Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: History of Spring Break

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

If you think Spring Break started with northern college kids heading to Florida to party, you'd be correct. But there's slightly more to it than that. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Amanda and Wes, watch out. We're not getting to be easy on you. Listen to two T's in a pod on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and everybody else is present in spirit. And this is step you should know short stuff. Where the boys are. Is that the song?

I think so. Oh, I always think of that Book of Love song. I want to be where the boys are. Well, wait, you say yours. I want to hear it. Oh, I want to be where the boys are, but I'm not allowed. You've not heard that song? I didn't know Lou Reed sang a song like that. Do I sound like Lou Reed?

I'll take that. You kind of speak singing, which is Lou Reed's deal. Yeah, I do speak sing. I can't put my all into it. Hey, man, a lot of people have made great careers out of speak singing. No shame. That's right. All right. I might take you up on that and be kind of. I'm a speak singer. That's right. I mean, that's the gateway to being a white male rapper, so just be careful.

Okay. I will be careful. If you see me with like three lines cut into my side, the side of my hair, maybe take me out for some drinks and give me some talking to. I've done that accidentally. Oh, I have too. Well, Yumi did it accidentally to me, but not, I'm talking intentional. Okay.

Yeah. All right. So we're talking spring break. That's why you sang, can you sing it again, please? Where the boys are. That was lovely. That is actually they think where spring break, the American institution of going to warm places in the spring, usually from northern universities and getting plastered for a week, came from a book called,

what's it called, Chuck? Where the boys are. Not bad, but okay. No, speak singing. You got to say, where. the boys are. Okay. I just want to be in your group.

Oh, yeah, we could do that. We could do a speak singing barbershop. Yeah. Not even a quartet. Yeah. That's such a great bad idea. Oh, we can also add the slide whistle. You got me too.

It's like an extra thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's our only instrument as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. So where the boys are. All right. So you mentioned where the boys are a bunch. and that was sort of the big launching point for spring break.

But we got to back up a little bit to some sort of ground laying, I guess. People since the 19th century, apparently American college students, even way back in the 1800s, would take little weekend breaks during the spring to like hot springs and maybe even to the coast to kind of get themselves right. And in the 20th century, early in the 20th century, the road trip was born. and woman colleges, you know, woman-only colleges were born, and you pair those things together, and you're going to get girls going to see boys.

And so all of a sudden, members of the opposite sex were really hanging out with each other a lot more. Yeah. This is when Fifth met Muffy. That's right. And then people started drinking a lot more, like kind of out in public. Like, if you went to the military at 18,

like it was okay to, you know, go to a dive bar and get drunk. But that was kind of frowned upon in college. But starting, you know, around the early 1920s or so, college kids started drinking. Yeah, that whole jazzy, I'm guessing, right? Probably. So there was an act of nature, a force of nature that also plays into this pretty prominently. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 that said, try again, Miami, and wipe Miami clean.

And so the city had to rebuild into the version we know today. But as a part of this, the nearby city of Fort Lauderdale was like, we need to get people back here. So we're going to do the thing that cities have always done and still continue to do to attract tourists. And that is build an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Yeah, I think it was more of a novelty at the time because that was certainly the first one in Florida in 1928. And not too long after, like five or six years later, there was a swimming coach for, from Colgate University in upstate New York, where it's very cold, you said, hey, guys,

it's very cold. And there aren't a lot of indoor training pools here. So let's go down to Florida. They built this whiz-bang new pool in Fort Lauderdale. They went down there, they trained in the spring. And by 1938, the college coach's swim forum was formed, and Word had gotten around that it was like a good place to go train, which accidentally coincided with the opening of sort

of a younger person's bar called the elbow room. Yeah, and the Sea Breeze Hotel. It sounds like my kind of place, man. A hotel bar, love those. Same. I don't even drink anymore, and I still love a good hotel bar. They're great. So, yeah, these college athletes, these swimming teams now had a place to be, Florida, and a place to party, the elbow room. And it's just starting to kind of get back that, like, hey, there's this really fun thing that the swim teams are doing. Other swim teams, kind of took part in this too. And this idea kind of spread beyond swim teams, college swim teams, to just college students who started to come down to Fort Lauderdale and droves. Yeah, like, I like to drink. I like to flirt. I like to be in the sun. I like a farmer's tan.

That's right. So maybe that's a great place to take a break. And we'll be right back with Where the Boys Are. Where the Boys Are. on the road driving in your truck. Why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. Pride is like love.

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Listen to Joy 101 on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, yeah, I guess we're finally at where the boys are, right? Because things have been kind of picking up steam through the 40s and the 50s. But then in 1958, there was an English teacher from Michigan State University. His name was Glendon Swarthout. And he said, hey, kids, I want to hang with you. Let's go down to spring break. I'm going to follow you around, and I'm just going to write about your escapades.

And apparently it was debauchous enough and just crazy enough that he managed to write a book out of like this, essentially this week in Fort Lauderdale with some of his students. And the name of that book was Unholy Spring. Unholy Spring. Unholy Spring. That's right. He changed the name to where the boys are, of course. The book was a pretty big hit, but the movie really put it on the map when MGM put that out not too long after. And that's what really changed things. All of a sudden, Florida was on display as like where, well, where the boys are and where the girls are and what you need to be doing every spring. And, you know, we got some loose numbers here. I'm sure it's kind of hard to put great numbers on the 1960 spring break growth. But they said that, you know, basically tens of thousands of students started coming after that movie came out. And by the mid-1980s, like close to 400,000 students were going just to Fort Lauderdale. Man.

