My Grandpa Survived the Hunger Games

Yeah. So. The other day, I was talking to my grandpa. He was telling me about his years in school. Mostly his Junior and Senior years. Apparently, his school had the Hunger Games. Just kidding. But it sounds pretty brutal to me. Some schools do special end of the year things. His did the Junior vs Senior Games (I don’t know the actual title, but it sounds good to me). The whole school is let out early for these events that pit the Juniors against the Seniors. To get an idea of the circumstances, he told me that when a Junior went to the movies, he had to take half of the Junior class for protection. Otherwise the seniors would beat them up. Harsh. No wonder we are weak today! Now we take our cell phones and iPods while our elders took their knives!

You head for the hills when they come out with their Nokias.
Anyway, he gave me a few examples of games they played. First off: Tug o’ War. Nothing sounds off about that, right? Just rival classes having some good ol’ fashioned fun? Wrong. This wasn’t any old kind of tug o’ war. Instead of just having a middle line to cross, they had the fire department there spraying water from a hose at high pressure. Being pulled to the middle was essentially torture. He told me of the time when he was a senior, they pulled a junior into the sights of the hose and just held him there. Eventually, that Junior switched sides to pull another junior in: Traitor!
Another wonderful SCHOOL SANCTIONED game was Bridge Crossing. Take a look at the wonderful picture.

The goal was to climb up one pole, shimmy across the middle, then go down the other pole to get to the other side. Oh. And there was a senior starting from one side, and a junior starting from the other side. Yup. That means only one can be the winner. They each got a small burlap sack filled with saw-dust to knock the other person off of the pole. I’d like to think that there was just dirt, grass, maybe even a pad under the pole, but knowing how things went back then, it was probably spikes.
Finally, they had something that more closely resembled the Hunger Games. There was just a ring drawn out with saw-dust filled sacks, and the contestants were in the ring, and the last one standing wins! He said there was 10-15 people in the ring. They could wrestle them out, no punching (though my grandpa said that most people just wanted to duke it out), and they had (you guessed it) sacks with sawdust to beat each other with.
He gave a great tale of how he lasted as long as he could in there (as a junior) but to no avail.
From this I learned that my grandpa was a victor, that schools back then were pretty cool, and that there must have been a surplus of sawdust. Ask your grandparents about any of their school stories!