Almost every Friday morning at 11 a.m., during my years at Brigham Young High School (1950-1956), our student body gathered to witness a student assembly.

These programs ran the gamut from student skits, to professional presentations by traveling assembly producers, to educational demonstrations by local service organizations such as the Provo City Fire Department.

Some were fun, some were boring, and some were real eye openers.

These welcome out-of-class events were always held in the College Hall auditorium. To get to the auditorium we walked from the rear of the historic Education building, heading east across a ground floor "connection way" which led to a flight of stairs going up to the second-floor auditorium.

The auditorium floor sloped slightly down toward the stage. It was polished by swabbing it with oil-soaked mops. The 1930s vintage wooden seats had once been stained brown and were mounted to cast-metal frames that had once been painted black. The wooden panels in each seat were curved not only for one’s back, but also for one’s posterior.

The seats folded up when not in use, and therefore the auditorium became a very noisy place when incoming audiences lowered them to be seated. College Hall seating was divided into three sections. As I recall, the large middle section held approximately 100 seats, and the two side sections had approximately 50 seats each.

The stage itself had a standard wood floor, and before events the performance area was hidden behind theater-style maroon curtains that opened in the middle as each production began.

To me it was not an impressive stage. In fact, I have seldom seen a stage, even in very uppity places, that looked like it had been recently swept or mopped. Our stage was no exception. Every assembly or production was performed on an inexcusably dusty stage floor, or so it seemed to me. I suppose this is one reason I have never fully appreciated theater productions. I got the feeling that if the folks putting on the show did not have enough sense of organization and care to clean the floor, then what else were they going to try to present to me that was slip-shod?

The Provo City Fire Department presented several assembly programs during the years that I attended our august institution. During my life I have appreciated the ferocious power and cleansing effect of fire, and perhaps this is where I learned such a deep respect for it.

In one demonstration we watched firemen place a gasoline-soaked rag in a container at the top of a rain gutter that was placed in a sloping position downward to another metal pan. Into this lower pan they placed a lighted candle. They taught us about the nature of gasoline fumes, explaining that the fumes always travel downward.

Then, bingo, sure enough, the invisible fumes would ignite as they reached the flame of the candle, and a flame would flash all the way up the gutter to the soaked rag. The firefighters immediately extinguished the flaming rag, but it was an unforgettable lesson in one of the vital aspects of fire prevention.

That ancient wooden stage, oil-soaked auditorium flooring, dusty cloth curtains, and even the entire wooden structure inside the brick-faced buildings, would have made a spectacular conflagration, had this demonstration ever gone wrong. But to my continuing surprise, we survived year after year with no mishaps! Can you imagine the elaborate safety precautions that would be required today for such a demonstration in such a firetrap with so many children present?

Our student body was composed of approximately fifty percent boys and fifty percent girls. Being an avid outdoorsman during my B.Y. High School days, I did not give much real thought to the fairer sex, with a couple of exhilarating exceptions.

One of the most eye-opening B.Y. High assemblies I ever attended was a talent assembly featuring a number of our classmates showing off their ballet talents.

I was probably just in the eighth or ninth grade. First you have to know that the style back then was for the young ladies to wear long felt skirts. These skirts covered them delightfully and fully from the waist down. I believe the skirts were called "Poodle Skirts" and they were worn with lightly starched crinoline blouses that seemed to have just been freshly put on. Bobby socks and oxfords completed these wonderful displays of flowering womanhood.

Keeping our thoughts clean and pure, as we were instructed, and because I was truly more interested in the duck season that was just about to open, I had never given much thought to the configuration of the young ladies' lower appendages. I guess, in my naiveté, I thought they were all very similar to each other, and that each young lady just came with standard issue legs.

Wow, when this entourage came out on stage and performed their jumpity jumps wearing their skimpy costumes including tutus, tights, and ballet slippers, a whole new world unfolded in front of my eyes! What a revelation it was to me to discover that girls' legs, even at a church-sponsored institution, came in all different sizes and shapes! I sat transfixed in my College Hall seat.

I have to confess that this singular experience gave me a completely different perspective on my life to come. This shock extended far beyond my current trials of homework, my anticipation of the upcoming hunting season, and my round-the-clock work of filling my bottomless teenage stomach.

The faculty took several votes: first, to unite in a policy denouncing the present Lack of Respect for the Rules; second, to call for a meeting with the Dean [of the BYU College of Education, a drastic step] and the Principal; and third, then be prepared to fight for Authority to clamp down on borderline jokes, and other forms of disrespect.

The Class of 1957 and some later classes probably lived in something of a police state when it came to their Friday morning student assemblies, if my guess is right.

Certainly if I had been a B.Y. High School administrator or faculty member at that time, the idea of students holding me out of a window by my heels would have guided my every action.

Call it "predangletal deterrence" -- or some such term.