Ojai Valley News Blog

Sandy and Jim Wooff, newly married, attend Nordhoff’s Senior Prom in 1959. Five children and 11 grandchildren later, they’re still married and living in Ojai.

This is part of the special report on Nordhoff High School’s first 100 years in the Oct. 7 edition.

By Misty Volaski
I’ve always thought of my grandma, Sandy Wooff, as the go-to person for insider information on the people and places of the Ojai Valley. With the exception of about five years, she has lived in Ojai her entire life. As a kid I loved her “Only-in-Ojai” stories — the fruit-picking parties, barn dances and the candy shop, horses tied to the Arcade, the day the Pergola was blown up.

So when I heard Nordhoff was turning 100 this year, I realized with delight that this would be another opportunity sit down on Grandma’s couch and soak up the local lore. But what was supposed to be an interview turned into something much more. It became a conversation, a compare-and-contrast of our respective experiences at Nordhoff High School.

I was pleasantly shocked at her Ranger revelations of the late 1950s —- girls couldn’t wear pants to school, but still hazed each other to get into the Girls’ Athletic Association. Teachers were strict, but acknowledged a prank was just a prank (and not grounds for a lawsuit).

As we talked, I found myself longing for the days of felt poodle skirts and hand-knitted argyle dice hanging from the rear-view mirror of my boyfriend’s car.

I had thought our antics were clever — boys riding dirt bikes through the quad on Senior Ditch Day, or the night we filled the male teachers’ classrooms with pink balloons during Battle of the Sexes Week.

But the things my grandmother’s class did were much more inspired — and difficult to pull off. There were stories of stealing underwear from teachers’ clotheslines and running them up the flagpole.

Then there was the time a teacher was particularly mean, and a group of burly football players picked up his car and put it in a courtyard surrounded by a fence with cement pillars. He was, of course, reduced to asking the students to help him get it back out again — the students won.

I never felt like we really won (which is probably why we tossed around silly string and tortillas and a blow-up doll during our graduation ceremony).

And the camaraderie she had with her classmates! When a student dropped a small firecracker into the radiator, no one would give up the name of the culprit — even when the entire class was faced with weeks of detention. But there was a distinct pecking order — “the upper class men were really very nice to the junior kids, but we stayed off of their lawn or they would sit you in the water fountain!” she recalled.

And although my class did get away with things like wrapping the ASB president in Saranwrap during a rally, Grandma Sandy’s class held Slave Days to benefit the sports clubs — all without a peep from the ACLU

“You could ‘buy’ a junior or a senior for a day,” she remembered, “and they would wash your car, pick you up in the morning, carry your books — nothing bad, they’d just wait on you, and no one thought it was wrong or racist.”

Neither was it wrong or odd to be married or become pregnant during high school — by their senior prom my grandparents were already married.

Amazing how so much has flip-flopped in 50 years. Amazing how our high school experiences were so different in the same small town. Amazing how much you learn — about your town, your family, yourself — when you listen to your elders.