The other day I made an offhand comment to my 11-year-old about, you know, the spanking machine.

"What's the spanking machine?" he asked.

"Well," I began, "back in the '80s, when it was your birthday, the entire class lined up and spread their legs to create a tunnel. You got on all fours and army-crawled your way through their legs, and everyone took a turn to spank you on the butt."

As I uttered those words, I began to second-guess myself. Did this actually happen? Was I, a tail-end Gen Xer from suburban Chicago, among the last kids to experience this childhood rite of passage that would never fly today?

I imagined my son, too, would be incredulous, if not horrified. But without a hint of curiosity or a single follow-up question, he shrugged it off. "No fair," he said. "That sounds fun."

I, however, was, as the kids say today, shook. My Proustian memory of the spanking machine, along with conversations with friends and colleagues, unlocked many more recollections that sound almost unbelievable in a modern context.

Here are the other weirdest things about '80s and '90s childhoods:

  • Mandatory communal showers. The powers-that-be in middle school decided that the age of puberty and peak of body self-consciousness would be the ideal time for kids to start seeing one another naked. In my gym class, we each were assigned a number. We stripped down in the locker room and then plodded through a U-shaped communal shower, hosed off by the wall sprinklers as if we going through a car wash. Waiting for us at the other end was our gym teacher clutching a clipboard, ready to check us off when we announced our number. Only then were we allowed to grab a standard-issue towel the size of a VHS tape. Girls could be excused from showers only if they brought a note from home saying they were on their periods. (Then of course, everyone knew you were on your period.)


  • Weigh-ins at the Ground Round. My friends reminded me about this nearly forgotten family restaurant chain, a precursor to Applebee's.Once or twice a week, the Ground Round Grill and Bar would have a "Pay What You Weigh" promotion — "just a penny a pound!" Before being seated, kids would step onto a gigantic scale. (If they weighed 60 pounds, their meal would be just 60 cents.) Then the child would be forced to wear a sticker that announced their weight to the world. As one Reddit user reminisced, the Ground Round was a place that "made life awesome for fat kids."


  • Door-less bathroom stalls. Smoking had been deemed such a problem in the boys' restrooms at my high school that administrators had the stall doors removed. That meant that boys could no longer get away with lighting up their cigarettes in private. But it also meant that they could no longer do other things in private — things one might do while sitting on a toilet. (Still obsessed with the smoking problem, the school officials strategically placed mirrors in front of the stalls.) To have a bowel movement at Glenbard North High School in the '90s required some true intestinal fortitude.


  • Square dancing in P.E. Could there be any less useful life skill than square dancing? And yet learning to swing one's partner and do-si-do were compulsory in gym classes all across America. I still remember the anxiety in first grade of learning which boy with whom I'd be forced to hold hands. Turns out the reason we all had to endure the awkwardness of square dancing is because Henry Ford, a known racist and anti-Semite, believed Jewish people invented jazz. He wanted to supplant it with square dancing, which he saw as "intrinsically white, and thus more intrinsically wholesome," reports the news site Quartz. Ford campaigned to have square dancing taught in P.E. classes. Today, two dozen states have deemed square dancing as their official dance. (Minnesota does not have an official state dance, but square dancing was proposed twice in the 1990s.)
  • Non-criminal acts of unwanted affection from your teacher. My first-grade teacher planted kisses on our cheek on our birthdays, so much that we'd have to rub her red lipstick off our faces. One of my friends had a kindergarten teacher who, during reading time, would pick two children who could sit at her feet and rub her pantyhose. "It was always such an honor to be selected," my friend recalled, "or so I thought."


The '80s, man. What got me nostalgic recently was hearing the news that Chi-Chi's, the Minnesota-based attempt at Tex-Mex chain food, was going to reopen in 2025. Remember their fried ice cream? That was a thing, right?

Of course it was, and it was divine. I can't wait to tell my kids about all my generation survived over a bowl of fried ice cream. Maybe it will unlock more weirdness.

What were your most awkward traditions that speak volumes about your generation? Send me your story at Laura.Yuen@startribune.com, and I may weave it into a future column.