirties. Although once you
have kids going off to college men and women, and
the advent of the car and the road trip, then
you start to get kids getting a little frisky when
they have some time off from school. But the idea
(04:51):
of spring break and this whole let's go to the
beach and have a real good time starts all because
of Fort Lauderdale, this casino pool and Sam Ingram, who
was yeah, really really concerned about his swift but all
that Christmas ham he was worried that they would get
little swimmers cuts. So yeah, in six he brought the
(05:13):
team down and by eight more than three hundred swimmers
were competing in the College Coaches Swim Forum at this
casino pool, and according to The New York Times, A
buchan All was born. Yeah, the first mention of spring
Break in Time magazine happened in nineteen fifty nine, I believe,
(05:36):
where one of the revelers commented, it's not that we
drink so much. It's just that we drink beer all
the time, right, so keep it going. So little has
changed since those early days. And then in nineteen sixty
spring break really enters into mainstream culture with the Hollywood
production Where the Boys Are, which is a movie based
(06:00):
on a book by the same name starring George Hamilton's
that uh star of Yesteryear who was always so dann,
always so damn. I think I have a purse the
color of George Hamilton. That's actually the color. It's George
Hamilton's Hamilton um. And it's about these four midwestern college
girls who spend their spring break in where else, Fort Lauderdale,
(06:23):
the first capital of spring break. And I like how
the plot line revolves around all of their different ideas
of premarital sex, like the main character sort of the
headstrong feminist who's like prematal sex and say okay by me,
And then she meets George Hamilton's She's like, I could
have premarital sex with George Hamilton's. But then the moral
(06:44):
of the story in this nineteen sixty film is that
she doesn't have to do it before she's ready, right,
And that is the moral of spring Break as well.
Um And by the seventies, this is according to Time
Magazine's Brief History of spring Break, which is very interesting
and tells me all sorts of things that I had
no idea about. But they say that by the seventies
things started to get a little raunchier. There was a
(07:06):
lot of gratuitous p d A and balcony diving, which
is when kids would jump from one balcony to the
other to try to get to people's rooms. And there's
actually a study out there about spring break syndrome, which
is referring to the number of accidental free fall injuries
in the spring Break atmosphere and how they're different from like,
let's say, a side impact injury of a car wreck.
(07:29):
So all these kids getting drunk and jumping from balcony
to balcony, a term was coined that reminds me of
yoga drop foot. It's from the from the yoga episode
where very specific injury um And then by nine more
than three hundred and seventy thousand students were heading to
Fort Lauderdale every year for spring break and things were
(07:53):
getting out of control. The mayor of Fort Lauderdale started
freaking out about it. Police started freaking out. In seventies,
there were a number of arrests that were happening every
year on the beach because kids were getting out of hand.
A lot of spring break syndrome spreading everywhere. People not
falling off of balconies, but just just falling rights, other
(08:14):
types of spring break syndromes. And you mentioned the mayor,
he actually went on Good Morning America to publicly state
that students were not welcome in his town anymore. And
a former city commissioner, Robert Cox, told The New York
Times that the commission voted to purchase a riot tank
with a water cannon to counteract any potential student rampages.
And he didn't stop there. Not only did he buy
(08:36):
a freaking riot tank, but when he became mayor, streets
were reconfigured to discourage cruising, and high end hotels and
restaurants replaced the lower end student attracting dive bars and things.
So the thing that I was expecting with this idea
of talking about spring break for a podcast was that
it would start, I don't know, in the in the
(08:58):
eighties or the nineties. It's something a product of MTV
because growing up, MTV always had their televised spring Break
weeks and it was a lot of you know, bands
and drinking and wet t shirt contests. But the fact
of the matter is that ever since large groups of
(09:18):
college kids have gathered in a warm locale since the
late nineteen thirties, trouble has ensued. It's all swimmers, faults,
It's darn Northern swimmers. But MTV does play a role
in this. In nineteen eighties six MTVS spring Break debuted
in beautiful Daytona Beach, not Fort Lauderdown. And I think
(09:41):
this is a really good example of popular culture feeding
what goes into the media, which then feeds back into
popular culture. And MTV Vice president Doug Hertzog said that
spring Break is a youth culture event. We wanted to
be a part of it. For that reason, it makes
good sense for us to come down and go live
from the center of it, because obviously the people there
(10:01):
are the kinds of people who watch HMTV, so it's
a cycle. Like he saw these young people doing all
these crazy things and thought, yes, we need to be
a part of that. We need to put it on
TV to get more people watching it to boost our ratings.
