TRN Roundtable: Back to School

There’s something special about the back‑to‑school season when we were younger. It was a time when the air felt a little crisper, the store aisles a little brighter, and the possibilities of a new year seemed to stretch out like an open notebook. Before social media, before online shopping, before everything became streamlined and digital, going back to school was an event. It was a ritual built from the smell of new folders, the excitement of picking out the perfect lunchbox, and the nervous thrill of wondering who would be in your homeroom.

At TRN, we love revisiting those moments, because they were more than errands and checklists. They were memories. They were the small traditions that shaped childhood. So we gathered a handful of our writers and some friends to share their own stories from those back‑to‑school days. Each piece captures a little slice of what made that season feel so full of hope and color.

Together, these stories paint a picture of a time when a new school year felt like a fresh start, and the little things made all the difference. So check them all out and if you’d like, leave a comment at the end about your own experience. Enjoy!

Back to School 1993

Back to school in 1993, the final year of school!  What would the year bring?  What would it look like?  What will I do after the following June upon graduating?

My school year started off with a bang!  Concluding the following year, I totaled my very first car within 3 months and was driving a sibling’s loaner Ford LTD.  Upon starting senior year, I was driving a nearly all black 1986 Plymouth Turismo and my 1964 Dodge step van that I had picked up during the summer.  Only a few weeks in while attending the vocational technical school, I learned that a position was opening at the local radio station.  Promptly applying for the position, I found myself starting the year with not only one part time job, but now two!  Yet, what would I do with my future?

As the weeks ticked by, our late co-founder Jason Gross and I would frequently head out to our hangout place, Beef’s, on the weekends to play pinballs, arcade, and billiard games while jamming to the jukebox.  I worked more at the radio station and gleaned more from my electronics lessons at the vo-tech school as I became more interested in joining the US Air Force to aptly prepare myself for the adulthood-future.  While at the time I didn’t hold my future to such light, looking back “my future seemed so bright, I gotta wear shades.”

Peering back on the past, I miss the radio station, miss the simplicity of going to work, hanging out, and driving down the back roads of central Pennsylvania.  It holds so much fond memories that it prompted our late friend Jason Gross to found Rediscoverthe80s.com where he and I reminisce about the 1980s.  While I did inherit it, it is my endeavor to keep Rediscover the 80s alive via articles and podcasts.  Check us out!

Wyatt Bloom
Wyatt runs Rediscoverthe80s.com and is the host of the Rediscover the 80s podcast as well as the MASKast podcast.

It Came from Fashion Bug

Back to school is about new beginnings, with new classes, new faces, and even a new you – yeah? And while I can almost taste the nostalgia and sentiment by way of Lunchables crackers and cafeteria-brand chocolate milk, only one true-blue first day-of-school memory remains complete and vacuum-sealed in the archives of my brain.

It was September 1993, and my first day of 5th grade. It’s significant because after years of Catholic-school hallways, nuns for educators, and lame uniforms, this was my entry year into the public school system. This was my year to establish my identity because, after all, I was picking out my own clothes. And I couldn’t mess up, not on my first day. 

So, what did I do? I messed up, of course. Ten-year-old me wore a pair of jean shorts with a pink-and-purple paisley print. Okay, fine, it was the 90s. But the shirt clenched the cringe: it was a white puffy shirt. Think marshmallow. Think pirate. Think Seinfeld. While I can’t recall my exact shoes, I’d bet money they were white high-top sneakers and white socks.

But honestly, my embarrassment is wholly in hindsight. Fifth grade proved to be an actual new beginning. I made friends, many of whom would last through high school. I was kind of fearless for no good reason, running for class president as the new kid (and losing), but also playing the lead in the school play. I wrote letters to crushes and, when asked, pretended they weren’t from me. And I got hooked on R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series – take that, Sister Juanita!

Fifth grade was good, but 33 years on, and the puffy and paisley still haunt me (and my closet). Just as clearly as I remember wearing them on that first day, I also remember never wearing them again. At some point, they were given away, and hopefully, a kid with a keener fashion sense and a sewing kit turned them into something great, passable, or a cleaning rag. 

Joanna Skrabala (aka Bloody Popcorn)
Joanna runs the incredibly fun Bloody Popcorn blog and you can follow her on Bluesky at @bloodypopcorn.bsky.social

Kevin’s Back to School Memories

As my son gets ready to head back to school with his Chromebook and apps I feel sadness that he will never experience the hunt that was back to school shopping. 