In Fort Lauderdale, I mean, it's a city in Florida, but you had 350,000 extra people for over the course of like a month probably. Like, that's an impact for sure. Yeah. And a bad impact at times. Yeah, like that's the thing. If you trace the history of spring break, it's like fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. It's awful now and then murders and rapes. Fun, fun, fun, fun, awful.

Fun, fun, fun, awful. And from what I can gather, Chuck, it turns awful when the middle-aged dudes show up. That's when it turns awful because they should not be there. They have no business being there. Spring break is for college kids. When the older dudes show up, that's when things get dark and bad. Yeah, although high school kids, I went to Panama City in high school, and it was dark and bad with high school kids, so I can assure you of that. Okay. I did too.

Because I was a good kid at the time. I was not a good kid at the time. Yeah, I mean, I was there. I was at those parties, but, you know, I was drinking my apple juice. I was pretending like I was drinking beer. Oh, were you really? That's awesome. I was. Very cringy to look back upon that, but. I think it's sweet and really charming, actually. Yeah, I can admit that now. I'll be 55 this weekend. All bets are off.

I know. How do you feel? I feel like I'm 53. You should have said, spring break. So spring break is going bad in Florida in Fort Lauderdale. The town obviously gets together, and this seems to be sort of the rule and say, all right, we got to start curbing some drinking laws. The mayor goes on Good Morning America and says, you need to start going to other places. And they did.

So all of Florida became destinations, Panama City where I went, like I said, senior year, 89. and then Daytona Beach was another big one. And Daytona really grew after MTV in 1986 started broadcasting live for their MTV Spring Break Party stuff. Yes, the first year in 1986, they had live musical performances. That was just a part of everyone. But in that year, they had performances by the Beastie Boys

and Starship. Yeah, I mean, who else would you get? What else goes together better? And I bet we can guess what song Starship performance. Stara. Yeah, and we built the city. Those were the two. That we built the city, though, is what also appears in one of the better Simpsons episodes

where the family goes on spring break and I remember keeps singing that song the whole time. That's really funny. And what's cool, I just can't not mention it. That's the second spring break episode The Simpsons did. The first one was where Bart and Millhouse and Nelson and at least one or two other kids just ran away and went on spring break. and ended up wearing wigs that they got out of the top of the Sunsphere in Knoxville. And it's a good one.

That's fun. Okay, so go watch those two, I think, is the point of this episode. That's the takeaway. So spring break's going big in Florida. MTV is there in the 80s and 86, like I said. But before that, in 1983, a very key thing happened right here in the ATL when some black college students got together. And we have some great historical black colleges and universities here. here in Atlanta. And not all of them went somewhere else for spring break. So one year in 83,

they got together and said, hey, we're stuck here on campus. Let's have a big picnic and a big party. This is coming off of, you know, the song La Freak by Sheik a few years earlier. And of course, the song Super Freak from Rick James was big. And it was a picnic. So they called it Freaknik. And Freaknik became a humongous deal in Atlanta. And with people coming from all over the country world even, but it blew up Atlanta for about a decade or so. Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of people, ostensibly black college students, mostly, just came to Atlanta and shut the town down because the main thing of Freaknick was cruising, right?

And you just all of a sudden had an extra few hundred thousand cars on the main drags throughout Atlanta, and like it would take you hours. to get places that it should take you 10, 15 minutes because there were so many cars just stopped in the middle of the road. That was freak nick. It was nuts. Yeah.

I mean, people started saying home, and, you know, white people were terrified because they were young black people having a lot of fun out in the streets. And the incidents of crime were here and there, but nothing like it was being portrayed in the news as like this sort of, you know, lawless situation happening.

there's a great documentary that I can't recommend enough that was out a couple of years ago on Hulu called Freak Nick, The Wildest Party Never Told that Atlanta's own Germain DePre produced, but it's great. I highly recommend watching it. Yeah, I think it actually did start to get pretty dark in the final years.

It did. And again, because middle-aged dude showed up. But one thing you can do if you want to crack down on spring break is make one or two new laws, and it'll completely choke the life out of it. For Freaknick, they passed a law about cruising and like that basically broke it up because that was the point of Freaknick.

Panama City Beach, where we both went for spring break, that was for a very long time that accepted the spillover from Fort Lauderdale and became a spring break mecca in and of itself. And in 2015, it got really bad. There was like a, it was just, I think it was like how it normally, was, but just some really ugly stuff got out on social media.

There was a girl who was unconscious and sexually assaulted, and there was a video of that that made its rounds. Eight people were shot in one house at one point. So Panama City got some really bad rep right then, and they did something about it. They said, you can't drink on the beach anymore, and that was, that took care of it from that point on. Yeah, there's still a ban. It's only in March, which is generally when spring break is. Ours is in April, but, it usually is in March. So yeah, that kind of did away with it. And, you know, that's kind of the deal with spring break. There are definitely a lot of universities now that do alternative things, like programs where you can say like, hey, don't go out and just get drunk on the beach. Like,

go volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and they're a collegiate challenge or, you know, go work for HIV advocacy. So plenty of other options besides the traditional spring break for sure. For sure. But yes, no matter what you're doing, whether it's working for habitat for humanity or you're, you know, staggering around Fort Lauderdale, every 10, 12 minutes, you have to shout. Spring break. That's right. Short Stuff is that. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app.

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