And then the more people who watch MTV spring Break,
the more people go down to MTV spring Break, right
because it cements this idea in our our young and
(10:23):
impressionable minds, said Hey, you know, for that one week
in March or April, that's what we're supposed to do,
black out every night on the jello shot. Not like
what I did my freshman year of college, which was
go to New York City in March. It was freezing
and at the same time that I went to New
York City with my friends. I don't know why I'm
pointing down, New York City is up anyway, When I
(10:46):
went to New York City and it was freezing, and
I was wearing sweaters and standing in line to see
Conan O'Brien, my roommate went to Florida, and one a
wet t shirt contest, which I think illustrates different perspectives
very well. The only spring break that I can remember
making into some kind of occasion during college because I
(11:06):
was I was probably working most spring breaks. UM was
one beach trip that my friends and I took camping
down on St. Augustine. But the way the timing of
spring break was in early early March, and it was
still cold, and I remember going out there sitting on
the beach with my swimsuit on but wrapped up in
(11:29):
the top towel, determined to have some fun in the
freezing cold sun. And there was these wind gusts would
kick up and just blow sand all over us, and
uh and I went home a day early. Yeah. I
had a similar experience when I was in middle school.
Every year I went to my aunt and uncle's house
in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Same thing. I actually got
(11:50):
bronchitis one year because it was so cold, but I
was determined to go in the pool. I am going
to have fun. And yet again we din ourselves into
comics from a young age. Not on a more serious note,
(12:15):
we do have to address the riskier behavior that does
tend to go hand in hand with these spring break romps. Yeah.
A two thousand and six study in the Annals of
Tourism Research found that students appear to participate in risk
your behaviors in the spring break environment then at home.
And this sounds like a no brainer. I mean, if
(12:36):
you've ever been to spring breaker, won't watch spring break
shows on MTV, you know that people are acting kind
of crazy. Um. But they look at why this is
happening and they found that it's your personal normative beliefs
and situational expectations that predict your intentions to binge, drink
and take part in it while you're on spring break.
(12:56):
So basically it's that thing of saying, Hey, you know
what I'm going on spring break. I've seen what spring
break looks like. Um on MTV And in the nineteen
sixty film where the boys are starring George Hamilton's and
I am expecting to go down and have a party
filled weekend and I'm just gonna go bonkers, right, And similarly,
(13:16):
intentions for casual sex were predicted by attitudes again personal
normative beliefs and expectations, but the actual engagement in casual
sex was predicted by prior experience with it, So you
might go down thinking like, oh, yeah, I'm going to
have all of this crazy spring break sex and drinking,
and then your actual actions might not measure up exactly.
(13:39):
And then the most disconcerting finding from this two thousand
six study was that a majority of students who did
in fact engage in sexual activity rarely or never used
condoms during spring break. Yeah, that is scary. That's a
lot of unprotected sex happening with a lot of possibly
intoxicated people. But speaking of numbers, let's put some sentages
(14:00):
around how many what proportion of students are having sex?
This is a little bit dated. A n study of
Canadian students from the Journal of Sex Research I found
that not too surprisingly, more men than women intended to
have casual sex on spring break. But when the numbers
all shook out, the percentages of guys and gals who
(14:24):
actually did it pretty similar fifteen percent of men and
of women. So maybe the casual sex not as rampant
as we think could be. Maybe people are just talking
it up. Yeah, And one thing that researchers looked at
in a in a two thousand and six study from
the Journal of Studies on Alcohol was comparing springbreak behavior
(14:44):
to normal behavior, because it could be that people are
never drinking during the year and going crazy on spring break,
or that they're drinking all the time and it just
continues when they go on vacation. And so they conducted
phone interviews with one hundred and seventy six freshmen students
over ten weeks to learn about their typical behaviors and
found that the people who drank more during the regular
(15:05):
semester are men, members of fraternities and sororities, students on
spring break, and those with higher fun social expectancies, so
the people who are just expecting to have a better,
more wild time in college. And they found that alcohol
used did not actually increase during spring break in general,
(15:25):
but spring break travelers increased their alcohol use during springbreak.
So is the binge week It was the wake up
crack of beer instead of having coffee right and just
go until you can't go no more. And that finding
echoes the quote that you said earlier from time about
it's not that we drink so much that we drink
all the time. That's from nineteen nine. Well, and now
(15:46):
that there's the whole thing of leaving the US going
to destinations like Cancoon where the drinking ages eighteen to
make it even easier, and then you go to an
all inclusive resort and it's just fountains of mimosas and
hurricane panes. That is quite a bachan all. Yes. So,
now that we've covered the risks and established the fact that, yes, indeed,
(16:09):
a lot of alcohol is consumed on spring break and
has been since the dawn of spring break, let's talk
about the business and of this, right, because all of
this alcohol consumption and hotel stays and restaurant eating, well
not eating of restaurants, but eating at restaurants, just to clarify,
although some of those drunk students probably have attempted to
(16:30):
eat a restaurant shoot on a on a restaurant. Um. Yes,
so this means that business is booming in these springbreak towns.