Today Walmart and Target exist in most areas and Amazon rules above them all. I long for the 1980s and 90s when no one store had everything that was needed or wanted. We’re going to need all the supplies, plus for me – new clothes that are allowed under the school’s uniform policy. Time to drive all over town for the next few weeks. 

Over my school going years in upstate New York we had many of the best department stores – Hills, Ames, Woolworth, Nichols, Zayre, McCrory’s, K-Mart, even Sears and JC Penny – now gone forever. “What stores are we going to today, Mom?” If there was more than one stop to make, then I had to play the odds. This store has folders I could be happy with, but what if the next store has even better ones? There’s no way Mom is going to buy twice the number of folders I need. (Side note, there were no cooler folders than the extreme sports ones featuring animals. Gorilla dunking a basketball. Panther blocking a soccer goal. I would still buy those today.) This debate is repeated for three ring binders, notebooks, pencils, pens and every other tool of school I’m forgetting. 

School uniforms were easy. As long as it was an acceptable color and fit, I didn’t care if they were name brand or brand X. However, at the time gym class did not have a uniform policy and that is where the clothing shopping rose to peak importance. What will look cool? What will allow me to express some individuality? What will allow some view into who I am outside of school but not mark me as “different”? Spoiler alert, heavy metal bands and comic book t-shirts were not the answer. Neither was wearing head to toe Raiders logos because everyone cool was wearing them, and not being exposed for knowing nothing of the team or the ability to name a single player. 

Not today though. All of the Chromebooks look the same. Nike and Under Armor cost as much as Converse and Columbia. These kids are so ingrained in meme culture if they were ever picked on for wearing something they could say it’s being done ironically and everyone would believe it. Maybe we can view some of this as progress. But I would rather promise to behave and focus during the shopping trip in hopes I can also get a new G.I. Joe while we’re at the store. 

Kevin Decent
Keep up with Kevin at his blog, Hellions Teams, acned check all of his posts here at TRN.

Those Metal Lunchboxes

When I was a kid, back to school meant loading up on the usual litany of school supplies. First it was Big Chief tablets, Husky pencils. Those items gave way to folders and No. 2 pencils and eventually to Trapper Keepers, loose leaf paper and erasable pens. However, from second grade through sixth grade, one school supply was a constant for me: the metal lunchbox. Early on, more often than not, my mom fixed my lunch for me so I carried a lunchbox almost every day and every year I talked my parents into buying me a new one.

Star Wars (1977, second grade) – the one lunchbox to rule them all! I was a seven year old that had to have EVERYTHING Star Wars related. Including this. After the second grade school year was over, I used it to store action figures in.

Battlestar Galactica (1978, third grade) – I absolutely loved this movie. At this point in time, it was a toss up if I loved BSG or Star Wars more. I had BSG toys and even a t-shirt with Cylons on it. Like the one before it, this lunchbox became a container for my BSG-related ships and action figures.

Buck Rogers (1979, fourth grade) – Wilma Deering settled the debate over which I liked better. It was, of course, Buck Rogers and my first big crush (as big a crush as a nine year old could have). I’m not real sure what happened to this after the school year was over.

The Empire Strikes Back (1980, fifth grade) – order was restored to my science fiction pantheon in 1980. We moved to a new town at the start of my fifth grade year and I went to one school the first half of the school year then moved across town to start at a new school the second half. At my first school, there were a lot of kids on free school lunches, so they didn’t carry lunchboxes. I was an oddity of sorts when I walked in with mine. Subsequently, my lunchbox was stolen one day. For the rest of my time at that school, I had to carry my lunch in paper sacks. Little did I know that my parents had bought me a new one and gave it to me for Christmas to use at the new school. It was around this time that I started to realize that people my age were carrying metal lunchboxes less and less. Like the original Star Wars lunch box, they both were eventually sold in garage sales.

Clash of the Titans (1981, sixth grade) – by 1981, plastic and soft side lunchboxes were becoming more prevalent. Because of that, less and less kids my age were carrying metal lunchboxes. Only us nerds were still into them, apparently. I was starting to eat lunch at school more and more but when I took my lunch, it was in this beauty. This sat in the garage for several years after sixth grade was over. I believe, at one point, my dad used it to store some of his garage junk. Eventually, it just disappeared.

By the time I hit seventh grade, I had eschewed carrying any type of lunchbox at all and primarily ate lunch at school. Years later, when my own kids bought lunch boxes, I would tell them about the bad ass lunch boxes I had in my youth (they did not care one bit, in case you were wondering). But I can tell you this, the ones my kids picked out were never as cool as the metal beauties my friends and I had.

