The Hallway Before the Lockdown
What Small-Town High Schools Ran On Before Anyone Was Watching
In 1982, a boy could bring a gun to a Midwestern high school and the incident would be processed as a local tragedy rather than a national crisis. There was no protocol. There was no lockdown drill. There was no cable news helicopter overhead, no social media timeline filling with speculation and grief performed for strangers. The principal called the police. The police came. The boy was arrested. The school board held a meeting. The parents whispered at the grocery store for a few weeks. And then the hallway where it happened went back to being a hallway, because the infrastructure for processing school violence as a systemic American problem did not yet exist. The infrastructure would come later. The violence came first.
I know this because I wrote it. In 1982, at sixteen, I wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders, set at a fictional Midwestern high school. One of those episodes involved a bullied student who brought a handgun to school. I did not write that episode because I was predicting Columbine, which was seventeen years in the future. I wrote it because I was paying attention to what was already happening in the hallways around me, the ordinary mechanics of cruelty and institutional neglect that American schools had been running on for decades before anyone decided to give it a name.
Those scripts sat in storage for over forty years. They are now a trilogy of novels. But before I tell you about the books, I want to tell you about the systems the books document, because those systems are the kind of hidden infrastructure that Prairie Voice was built to examine.
The American high school in 1982 operated on a set of assumptions that have since been dismantled so thoroughly that they are difficult to reconstruct. The first assumption was that the building was safe. Not safe in the way we now use that word, which implies threat assessment teams and metal detectors and bulletproof glass in the main office. Safe in the way a house is safe: a place you enter without thinking about whether you will leave it. Students walked in through unlocked doors. They carried whatever they carried. Nobody checked.
The second assumption was that the adults in the building were adequate to the problems the students brought with them. A guidance counselor with a master’s degree in education and a caseload of four hundred students was expected to identify substance abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, eating disorders, depression, and suicidal ideation through the diagnostic tool of a fifteen-minute conversation once per semester. The counselor’s office had a poster on the wall about self-esteem. The poster was not helping.
The third assumption, and this is the one that matters most for what these novels are about, was that teenagers who were in trouble would tell someone. The entire system depended on disclosure. If a kid was drinking in the darkroom during fourth period, the system assumed that eventually the kid or one of his friends would report it. If a kid was being bullied to the point of psychological collapse, the system assumed the kid’s parents would call the school. If a kid had hereditary bone cancer growing silently through his skeleton, the system assumed the family would inform the administration so appropriate accommodations could be made.
None of these assumptions held. The kid drinking in the darkroom did not report himself because the darkroom was the only place he felt calm. The bullied kid’s mother told him to stop accepting the abuse, which he interpreted as permission to solve the problem with a weapon, because the gap between a mother’s intention and a son’s interpretation is the most dangerous space in any household. And the family with the bone cancer kept it in a drawer, literally, because the mother’s list of medical appointments was hidden in a kitchen drawer that nobody else opened, because the family’s operating system for processing catastrophic information was silence, and silence was the only technology they had.
The school newspaper was different. Not because it was better funded or better supervised or because the administration valued student journalism. It was different because it was the one institution in the building where teenagers were expected to notice things and write them down.
In the early 1980s, high school newspapers occupied a peculiar position in the civic architecture of small Midwestern cities. The local daily, if the town still had one, covered city council and high school football and obituaries. The school paper covered everything else: the hallway, the cafeteria, the parking lot, the social hierarchy, the teachers, the dances, the substance abuse the adults pretended not to see. A good school paper was a diagnostic instrument, and the students who ran it were, whether they knew it or not, performing the same function as the public health nurses who used to visit prairie schools in the 1930s: identifying problems that the formal system had been designed to ignore.
The Westborough Crusaders trilogy centers on a school newspaper called the Krugerand, edited by two sophomores who are smarter than the building deserves and funnier than the situation warrants. The journalism teacher, a man named Canterbilly who eats donuts and lectures about the prostitution of the English language, runs his classroom on a single principle: the writing matters, and the truth matters, and the adults who want the paper to publish safe territory can go downtown and explain to the school board why they are afraid of fifteen-year-olds with typewriters.
That principle, that student journalism should function as institutional accountability rather than institutional decoration, was already under siege in the early 1980s. The Supreme Court would not hand down Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier until 1988, six years after these scripts were written, but the conflict that case formalized was already playing out in every school where an administrator crumpled a student newspaper and threw it at a wastebasket because the students had written something true and the truth made the building look bad.
The substance abuse infrastructure of the early 1980s is another system that the trilogy documents with the specificity of a field report. The War on Drugs was underway but had not yet reached the saturation of the late Reagan years. DARE did not exist until 1983. MADD was founded in 1980 but had not yet reshaped the national conversation about teenage drinking. A sixteen-year-old in a Midwestern city could drink at a party on Friday night and walk into school on Monday morning and no adult would ask a question, because the question had not yet been formulated as a question worth asking.