And according to the Houston Chronicle on March eighteenth, hotel
bookings for Texas Week, which I've never heard of, but
I guess it's the big spring break event of Texas
of Texas which ran from March eleven to see, um,
(16:52):
we're at capacity. According to the special event coordinator for
the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau. I really
know someone who spent spring break in South Padre Island
and I did not look at her pictures because I
just think they'd be crazy. And apparently South Padre Island
is popping. And it's interesting, Caroline that you mentioned that
(17:13):
you did not choose to look at her pictures, which
I'm assuming we're posted on the social network called Facebook.
Because social media supposedly is tamping down on the spring
break fund. These college students who have largely grown up
with social media are so aware of how easily they
(17:36):
can be caught and broadcast doing things such as wet
t shirt contests and jello shots, that they aren't partying
as hard as they used to be. We'll see. Yeah,
The New York Times identifies this as a trend, but
I question how much of a trend it actually is.
It might just it might just be a part of
these kids lives now because Facebook is everything on Facebook
(17:58):
and the internet is I mean, it's just so prevalent
and it's all intertwined, and it might just be more
of an attitude that they have now, like Okay, well,
I'm still going to go down and have fun. I
just don't want people taking pictures of me so that
potential employers will see them, you know, because I feel
like when I was in college facebook uh or I
got on Facebook in two thousand four, which was my
(18:19):
sophomore year of college, so I still wasn't even for
the rest of college. I wasn't thinking about like, oh
my gosh, someone's gonna see a picture of me holding
a beer and I'm going to lose a job. But
maybe it's just so prevalent now that kids are are
really worried about it. And one year old bartender is
quoted in the story is saying that the students she
sees are very prudish and that ten years ago people
(18:39):
were doing filthy, filthy things, but it wasn't posted on Facebook.
So there's a little bit of nostalgia from a year old.
In a commentary about that New York Times trend Peace,
the blog Jezebel also brings up this issue of whether
or not women women are being more slut shamed into
sort of tamping down on their crew easier spring break activity,
(19:01):
because you also have to remember the out of spring
break culture we have the whole girl's Gone wild culture
of filming pretty young women who are usually pretty intoxicated,
doing some pretty sexy types of things. Right. And I mean,
I think I've told you this before, Kristen, But my
(19:22):
dad's only advice to me when I was going to
college was don't let me see you want commercial at
three in the morning. So it is a concern out
there that our young ladies, are young college ladies, will
end up victims of girls gone wild. But this, the
whole social media thing, really isn't killing spring break revelry.
I mean, plenty of people are still going. And all
(19:42):
these articles coming out of Florida this month reporting on
the spring break craziness down there basically said that hotel
occupancy is up in spite of the recession. It's incredible.
I saw on I think it was from U S
News and World Report the average college student will spend
a level a hundred dollars on a spring break getaway. Right.
(20:03):
This is in a recession economy. I couldn't even do
that before the recession when I was in college. The
Sun sentinelow March twelve reported that the Greater Fort Lauderdale
Convention and Visitors Bureau expected about one million visitors to
Broward County alone, and those one million visitors were expected
to spend oh, I don't know, just about a billion dollars.
(20:25):
So even though they're all these towns in Florida who
back in the eighties were like, enough, we don't want
to be that kind of town. We don't want to
have a week long disruption in our lives, they're finding
ways to still attract and draw visitors, but just hoping
that it's not the same like craziness that was so
common in the eighties, not all that spring break syndrome
(20:45):
and balcony hopping spreading around, right, because they're actually attracting
a lot of not just college students, but some of
the hotel people that they talked to for this article
were saying that there were a lot of convention people
and families to go down to the beach for spring break.
So there's a mix. Although I would not want to
be a family staying in a hotel with a bunch
of springbreak college kids. I would try to stay somewhere else. Yeah,
(21:07):
I mean, that's got to be part of the give
and take of of being a tourism driven city. Um,
but we've been talking all about this debauchery that goes
along with springbreak, because I think that we can pretty
conclusively say that the history of springbreak has been kids
getting in cars and planes and going to a hot
location to drink alcohol swimmers. But there's also been the
(21:30):
more recent rise of alternative spring breaks, which is great.
