However, smoking has undergone varied levels of scrutiny by the administration since Redwood’s early years.
When the school opened in 1958, smoking was forbidden on campus. According to English teacher Sylvia Jones, who has taught at Redwood since 1964, the rules against smoking didn’t necessarily stop students from lighting up.
“It was a constant thing of the administration trying to catch up with kids in bathrooms, around the corner, at the edges of the campus,” she said.
Smoking was taken seriously by the administration during the ‘60s, according to Ric Kellen, Class of 1968 and current owner of Corte Madera’s Mellow Motors.
“You didn’t want to get caught smoking,” he said. “If I remember right, it was a three day suspension if you got caught, so it was fairly serious.”
According to Kellen, during the ‘60s the bathrooms and the back parking lot were the places where students could go to smoke without detection by Dean of Boys Paul Bosque.
“You would run out to your car and try and have a quick smoke and avoid getting caught,” he said. “It was sort of a game. There’d be groups of people in their cars and Bosque would be patrolling.”
Kellen said the administration rarely apprehended anyone for smoking because they could not punish a student if they hadn’t seen a cigarette in his or her mouth.
“They’d get close and everybody would put their cigarettes out and walk away and that’d be the end of it,” he said.
When the back parking lot wasn’t convenient enough for the school’s smokers, their only alternatives were Redwood’s lavatories.
As a non smoker, former teacher and administrator Sue Chelini’s only problem with smoking at Redwood was when some female faculty members would smoke in the women’s faculty bathroom next to the attendance office during breaks.
“Two or three people would take their breaks in there and smoke, so if you wanted to go to the bathroom you would have to walk through a curtain of grey smoke,” she said. “It just always smelled terrible in there, so you hardly ever wanted to go.”
Jones said that as a young member of the staff, she was often sent to patrol bathrooms for smoking rule-breakers.
Kellen, however, said that while the administration rarely caught bathroom smokers, those hoping to light up in the lavatory always looked out for patrolling administrators, allowing them to mostly avoid detection.
“I remember being in there, and in the boys’ bathroom there must have been 20 guys in there smoking,” he said. “I mean you couldn’t even see the other end of the bathroom. And [assistant principal] Jack Baat came in and everyone just dropped their cigarettes on the floor and walked out, and he didn’t bust anybody for smoking. There’s 20 or 30 lit cigarettes on the floor and everybody just files past him.”
As the ‘60s turned, new state legislation expanded the areas where smoking was legal and the school established designated smoking areas. Students were allowed to smoke behind the tennis courts and on the road behind the Little Theater and language hall. The latter smoking spot was eventually closed after teachers complained of smoke wafting into their classrooms.
Despite the clearly defined smoking spots around campus, Chelini said that during this time, the rules became more lax.
“You could smoke pretty much anywhere outside,” she said. “Staff could smoke in staff lounges and restrooms.”
Karen Murk, an ’82 Redwood grad and current math teacher, said that the designated smoking spot in the early ‘80s was under the awning by the cafeteria and near the east doors to the school.
These smoking spots gave smokers a safe haven to flip a cigarette throughout the ‘70s and through the late ‘80s, when state legislation passed that made it illegal to smoke at any site on a high school campus.
The administration decided to establish a new and improved smoking spot that circumvented the law by allowing smoking between the softball field and the pump station near the exit of the back parking lot, an area technically off campus.
“Everyone driving by saw this large clot of kids smoking. This was not good public relations,” Jones said.
Chelini said that she felt allowing the new smoke spot was hypocritical, especially because the school had been preaching a non smoking message.
“You were teaching in the classrooms the negative effects of cigarettes, and then you were allowing kids to learn to smoke at school,” Chelini said. “In the fall you’d have maybe 25 or 30 kids who were there, and by spring you’d have 50 or 100. It was just ridiculous.”
In the fall of 1995, students returned to school to discover that smoking had been banned on or in eye-line of campus.
Chelini, an assistant principal at the time, said that students largely complied with the order and violations were rare.
Instances of students caught smoking when she retired in 2003 were quite rare. Today, the rules haven’t changed.
While it may not be as easy for students to obtain cigarettes these days, it seems unlikely that smoking will ever be entirely eradicated from teenage life, according to Chelini. Peer pressure to smoke is very powerful, according to Kellen.
“Yeah it was cool, you know. The cool guys smoked. It all seems rather ridiculous now,” he said. “That’s what you do I guess when you’re that age.”
Kellen said he believed that over half of the student body while he was at Redwood had at least tried cigarettes. Murk said that while smoking was easy and accessible, it was less of a problem in the ‘80s.
“We’d had a lot of bad press about tobacco, so I think we kind of knew those risks and it wasn’t that big a deal,” she said. “I think there were other things that were more attractive to people — that were not legal.”
Murk said that she does not believe that teen smoking will die out out as long as adults still smoke.
“Whatever adults are doing kids are drawn to, especially when you’re a teen,” she said. “You’re exploring your independence and your right to do stuff.”