The trajectory of adolescent alcoholism in the early 1980s followed a pattern that addiction researchers now recognize as textbook but that, at the time, was invisible to the institutions that should have been watching. Social drinking at a lakeside party. A flask at a football game. A beer hidden behind the porch railing, drunk in the dark, not for pleasure but for need. The distinction between wanting a drink and needing a drink is the diagnostic line, and in 1982, the adults in the building did not know where that line was, because the diagnostic vocabulary for adolescent substance abuse was still being written by researchers whose findings had not yet filtered down to the guidance counselor with the self-esteem poster.
The trilogy follows a character named Stan Harrison across that line, from Julie Taler’s boyfriend to Mike Redson’s drinking partner to a kid sitting alone in a darkroom holding a mostly empty bottle of cherry vodka and thinking about the girl he lost. Stan’s arc is not a cautionary tale. It is a systems failure. The school had no early intervention protocol. The family had no framework for recognizing the signs. The friends had no language for what they were watching. And the rehabilitation facility where Stan eventually lands, a real facility of the kind that existed in the early 1980s, operates on a model of treatment that expects epiphany and delivers, instead, the daily negotiation of bad days and worse days and occasionally a day that is merely terrible.
The bullying infrastructure is the system the trilogy treats with the most unforgiving precision. In the early 1980s, before the word “bullying” had been absorbed into the administrative lexicon as a category requiring institutional response, what happened to a kid like Bergie Bergman was processed as a social problem rather than a safety problem. A large, gentle kid whom not many girls liked, who would not hurt anybody, who was still a child in many ways with an innocence about him, was identified as a target by a predator named Mike Redson, who was not just cruel but creative in his cruelty, who recruited accomplices and invented new humiliations the way other teenagers invented excuses for not doing homework.
The school did nothing. Not because the school was indifferent, though it may have been, but because the school’s operating system did not include a response to sustained psychological abuse of one student by another. A teacher might intervene in a fight. An administrator might suspend a student for a visible infraction. But the daily accumulation of hallway shoves, cafeteria humiliations, bathroom ambushes, and the particular cruelty of being made to feel that your existence is an imposition on the people around you: for this, the building had no protocol, no form, no procedure, no poster.
Bergie’s mother, watching her son deteriorate, told him not to take it anymore. She meant: stand up, speak out, tell a teacher, refuse to be diminished. He heard: whatever it takes. The space between those two meanings is where the gun came from, and the space is not a failure of communication between a mother and son. It is a failure of every institution that should have made the gun unnecessary: the school that did not see, the teachers who did not act, the administration that processed cruelty as a social problem rather than a safety crisis, and the community that assumed teenagers would solve their own problems because the community had no mechanism for solving them.
I set the Westborough Crusaders in a fictional city because the systems I was documenting were not specific to any single town. They were infrastructural. They ran beneath the surface of every Midwestern school building the way heating ducts run beneath the floors, carrying warmth and sound to places the building’s architects never intended. In the novels, a character named Puck Taler crawls through the heating ducts of his family’s house, listening to every conversation without being part of any of them. He hears his mother schedule a doctor’s appointment she has not told anyone about. He hears his brother’s girlfriend say something she will regret. He hears the house process information through silence, which is the technology prairie families have always used for catastrophic news: you do not discuss it directly, you love harder when the person is in the room, and you keep the list of doctors’ appointments in a drawer.
Puck is in the ducts because the ducts are the infrastructure the family does not see. The novels are about the infrastructure the school does not see. Prairie Voice is about the infrastructure the country does not see. The connection is not metaphorical. It is structural. The hidden systems that sustain communities, whether those communities are forests or towns or high schools or families, operate on principles of circulation, reciprocity, and accumulated knowledge that become visible only when they fail. The mycorrhizal network beneath a forest floor and the social network beneath a high school hallway share a common vulnerability: when the hub nodes are removed, when the connective tissue is severed, the system collapses, and the collapse is silent, and by the time anyone notices, the damage is done.
The Westborough Crusaders trilogy, published by David Boles Books, consists of three novels: The Year Before the Wire, which traces the year before the series begins, documenting how each character arrived at the first day of sophomore year already transformed by loss; A Farewell to Shins, which expands the eight original episodes into full novelistic interiority, going inside the heads of teenagers whose external behavior the adults in the building could see but whose internal experience the adults could not access; and The Stopped Clock, which follows the consequences into territory the original scripts could not reach, asking what survives when the pressure that forged these friendships does not stop.
These are not nostalgic novels about the 1980s. They are not sentimental about small-town life. They do not protect the reader from the cost of what the characters endure, and they do not offer the comfort of adults who arrive with wisdom the teenagers could not have figured out themselves. What they offer instead is a precise accounting of the systems that were supposed to protect young people and did not, told by someone who was there, who was sixteen when the systems failed, and who wrote it down because writing it down was the only tool available, and the only tool that worked, and the only tool that still works now, forty-four years later, when the hallways have lockdown drills and the darkrooms have been converted to storage and the school newspapers have moved online and the infrastructure has changed in every particular except the one that matters: teenagers still build their own shelters, because the institutions still have not learned to build them for the kids.
The clock is ticking. Somebody has to wind it.