There are new options for going and using your time
to improve the world in a way, whether that's doing
um clean up after Hurricane Katrina, or going to more
remote location to do some kind of humanitarian outreach, educating yourself,
(21:52):
doing outward bound trips. Right and there's Breakaway, which is
a nonprofit that provides training to colleges universe of these
and other nonprofits interested in creating lifelong active citizens according
to their website. And so this is for people who, yeah,
who want to participate in things like Habitat for Humanity
and help build houses and things like that on spring
break and help better their community or you know, a
(22:15):
far away community if they so choose, instead of going
and getting drunk. Right now, let's say that the alternative
spring break is probably one of the most positive outcomes
of springbreak. Not to say that when I was in college,
I did not look forward to having that week off,
and maybe I did walk into this podcast a little
bitter that I don't still have that time off because
(22:37):
I have friends who are now getting their masters, are
there in law school, and this is the time when
they're all going on spring break. Now I almost forget
what springbreak was like. It must have been so nice
for me to not do homework for a week, be
able to sleep late shivering in New York City. That
was only one year. I honestly don't remember what I
(22:58):
did for springbreak for the rest college. So I hope
that listeners will consider this our kind of spring break
give to ourselves. Just just a fun little podcast trying
to figure out where the strange bakan all came from.
And it really just came from that son and alcohol
and cheap airfare and George Hamilton's and my purse. So
(23:21):
please tell us about what you did or currently do
during spring break, uh in college, if you went wilder,
if you maybe did some alternative spring break stuff. Mom
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can send
those letters. And we've got a couple of letters here
to share from our episode on women's wrestling, And this
(23:52):
first one is from Andrew, who is a big fan
of professional wrestling, and he writes in recent years, ww
use hiring policy of women has been to hire models
and train them to wrestle. Usually this sends up poorly
in the matches are train wrecks. However, ww E has
hired some women who are very talented who started out
on the independent wrestling scene, trained by themselves because they
(24:15):
loved what they did. Beth Phoenix, Na Tayler, need Heart
and Karma and w w E are good examples. Some
of the models even took to wrestling well, like Eve Torres,
who trains in Brazilian jiu jitsu. The independent scene has
a vast array of talent, such as Sarah del Ray,
cheerleader Melissa and Mischief, whose day job consists of being
(24:35):
a microbiologist. If you want to check out a promotion
in the U s as talented female wrestlers, check out
the Shimmer promotion, as the promotion is based more off
the wrestling than sex appeal. So thanks for that insight
on women and wrestling, Andrew. Okay, this is from Shane.
He has some thoughts to share in wrestling as well.
UM I can get behind the mixed wrestling at the
(24:56):
college level and I can get behind more opportunities for
girls wrestling at the high school level. I don't think
I can get behind mixed wrestling at the high school level.
And here is why. High school is a time when
boys and girls are learning appropriate behavior in relation to sexuality.
It is also a time when hormones are running wild.
While listening to your podcast, I tried to think about
what it was like for me when I was in
high school. Wrestling with a girl would have posed some
(25:18):
awkward problems. This sort of a situation is just asking
for an unintended sexual harassment suit, not to mention the
social stress associated. So thanks, that makes sense. I can
see how there could be some some awkwardness on that.
In that tiny, tiny ring or Matt on the mat,
(25:39):
I would say ring from Matt, you're thinking of w
w E kids wrestling in the de WWI also would
be it's weird deceive. Okay. Well. Mom Stuff at Discovery
dot Com is where you can send your letters. You
can also find us on Facebook, leave a comment there
like us if you'd like to, and you can follow
us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. You can also
(26:01):
check out what we're doing during the week on our website,
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app
has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.
Hey, this is Annie, and you're listening to stuff I'll
never told you. Spring has sprung here in the United
States kind of as as I record this, yesterday was
(00:27):
spring forward, which I detest with the passion, but you
know that's me. Um and this also means it's time
for students to flock south or to coast around the
States for the annual migration that is spring break. Now,
I never did spring break successfully. In heavy quotes, I
(00:48):
somehow is never around during that time, I would I
would say I was doing arguably more enjoyable things for
me personally, Like I took my first trip to Europe
for school, um and, which was my first time on
a plane, I remember. But I only managed to do
the the beach spring break thing once um and there
was a cold snap so there was no swimming to
(01:09):
be had. We, like all, stayed indoors. We did get
matching airbrush spring Breake shirts, which I occasionally busted out.
Another popular thing to do for spring break where I'm
from is to go to Savannah for St. Patrick's Say Parade.
It usually happens around the same time and if you've
never been never heard of it. It is a party.
It is a huge party. My best friends did it
(01:31):
every year in high school. UM. I only made it
once and it was to march in the parade, so
again not really spring breaking it. I did later go
in college and I don't really have time to go
into the story. Now. It's a good one. Uh. It
involves the board games, Fatigo, a failed account of Billy
Buddy system, and dead cell phones. Um. And one year
(01:54):
I was away working or or something, UM, and my
friends may a cardboard cutout of my head called it
the Spirit of Annie, and it appeared in all of
their pictures and they tagged me and all of their
pictures because I was there in spirit. Anyway, for those
of you who are planning your spring break, we hope
(02:16):
that you have a fun, safe one. UM, take care
of yourselves, and here are some history facts to annoy
your friends with on the trip. Welcome to Stuff Mom
Never told you from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
(02:37):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. Kristen,
if I had asked you a week ago what you
thought were the origins of spring break, what would have
been your guests? Someone had a hose and someone was
wearing what a T shirt what T shirt contest? Maybe
And yeah, someone ran through a sprinkler on a beach
(02:59):
some and someone was serving jello and accidentally like whoops,
and lazy poured a lot of vodka into it. I
like it that that's creative, but it's not at all
close to the origins of spring break in real life.
