Scooping the loop

Boomers who grew up in Storm Lake during the 1950s, 60s and 70s probably remember “Scooping the loop” when they were in high school here.

For those of you from different generations, this was the time-wasting tradition of driving in circles around Storm Lake, starting downtown and rolling south on Lake Avenue, then east on Lakeshore Drive until Flindt Drive, where you turned north and rolled along Milwaukee Avenue past the high school until you met up with Lake Avenue and repeated the circuit. Over and over again.

Kids who didn’t have cars rode with those who did. The whole circuit would take about 15 minutes, unless you stopped for gas at SuperAmerica (now Brew), grabbed a malt at Cone-E-Corner across the street from East School; or at A&W root beer where Dairy Queen is now; or exchanged gossip with classmates at the high school parking lot. Sometimes they’d stop at the Vista Theatre to visit friends who worked there and mooch popcorn.

Passing under the railroad overpass near the packing plant often required honking the car horn while holding the palm of your hand on the roof of the car. I never figured out if this was for good luck or what.

The kids didn’t cause much mischief, other than maybe racing the engine at a stoplight.

It certainly drove the old geezers crazy, wondering why these young whipper snappers were wasting time and gas. The price of gas in 1965 was 31 cents per gallon, equivalent to about $3 today.

I never had a car in high school, so I had to leech rides from friends who did. Pat and Eileen Cullen didn’t think their kids needed cars, especially when we were within walking distance of school.

Scooping the loop wasn’t just a Storm Lake thing in the 60s. Other communities, even large ones like Des Moines and Los Angeles, tried to contend with it and some even tried to outlaw it. If the cops in Des Moines spotted your car scooping the Capital City’s loop, it was a ticket for you. Again, the kids didn’t cause any trouble in Des Moines, it just annoyed the folks who didn’t approve of a generation with long hair and loud music having fun. It’s an eternal problem. Do you suppose Mary and Joseph were annoyed when Jesus wanted to borrow the family donkey to go check out what was going on with Peter and Paul in Nazareth?

It didn’t seem to bother the Storm Lake cops. They were pretty laid back. A couple weeks ago, after I wrote how respected Storm Lake Police Chief Russ Bair was back in the day, I received this note from a guy who was in high school then:

“How many small town cops would pull a 16-year-old over, find out why he was out at 2 a.m. when curfew was 11 p.m. and then follow him home with no citation rather than running him to the station and waking the kid’s parents up at that ungodly hour. Just one that I remember: Russ Bair. That small town cop did.”