Oh, what a tease of a title! Emblazoned with a titanic knickered lad and lass surveying a hellish scene of test tubes, car wrecks, and booze bottles, Youth Studies Alcohol tantalized me with its possibilities. "Could it be true?" thought I, "Could someone have written a young abuser's guide to alcohol in the early part of this century? Could this be the textbook to a lost class in adolescent alcohol appreciation; extra credit being awarded to the permanently snockered? Could today's young dipsomaniacs be lured away from chugalugging 31 Flavors swill like Goldschlager and Jagermeister, and turned on to the sophisticated delights of brandy and twenty-year-old scotch?"

Alas, such was not the case. Youth Studies Alcohol--published in 1936--is a final sigh from the forces of temperance in America's post-Prohibition period. Despite this, while Youth Studies Alcohol finds rum less demonic than, say, Carrie Nation did, it nevertheless achieves with facts and figures what Nation couldn't do with her hatchet. It makes booze boring; REALLY boring.

Youth Studies Alcohol opens with a basketball game between the Beaverton Tigers (our heroes) and the Marshall Arrows (boo, hiss). In due time, Tigers' captain Bob Stanhope and fellow stout-hearted WASP teammates Jack Thornton and "Slim" Ellerton quickly rout the Arrows, leading the team to a certain shot at the state championships.

Sadly, tragedy awaits.

Flushed with victory, Beaverton High student Ed Fitzgerald (Hello? Mr. Lightfoot?) decides to celebrate at the Paradise Inn. Once there, Ed--who has never known the taste of liquor--bends to peer pressure and his ethnicity's inherent weakness for firewater by ordering not one, but three beers. An ordinarily cautious driver (as the book takes great pains to explain), Ed is besotted with beer-soaked machismo, leaps into his father's car, and tools down the back lanes of Beaverton. Inevitably, he passes the very car transporting the Tigers' star players, bumping them into a ditch. The result: Thornton's leg is broken in two places, "Slim's" eye is shredded by flying windshield shards, and Bob Stanhope is paralyzed for life. Ouchie.

DUI laws are apparently a distant dream at this point in time. Ed confesses to his principal Mr. Clark, who, rather than calling the cops, states with steely determination, "[L]et us agree here and now that we shall really try to find out just what it was that changed you from one of the most careful drivers in this town to a reckless, brainless fool who nearly snuffed out the lives of his best friends." To this Ed emphatically pumps the principal's hand and claims, "You're right, Mr. Clark, I'd give my right arm if it had never happened." Armed with this new resolve to trade one of his limbs for all four of Bob Stanhope's, Ed, oddly enough, disappears from the book entirely.

Beaverton High, on the other hand, is in a dither over the accident; particularly the Junior High students who, coincidentally, are in the very age group Youth Studies Alcohol targets. The particular youths studying alcohol inhabit Miss Williams' homeroom; a perfect group of those ubiquitous safety robots so beloved by children's safety manual writers. Sensible to the point of annoyance, each kid reacts to any suggestion that using alcohol for any purpose other than massaging sore muscles or manufacturing antifreeze is the damndest thing he or she ever heard. WHY would anyone want to lose control of their inhibitions? WHY would anyone rather hoist a few than play a rousing game of Johnny-on-a-pony? Miss Williams' kids scratch their heads over these and other compelling hootch conundrums to the point of drawing blood.

Example:

"What I can't understand," said Bill, "is why in the world people will take something into their bodies that can do this to their nerves and muscles."

"That's easy to see," broke in Ned, "They don't know what harm is being done. They are out for the 'kick' that it gives them."

Lois raised her hand. "I wonder if people don't use alcohol because they are fooled into thinking it does things, which it does not do; or is it because they do not know the amount of damage done?"

Interestingly, Miss Williams herself plays a remarkably passive role in the book. Occasionally offering guidance in the form of suggestions, it is nevertheless her students who come the book's conclusion that temperance (if not, as implied, total abstinence) is the only sane choice. I think it's unlikely that most teachers would follow her example, choosing instead to poke and prod their students into making the "correct" choice. Reading between the lines, Youth Studies Alcohol allows for no dissenting opinions; even the classroom activities provide instructions on gaffing the desired results.

Obviously, it's easy to scoff at Youth Studies Alcohol's portrayal of Miss Williams' students as precocious bluenoses; what is astonishing, though, is that this hackneyed method of putting young minds on the straight and narrow remains the standard of childhood health and safety education. To be sure, some kids are easily browbeaten into emulating their straightlaced fictional counterparts; for the greater number, however, trial and error will remain the rule.

In reading Youth Studies Alcohol my mind wandered. I imagined Ed, Ned and Ted holed up in barn loft, sharing a bottle of bourbon nipped from Mr. Gower's dry goods store. Three sheets to the wind, they unwittingly ignite the hay with a carelessly tossed cigarette while crossing streams out the loft window. I pictured Lois at eighteen, throwing her skirt up over her head after downing ten shots of gin at a college mixer. Thirty years later she's popping Valiums like Pez after packing her seven kids off to school. I envisioned a blotto and naked Bill--his ass wrapped in duct tape--stumbling down the highway after being dumped by his frat brothers during rush week. "They'll learn," I thought to myself, "Oh, how they'll learn."

*The classroom project appendix, however, is a hoot, offering the following sadistic experiment:

2. Place a goldfish in a jar containing distilled water and another in a jar containing a solution of alcohol and water of the same proportions as that used in experiment No. 1 [Author's Note: Experiment No. 1 requires that you fill one jar 2/3rds full with water and the other with an equal amount of alcohol. The text suggests spirits of cologne--whatever that may be--but I've always believed that fish goes best with white wine.] The fish in the solution will live but a short while. Observe also the effect on the coloring of the scales when the dead fish is dropped into pure alcohol.