Not not a bunch of just happenstance mistakes that lead
to drunkenness and and wet T shirts. Not a series
of happy accident more like one happy accident. And then
(03:23):
once upon a time, we had the Casino Pool in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And so backing up a little bit,
I'm getting ahead of myself. It was cold up at
Colgate University, and the swim coach did not want his
students to get out of shape over Christmas break. So
one of his students father, suggested that the team come
down to Fort Lauderdale and practice at the Casino Pool,
(03:45):
which was the first Olympic sized pool in Florida. It
had been built in the nineteen twenties, and so he did. So.
All these swimmers come down to Fort Lauderdale, and they're
enjoying the warm weather and the warm welcome, and as
it tends to do, we're spread among college students that
this was a cool thing to do, and the spring
break was born. And this is in nineteen thirty six
(04:08):
that Ingram first springs that Colgate University swim team down.
I had no idea that spring break. Yeah, in the thirties,
even though some might say that, hey, you know, the
idea of a spring celebration can be traced back to
Greek and Roman times with the bacchanals and the changing
of the seasons and it's getting warm, let's pour a
(04:30):
bunch of wine, um and but really in the United
States it started more in the thirties. Although once you
have kids going off to college men and women, and
the advent of the car and the road trip, then
you start to get kids getting a little frisky when
they have some time off from school. But the idea
(04:51):
of spring break and this whole let's go to the
beach and have a real good time starts all because
of Fort Lauderdale, this casino pool and Sam Ingram, who
was yeah, really really concerned about his swift but all
that Christmas ham he was worried that they would get
little swimmers cuts. So yeah, in six he brought the
(05:13):
team down and by eight more than three hundred swimmers
were competing in the College Coaches Swim Forum at this
casino pool, and according to The New York Times, A
buchan All was born. Yeah, the first mention of spring
Break in Time magazine happened in nineteen fifty nine, I believe,
(05:36):
where one of the revelers commented, it's not that we
drink so much. It's just that we drink beer all
the time, right, so keep it going. So little has
changed since those early days. And then in nineteen sixty
spring break really enters into mainstream culture with the Hollywood
production Where the Boys Are, which is a movie based
(06:00):
on a book by the same name starring George Hamilton's
that uh star of Yesteryear who was always so dann,
always so damn. I think I have a purse the
color of George Hamilton. That's actually the color. It's George
Hamilton's Hamilton um. And it's about these four midwestern college
girls who spend their spring break in where else, Fort Lauderdale,
(06:23):
the first capital of spring break. And I like how
the plot line revolves around all of their different ideas
of premarital sex, like the main character sort of the
headstrong feminist who's like prematal sex and say okay by me,
And then she meets George Hamilton's She's like, I could
have premarital sex with George Hamilton's. But then the moral
(06:44):
of the story in this nineteen sixty film is that
she doesn't have to do it before she's ready, right,
And that is the moral of spring Break as well.
Um And by the seventies, this is according to Time
Magazine's Brief History of spring Break, which is very interesting
and tells me all sorts of things that I had
no idea about. But they say that by the seventies
things started to get a little raunchier. There was a
(07:06):
lot of gratuitous p d A and balcony diving, which
is when kids would jump from one balcony to the
other to try to get to people's rooms. And there's
actually a study out there about spring break syndrome, which
is referring to the number of accidental free fall injuries
in the spring Break atmosphere and how they're different from like,
let's say, a side impact injury of a car wreck.
(07:29):
So all these kids getting drunk and jumping from balcony
to balcony, a term was coined that reminds me of
yoga drop foot. It's from the from the yoga episode
where very specific injury um And then by nine more
than three hundred and seventy thousand students were heading to
Fort Lauderdale every year for spring break and things were
(07:53):
getting out of control. The mayor of Fort Lauderdale started
freaking out about it. Police started freaking out. In seventies,
there were a number of arrests that were happening every
year on the beach because kids were getting out of hand.
A lot of spring break syndrome spreading everywhere. People not
falling off of balconies, but just just falling rights, other
(08:14):
types of spring break syndromes. And you mentioned the mayor,
he actually went on Good Morning America to publicly state
that students were not welcome in his town anymore. And
a former city commissioner, Robert Cox, told The New York
Times that the commission voted to purchase a riot tank
with a water cannon to counteract any potential student rampages.