Eric Vardeman
Eric is a charter member here at TRN and you can read all of his articles here, and co-founder of This Nostalgic Life newsletter.

Back to School ’93

My most memorable back to school experience was in the Fall of 1993 when I got to move to New Jersey for 6 months to live with my Grandma in the house/town my Mom had grown up in. It was a fun option while my Mom was traveling around Europe on a college art class trip. I was so excited to hang out with my cousins and experience life in what was the exact opposite of the Southern California childhood I had grown up with. This included enrolling in the local middle school, which was operating out of the building that used to be the high school that my Mom had attended in the 50s. It was so fun to walk the same halls that she had traveled decades earlier.

I was thrilled to have an allowance provided by my parents to go shopping for my new school supplies completely on my own. Being a big comic book fan, I bought a Batman The Animated Series pencil box and matching set of pencils, mini-notepads and erasers to go inside. This really felt like I was getting away with something by bringing this “contraband” to school. I mean there were bright, colorful images from my favorite cartoon of the moment ready to grab my attention when I got bored with math class!

There was also a summer reading requirement at the school, so I went to the book store and bought a copy of the original Jurassic Park novel by Michael Crichton. I had just seen the movie in the theaters multiple times that Summer and was excited to read the source material. While I was at the bookstore I also bought The Making of Jurassic Park book filled with behind the scenes details and images of how that dinosaur adventure was brought to life. These were a great compliment to the Weird Al Yankovic album I had brought with me to New Jersey, “Alapalooza”, which featured a parody of the Jurassic Park logo on the cover.

The biggest thrill of that back to school experience for me was getting my own locker. 6th grade was still elementary school in California, so being entrusted with a combination to my own private storage space felt like a big deal. Plus, I had only ever seen lockers on TV shows and in movies, so it felt like I had stepped into the role of the cool new transfer student bringing his West Coast style to the New Jersey locals. It was a magical back to school experience and I will always cherish it.

Adam Pope
Adam is the host of Wizards: The Podcast Guide to Comics, Remember That Show, and Rental Return podcasts right here at TRN.

Trapper Keepers Were Status Symbols

The Trapper Keeper was one of those rare school supplies that felt like more than just a binder. When I first got one, it felt like a small piece of freedom tucked into my backpack. Mead had created something that didn’t just hold paper. It held personality. Before we had phones or social media or any real way to express ourselves, that bright, glossy cover became the first thing that felt like mine.

What made it special was how different it looked from everything else on the shelf. There were neon grids, laser beams, sunsets, puppies, race cars, unicorns, and wild geometric patterns that didn’t look like anything I had ever seen in a classroom. Picking one felt like choosing a version of myself. And when I opened it, the sound of the Velcro made me feel a little more confident, like I had my life together even if the inside was full of doodles and half-finished homework.

That’s why the Trapper Keeper still sticks with me. It wasn’t about the assignments I stuffed inside it. It was about the feeling it gave me, the sense that I could shape my own little corner of the world. Seeing one now doesn’t bring back memories of schoolwork. It brings back the memory of possibility, of being young and hopeful and convinced that a binder with laser beams on it meant I was ready for anything.

Mickey Yarber
Mickey is the Editor-in-Chief here at TRN, and also shares his own personal pop culture memories at Retro Ramblings.

Back to School Fashion Flop

When I was a kid my sister and I only went shopping for new clothes once a year. Around the time the school year ended my mom would take us shopping for next year’s school clothes — five shirts and five pairs of blue jeans. The clothes were put on layaway, paid off over the summer, and picked up a few days before the following school year began.

When I was in sixth grade, I had no concept of brand names or clothing fads. All my friends dressed the same way I did. We all wore t-shirts or off-brand Polos with blue jeans that started the year with a crease in the leg and ended with holes in the knees. It wasn’t until I entered middle school that I began to notice there were kids who dressed… cool? That year I saw breakdancers, skaters, and metal heads. In the cafeteria, all the girls who looked like Madonna sat on one side while the ones who looked like they were part of Prince’s entourage sat on the other. And then there were the rest of us, kids like me in our boring shirts and blue jeans. I vowed that 8th grade would be different. In 8th grade, I would be one of the cool kids.

When it came time to shop for next year’s clothes, I began picking random things that I thought looked cool. My mom reminded me that whatever I picked out, I would be wearing the entire next year. What could possibly go wrong? On the first day of 8th grade I walked into school a new man. No longer was I the kid wearing blue jeans and a striped Polo. No, I was the kid wearing an Ocean Pacific t-shirt underneath a Miami Vice jacket with padded shoulders, gray cargo pants, and a pair of bright pink Converse. I even had a “Footloose” spiked haircut, except I didn’t put any product in my hair so my head just looked like a big puffy mushroom. If there was one thing everyone in school agreed on it was that I could make cool clothes look uncool. While riding the bus home from school that day all I could think about was all the pairs of cargo pants, surfing and skateboarding shirts, and Don Johnson jackets I had hanging in my bedroom closet. 8th grade was a long, long year for me.

