Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren vog obam Here, if you can smell the unmistakable odor of stale beer and sunscreen, it must be that time of year again, spring break, when hundreds of thousands of American college students descend on resort towns in Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean for a week of day drinking, bass thumping, foam parties, and perhaps more than a few poor decisions. But how exactly did spring break become a booze fueled
rite of passage for American co eds? And do today's college kids still get psyched about a week of sunburn, hangovers and fried shrimp specials? Or have they moved on to more respectable choices. Let's start with some history, ancient history. It turns out you can trace the roots of spring
break all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Apparently it could get stressful inventing democracy and Western philosophy all day, so the Greeks like to blow off some steam each spring with a three day awakening dedicated to Dionysus, the
god of wine and fertility. But the real start of spring break as we know it was in the mid nineteen thirties when a swimming coach from Colgate University in frigid Upstate, New York decided to take his team down to Florida for some early training at a brand new Olympic sized pool in sunny Fort Lauderdale. The idea clicked with other college swim coaches, and soon the spring training
migration became an annual tradition for swimmers nationwide. Since you can only swim so much, though the college athletes also excelled in partying, word got back to campus that Florida wasn't a bad place to spend Easter break, and the flow of northern college students to southern beaches started to
pick up through the nineteen forties and fifties. But the uncontested landmark moment in spring break history was the publication of a little book originally titled On Holy Spring but smartly changed to Where the Boys Are in nineteen fifty eight. Glendon Swarthout was an English professor at Michigan State University who tagged along with his students to witness their beat
nick Arish Shenanigans in Fort Lauderdale. Back then, hooking up was called house and Swarthout witnessed enough house playing, beach cruising, and beer chugging in Fort Lauderdale to fill his breakout novel, published in nineteen sixty. Mgm quickly turned Where the Boys Are into a blockbuster romantic comedy that made spring Break in Florida seemed like Paradise, or at least a version of Paradise where you sleep twenty people to a hotel room,
but the cute guy has a yacht. After Where the Boys Are, these spring break floodgates were officially wide open seemingly overnight. The numbers of college students visiting Fort Lauderdale over Easter vacation went from twenty thousand to fifty thousand, and estimated three hundred and fifty thousand students mobbed Fort
Lauderdale during spring break. In response, the town passed tougher public drinking laws, and the mayor even went on Good Morning America to tell spring breakers to take their balcony diving, drunk driving antics somewhere else, which they did. Other Florida beaches had already begun to pick up the overflow from Fort Lauderdale, including Panama City Beach and Daytona Beach. The latter became the shooting location for mtvs first ever spring
Break special, broadcast in nine six. By the midnighteteen nineties, MTVS annual Skinfest had become a cultural institution, showcasing live music performances and lots of Carmen Electra and a bikini from spring break destinations like Cancoon and Jamaica. Around the same time, another spring break tradition was born, far from the beaches of Florida or Mexico. In n three, some black college students in Atlanta, Georgia organized a picnic for
kids who were stuck on campus over spring break. This was a few years after the number one disco hit left Freak and Rick james Is Super Freak was still big, so the organizers decided to call their picnic gathering Freakneck. What started as a small get together with burgers, hot dogs and a boom box would explode over the next decade into the spring break destination for black college students and high school students and anyone else who felt like coming.
Hundreds of thousands of black co eds would cruise into Atlanta for Freakneck, clogging traffic day and night for a multi day street party. Freaknick cemented Atlanta as a mecca of black culture, but the party fizzled out around nine as the mayor cracked down hard on cruising. Gone are the heydays of MTV and Freaknik. But is spring break still a big deal for today's college kids. Numbers are hard to come by, but as recently as Panama City Beach was drawing five hundred thousand people a year to
its sugary white shores. Then after a particularly nasty spring break in Panama City, officials voted to ban all alcohol conception on the beach, which has apparently drained the life out of the party. What's clear is that college students today have a lot more choices for how they want to spend their spring break. The beaches are definitely still popular. According to a survey, fifty of college students planned to go somewhere warm for spring break, but so are trips
that emphasized meaning over mayhem. In nine, Habitat for Humanity became one of the first volunteer organizations to offer an alternative spring break to college students looking to give back over vacation. Since then, more than two hundred and sixty thousand students have participated in Habitats Collegiate Challenge, including seven thousand, according to a Habitat spokesperson. Today, there are hundreds of Alternative Spring Break chapters at colleges and universities across the
United States. Kelly Center is a sophomore psychology major at Michigan State University, where she's the education coordinator for Alternative Spartan Breaks, which organizes seventeen different trips each year for activities like trail construction or HIV advocacy. In an email, a Center says that more than two hundred m s U students sign up each year, even though they don't know where they're going until they're accepted into the program.
For them, it's about the experience, not the destination. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other hard partying topics, visit our home planet pow stuff work stock Com