And he didn't stop there. Not only did he buy
(08:36):
a freaking riot tank, but when he became mayor, streets
were reconfigured to discourage cruising, and high end hotels and
restaurants replaced the lower end student attracting dive bars and things.
So the thing that I was expecting with this idea
of talking about spring break for a podcast was that
it would start, I don't know, in the in the
(08:58):
eighties or the nineties. It's something a product of MTV
because growing up, MTV always had their televised spring Break
weeks and it was a lot of you know, bands
and drinking and wet t shirt contests. But the fact
of the matter is that ever since large groups of
(09:18):
college kids have gathered in a warm locale since the
late nineteen thirties, trouble has ensued. It's all swimmers, faults,
It's darn Northern swimmers. But MTV does play a role
in this. In nineteen eighties six MTVS spring Break debuted
in beautiful Daytona Beach, not Fort Lauderdown. And I think
(09:41):
this is a really good example of popular culture feeding
what goes into the media, which then feeds back into
popular culture. And MTV Vice president Doug Hertzog said that
spring Break is a youth culture event. We wanted to
be a part of it. For that reason, it makes
good sense for us to come down and go live
from the center of it, because obviously the people there
(10:01):
are the kinds of people who watch HMTV, so it's
a cycle. Like he saw these young people doing all
these crazy things and thought, yes, we need to be
a part of that. We need to put it on
TV to get more people watching it to boost our ratings.
And then the more people who watch MTV spring Break,
the more people go down to MTV spring Break, right
because it cements this idea in our our young and
(10:23):
impressionable minds, said Hey, you know, for that one week
in March or April, that's what we're supposed to do,
black out every night on the jello shot. Not like
what I did my freshman year of college, which was
go to New York City in March. It was freezing
and at the same time that I went to New
York City with my friends. I don't know why I'm
pointing down, New York City is up anyway, When I
(10:46):
went to New York City and it was freezing, and
I was wearing sweaters and standing in line to see
Conan O'Brien, my roommate went to Florida, and one a
wet t shirt contest, which I think illustrates different perspectives
very well. The only spring break that I can remember
making into some kind of occasion during college because I
(11:06):
was I was probably working most spring breaks. UM was
one beach trip that my friends and I took camping
down on St. Augustine. But the way the timing of
spring break was in early early March, and it was
still cold, and I remember going out there sitting on
the beach with my swimsuit on but wrapped up in
(11:29):
the top towel, determined to have some fun in the
freezing cold sun. And there was these wind gusts would
kick up and just blow sand all over us, and
uh and I went home a day early. Yeah. I
had a similar experience when I was in middle school.
Every year I went to my aunt and uncle's house
in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Same thing. I actually got
(11:50):
bronchitis one year because it was so cold, but I
was determined to go in the pool. I am going
to have fun. And yet again we din ourselves into
comics from a young age. Not on a more serious note,
(12:15):
we do have to address the riskier behavior that does
tend to go hand in hand with these spring break romps. Yeah.
A two thousand and six study in the Annals of
Tourism Research found that students appear to participate in risk
your behaviors in the spring break environment then at home.
And this sounds like a no brainer. I mean, if
(12:36):
you've ever been to spring breaker, won't watch spring break
shows on MTV, you know that people are acting kind
of crazy. Um. But they look at why this is
happening and they found that it's your personal normative beliefs
and situational expectations that predict your intentions to binge, drink
and take part in it while you're on spring break.
(12:56):
So basically it's that thing of saying, Hey, you know
what I'm going on spring break. I've seen what spring
break looks like. Um on MTV And in the nineteen
sixty film where the boys are starring George Hamilton's and
I am expecting to go down and have a party
filled weekend and I'm just gonna go bonkers, right, And similarly,
(13:16):
intentions for casual sex were predicted by attitudes again personal
normative beliefs and expectations, but the actual engagement in casual
sex was predicted by prior experience with it, So you
might go down thinking like, oh, yeah, I'm going to
have all of this crazy spring break sex and drinking,
and then your actual actions might not measure up exactly.
(13:39):
And then the most disconcerting finding from this two thousand
six study was that a majority of students who did
in fact engage in sexual activity rarely or never used
condoms during spring break. Yeah, that is scary. That's a
lot of unprotected sex happening with a lot of possibly
intoxicated people. But speaking of numbers, let's put some sentages
(14:00):
around how many what proportion of students are having sex?