Rob “Flack” O’Hara
Rob “Flack” O’Hara is a writer, blogger, podcaster, and YouTuber. Links to his social media and podcasts can be found at RobOHara.com/Links

High School Hell

High school was kind of hell for me. It wasn’t that I was bullied to the point of getting into fights, though I was bullied a lot, or that I didn’t fit in (I didn’t by choice.) It was more that I knew there was this finite time left of being a kid. I was one of those guys that wanted to keep using a lunchbox two years after it was no longer cool to do that, or to keep buying toys ad reading comics all the time. I had a close-knit group of two or three friends who were similar, and we were essentially a clique onto ourselves. We weren’t cool, but were friendly with the cool kids. We were into art and music, but were hardly the “Art Crowd” that were constantly ditching class and getting stoned in the bathrooms. We were smart, but none of us were going to make the short list for valedictorian. We hung out as much as we could in school, but always afterwards and were usually doing gaming sleepovers every weekend all the way through our senior year.

But what we had was perfect for me. And I knew it had an expiration date on it. I had absolutely no plans of going to college. I watched my sister, the smartest, most popular person I knew, go to university twice and saw it wreck her. I knew that if Beth couldn’t handle it, I would crack like an egg. It didn’t help that there was no money for it either. All the way back to entering 9th grade, I knew that a countdown had started where I had four more good years with my friends before they were going to bail and go to college, leaving me behind. So, for the entire four years of high school there was this constant battle in my head between watching the time slip away and trying my best to be in the moment, and to enjoy what time I did have.

By Senior year the sands in the hourglass were getting so thin that I felt my friends slipping away faster than I’d hoped. One of us applied for vocational short days and would leave school at noon to go work his job at the supermarket, having the opportunity to put in almost full-time hours at age 17. Another friend was pulling away from us because of some personal reasons. By the end of the first couple weeks of school, I could clearly see that I was already sort of on my own. I’d had a plan all through high school, working just hard enough to knock out all of my required credits as quickly as possible, doubling up on some math and history so that I would have an almost free final semester filled with nothing but electives.

I filled that last four and a half months with noting but Art classes, taking photography, 3-D art, Drawing and Painting (for a third time), and even convinced the art teacher to let me audit a second go at 2-D art, and to create an Independent Study course in illustration. Independent Study courses were rare in the area of Georgia where I was at the time (as my teacher told me), but she signed off on it, and I ended up using that time to take naps in the photography dark room under the auspices that I was developing film and making prints that I was going to use for illustration projects. I took hold of the school experience that was typically foisted upon me and I remade it into something that I wanted. I ended up learning way more in those last few months because I was engaged and in the driver’s seat of a lot of what I was studying. I’d unlocked the way that I learn best.

Though my original idea was to give myself an easy end to my senior year, what I’d inadvertently done was provide myself with a way to cope with my friends drifting away, off on a different course. I spent that time finding myself, giving myself projects to work on, goals to achieve, and the space to fail on my own and to pick myself back up afterwards. It was a blueprint that I would carry forward and it gave me the guts to move out of my folk’s place a little less than a year later. While my friends went off to college, I worked two jobs and started supporting myself, and eventually I found my place at a job that I loved, making decent money without having to do it the “way that you’re supposed to.”

Shawn Robare
You can find plenty more from Shawn at his site Plastic Rocket Pop where he shares tons of memories of pop culture’s past.

Looking back on these stories, it is easy to see why the back‑to‑school season meant so much to kids growing up in the eighties and nineties. It was never just about pencils or notebooks or new sneakers. It was about the feeling of possibility that came with a fresh start, the excitement of small traditions, and the comfort of knowing that certain things would always be waiting for you when August rolled around. Every writer here brought a different memory to the table, yet together they remind us how universal those moments were.

As you finish reading, we hope these reflections stirred up a few memories of your own. Maybe it was the smell of a brand new Trapper Keeper, or the thrill of picking out the perfect lunchbox, or the simple joy of seeing old friends after a long summer. Back‑to‑school season was a patchwork of little experiences that shaped who we were, and revisiting them reminds us why that era still holds such a special place in our hearts. Here’s to the memories, the stories, and the simple magic of starting fresh.