This is a little bit dated. A n study of
Canadian students from the Journal of Sex Research I found
that not too surprisingly, more men than women intended to
have casual sex on spring break. But when the numbers
all shook out, the percentages of guys and gals who
(14:24):
actually did it pretty similar fifteen percent of men and
of women. So maybe the casual sex not as rampant
as we think could be. Maybe people are just talking
it up. Yeah, And one thing that researchers looked at
in a in a two thousand and six study from
the Journal of Studies on Alcohol was comparing springbreak behavior
(14:44):
to normal behavior, because it could be that people are
never drinking during the year and going crazy on spring break,
or that they're drinking all the time and it just
continues when they go on vacation. And so they conducted
phone interviews with one hundred and seventy six freshmen students
over ten weeks to learn about their typical behaviors and
found that the people who drank more during the regular
(15:05):
semester are men, members of fraternities and sororities, students on
spring break, and those with higher fun social expectancies, so
the people who are just expecting to have a better,
more wild time in college. And they found that alcohol
used did not actually increase during spring break in general,
(15:25):
but spring break travelers increased their alcohol use during springbreak.
So is the binge week It was the wake up
crack of beer instead of having coffee right and just
go until you can't go no more. And that finding
echoes the quote that you said earlier from time about
it's not that we drink so much that we drink
all the time. That's from nineteen nine. Well, and now
(15:46):
that there's the whole thing of leaving the US going
to destinations like Cancoon where the drinking ages eighteen to
make it even easier, and then you go to an
all inclusive resort and it's just fountains of mimosas and
hurricane panes. That is quite a bachan all. Yes. So,
now that we've covered the risks and established the fact that, yes, indeed,
(16:09):
a lot of alcohol is consumed on spring break and
has been since the dawn of spring break, let's talk
about the business and of this, right, because all of
this alcohol consumption and hotel stays and restaurant eating, well
not eating of restaurants, but eating at restaurants, just to clarify,
although some of those drunk students probably have attempted to
(16:30):
eat a restaurant shoot on a on a restaurant. Um. Yes,
so this means that business is booming in these springbreak towns.
And according to the Houston Chronicle on March eighteenth, hotel
bookings for Texas Week, which I've never heard of, but
I guess it's the big spring break event of Texas
of Texas which ran from March eleven to see, um,
(16:52):
we're at capacity. According to the special event coordinator for
the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau. I really
know someone who spent spring break in South Padre Island
and I did not look at her pictures because I
just think they'd be crazy. And apparently South Padre Island
is popping. And it's interesting, Caroline that you mentioned that
(17:13):
you did not choose to look at her pictures, which
I'm assuming we're posted on the social network called Facebook.
Because social media supposedly is tamping down on the spring
break fund. These college students who have largely grown up
with social media are so aware of how easily they
(17:36):
can be caught and broadcast doing things such as wet
t shirt contests and jello shots, that they aren't partying
as hard as they used to be. We'll see. Yeah,
The New York Times identifies this as a trend, but
I question how much of a trend it actually is.
It might just it might just be a part of
these kids lives now because Facebook is everything on Facebook
(17:58):
and the internet is I mean, it's just so prevalent
and it's all intertwined, and it might just be more
of an attitude that they have now, like Okay, well,
I'm still going to go down and have fun. I
just don't want people taking pictures of me so that
potential employers will see them, you know, because I feel
like when I was in college facebook uh or I
got on Facebook in two thousand four, which was my
(18:19):
sophomore year of college, so I still wasn't even for
the rest of college. I wasn't thinking about like, oh
my gosh, someone's gonna see a picture of me holding
a beer and I'm going to lose a job. But
maybe it's just so prevalent now that kids are are
really worried about it. And one year old bartender is
quoted in the story is saying that the students she
sees are very prudish and that ten years ago people
(18:39):
were doing filthy, filthy things, but it wasn't posted on Facebook.
So there's a little bit of nostalgia from a year old.
In a commentary about that New York Times trend Peace,
the blog Jezebel also brings up this issue of whether
or not women women are being more slut shamed into
sort of tamping down on their crew easier spring break activity,
(19:01):
because you also have to remember the out of spring
break culture we have the whole girl's Gone wild culture
of filming pretty young women who are usually pretty intoxicated,
doing some pretty sexy types of things. Right. And I mean,
I think I've told you this before, Kristen, But my
(19:22):
dad's only advice to me when I was going to
college was don't let me see you want commercial at
three in the morning. So it is a concern out
there that our young ladies, are young college ladies, will
end up victims of girls gone wild. But this, the
whole social media thing, really isn't killing spring break revelry.
I mean, plenty of people are still going. And all
(19:42):
these articles coming out of Florida this month reporting on
the spring break craziness down there basically said that hotel
occupancy is up in spite of the recession. It's incredible.
I saw on I think it was from U S
News and World Report the average college student will spend
a level a hundred dollars on a spring break getaway. Right.
(20:03):
This is in a recession economy. I couldn't even do
that before the recession when I was in college. The
Sun sentinelow March twelve reported that the Greater Fort Lauderdale
Convention and Visitors Bureau expected about one million visitors to
Broward County alone, and those one million visitors were expected
to spend oh, I don't know, just about a billion dollars.
(20:25):
So even though they're all these towns in Florida who
back in the eighties were like, enough, we don't want
to be that kind of town. We don't want to
have a week long disruption in our lives, they're finding
ways to still attract and draw visitors, but just hoping
that it's not the same like craziness that was so
common in the eighties, not all that spring break syndrome
(20:45):
and balcony hopping spreading around, right, because they're actually attracting
a lot of not just college students, but some of
the hotel people that they talked to for this article
were saying that there were a lot of convention people
and families to go down to the beach for spring break.
So there's a mix. Although I would not want to
be a family staying in a hotel with a bunch
of springbreak college kids. I would try to stay somewhere else. Yeah,
(21:07):
I mean, that's got to be part of the give
and take of of being a tourism driven city. Um,
but we've been talking all about this debauchery that goes
along with springbreak, because I think that we can pretty
conclusively say that the history of springbreak has been kids
getting in cars and planes and going to a hot
location to drink alcohol swimmers. But there's also been the
(21:30):
more recent rise of alternative spring breaks, which is great.
There are new options for going and using your time
to improve the world in a way, whether that's doing
um clean up after Hurricane Katrina, or going to more
remote location to do some kind of humanitarian outreach, educating yourself,
(21:52):
doing outward bound trips. Right and there's Breakaway, which is
a nonprofit that provides training to colleges universe of these
and other nonprofits interested in creating lifelong active citizens according
to their website. And so this is for people who, yeah,
who want to participate in things like Habitat for Humanity
and help build houses and things like that on spring
break and help better their community or you know, a
(22:15):
far away community if they so choose, instead of going
and getting drunk. Right now, let's say that the alternative
spring break is probably one of the most positive outcomes
of springbreak. Not to say that when I was in college,
I did not look forward to having that week off,
and maybe I did walk into this podcast a little
bitter that I don't still have that time off because
(22:37):
I have friends who are now getting their masters, are
there in law school, and this is the time when
they're all going on spring break. Now I almost forget
what springbreak was like. It must have been so nice
for me to not do homework for a week, be
able to sleep late shivering in New York City. That
was only one year. I honestly don't remember what I
(22:58):
did for springbreak for the rest college. So I hope
that listeners will consider this our kind of spring break
give to ourselves. Just just a fun little podcast trying
to figure out where the strange bakan all came from.
And it really just came from that son and alcohol
and cheap airfare and George Hamilton's and my purse. So
(23:21):
please tell us about what you did or currently do
during spring break, uh in college, if you went wilder,
if you maybe did some alternative spring break stuff. Mom
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can send
those letters. And we've got a couple of letters here
to share from our episode on women's wrestling, And this
(23:52):
first one is from Andrew, who is a big fan
of professional wrestling, and he writes in recent years, ww
use hiring policy of women has been to hire models
and train them to wrestle. Usually this sends up poorly
in the matches are train wrecks. However, ww E has
hired some women who are very talented who started out
on the independent wrestling scene, trained by themselves because they
(24:15):
loved what they did. Beth Phoenix, Na Tayler, need Heart
and Karma and w w E are good examples. Some
of the models even took to wrestling well, like Eve Torres,
who trains in Brazilian jiu jitsu. The independent scene has
a vast array of talent, such as Sarah del Ray,
cheerleader Melissa and Mischief, whose day job consists of being
(24:35):
a microbiologist. If you want to check out a promotion
in the U s as talented female wrestlers, check out
the Shimmer promotion, as the promotion is based more off
the wrestling than sex appeal. So thanks for that insight
on women and wrestling, Andrew. Okay, this is from Shane.
He has some thoughts to share in wrestling as well.
UM I can get behind the mixed wrestling at the
(24:56):
college level and I can get behind more opportunities for
girls wrestling at the high school level. I don't think
I can get behind mixed wrestling at the high school level.
And here is why. High school is a time when
boys and girls are learning appropriate behavior in relation to sexuality.
It is also a time when hormones are running wild.
While listening to your podcast, I tried to think about
what it was like for me when I was in
high school. Wrestling with a girl would have posed some
(25:18):
awkward problems. This sort of a situation is just asking
for an unintended sexual harassment suit, not to mention the
social stress associated. So thanks, that makes sense. I can
see how there could be some some awkwardness on that.
In that tiny, tiny ring or Matt on the mat,
(25:39):
I would say ring from Matt, you're thinking of w
w E kids wrestling in the de WWI also would
be it's weird deceive. Okay. Well. Mom Stuff at Discovery
dot Com is where you can send your letters. You
can also find us on Facebook, leave a comment there
like us if you'd like to, and you can follow
us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. You can also
(26:01):
check out what we're doing during the week on our website,
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
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