Written and Illustrated by Antsy McClain
From Valentine’s Day to the Cooties, who we are as adults is largely shaped on grade school playgrounds
There were many maladies and sicknesses to endure when I was a kid — measles, mumps, chicken pox — but none were scarier than the Cooties Outbreak of 1975.
The Cooties didn’t take any lives, as I recall 1, but it caused irreparable damage to the self esteem and emotional well-being of countless grade schoolers in the 1970s and ’80s. You might have been one of them.
For those unfamiliar with the Cooties, I will do my best to explain. For reasons I can only call malicious prejudice based on class, clothing and/or outward appearance, an unfortunate child would be singled out to have the Cooties. The committee who took it upon themselves to make such designations were invariably the more popular, better looking, better dressed kids. But the one thing they had most in common was this: They were mean.
After appointing themselves Cootie Detectors, the mean kids would find some poor, unsuspecting child at recess, sitting on the monkey bars, minding their own business. One of the Cootie Detectors (who we will call Brenda) would tap the shoulder of the Cootie Carrier (who we will call Rachel) and then tap another kid — also minding their own business (we’ll call him Ronnie) — and loudly exclaim, “Ronnie has Rachel’s Cooties!”

The entire playground would then shriek in horror and run as far away from the carrier as possible, knowing that contracting the Cooties would mean complete social ostracism, which, just below sudden death or audibly passing gas in class, is the worst thing that could happen to a 12-year-old in grade school.
Not getting rid of the Cooties and carrying them to one’s grave doomed one to a life of scorn, ridicule and total failure in every endeavor. 2
Once the Cooties started to spread, it became necessary for every child to inoculate themselves, either by crossing their fingers (the universal symbol of immunity) or by receiving a Cootie shot, which was administered, not surprisingly, by one of the original mean kids who would charge 25 cents to stamp the back of your hand with an inked-up pencil eraser. Brenda reportedly bought a bicycle with the proceeds. This was the first con game or racket to which I was ever exposed, long before pyramid schemes; three-card monte; or health, car and life insurance.3
Sadly, I have learned that the Cooties are not eradicated.4 The Cooties are still going strong, passed around on elementary school playgrounds as we speak. Studies show that 88.7% of grade schoolers will contract the Cooties at least once before they are 14. Many contract the disease repeatedly, forgetting to cross their fingers or not being able to afford the 25 cents for a Cootie shot.
Valentine’s Day as a third-grader
Valentine’s Day in elementary school was littered with social landmines many of us recall with dread. Our participation was mandatory, forced upon us by teachers who made us bring decorated shoeboxes from home with the hopes that they would be filled with love.
Mine was evidently the only family who didn’t keep empty shoeboxes lying around, so that year, I hastily emptied a box of Wheaties and glued some hearts on it for my Valentine’s box, cutting a slit somewhere near Bruce Jenner’s head for the card slot.
The Valentine’s cards were sold in sheets with perforated edges that could be torn out and personalized. We would pick them out at the grocery store. Favorite pop icons like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck from “Looney Tunes” would don the full-color front while the back was left blank for writing. Each package included three sizes, and the larger ones were reserved for that someone special, going down in size and, well, importance. The small cards were the most plentiful, and if you got a tiny one with only the person’s name on the back, it was considered a third grade brush off, as if to say, “Don’t get any ideas. Ms. Beason made me give you this.”
The message was clear, misconstrued only by the most dense among us. My friend, Larry Strauss, for example, carried an undying flame in his heart for Sara Taylor. When she wrote her name on the back of a Tweety Bird card that included the phrase, “Be Mine” on it, he swooned. But everybody knew that “Be Mine” was like saying “Season’s Greetings,” and it didn’t really mean anything. I even showed him one of my own Tweety Bird “Be Mine” cards from Vanessa Swanson, who was clearly out of my league, but Larry didn’t listen. And that was a good thing, as it turned out. He and Sara have been married 37 years now. They have three kids and a new grandbaby.
As soon as we got to class the morning of Valentine’s Day, we placed our boxes on our desks and went from desk to desk, depositing our personalized cards in every box. I chose one of the larger cards for Debbie Sanford. She had long, deep dimples that framed her smile like parentheses and big brown eyes that seemed too big for her head. I opened her lid to put my card inside, and I saw dozens of other, bigger cards, glittered up and adorned with cut-out hearts, some with candy taped to the outside. Brian Spencer had even stuffed a Whitman’s Sampler in there. It was just a four-piece, but those were, like, a buck twenty-five. Where did he have that kind of money? And no one said we could give out Whitman’s Samplers. Brian was clearly breaking the rules. I saw Debbie at recess later, daintily eating those little chocolate squares with Brian hovering over her casually. He had been held back a year, so he was a foot taller than the rest of us, and despite him barely being able to read, I didn’t have a chance. The two of them were laughing at something, and I had to hand it to him: Rules or no rules, $1.25 was a small price to pay to hear Debbie Sanford laugh with a mouth full of chocolate.
Marty Miller was the George Clooney of our elementary school, every girl’s favorite. His Valentine’s box was always stuffed with large, personalized, multicolored envelopes containing those big 75 cent cards our mothers would read thoughtfully at the drug store. I don’t think my whole package of Valentines cracked a 50-cent piece, and here these girls were dropping major coin on one guy. Lucky stiff.

We all looked at Marty with envy as he sat with his gluttonous, foil-covered shoebox on the corner of his desk. Some girls clearly gave him two or three. Mathematically, it wasn’t possible to have so many Valentines cards in a class this size. I shook my Wheaties box and heard several small cards hitting the sides with a sad, lonely flutter.
Toward the end of the day, however, I opened my Wheaties box to see a medium-sized card from a sweet girl named Annie Meadows. She was a cute, tomboyish farm girl with kind, green eyes who incidentally ended the Cooties pandemic on our playground later that year.
Tired of the nonsense, Annie exclaimed loudly to everyone at recess that she was born with a natural immunity to the bug.
“All I have to do is hug everyone on this playground,” she yelled, locking eyes with mean Brenda. “And you will all be immune forever!” We uncrossed our fingers and ran to Annie, who gave us each a warm hug. She smelled like hay from her farm and spearmint from the gum she was happily chomping. We left her arms and filed past mean Brenda with a sneer, some of us sticking out our tongues in brave defiance. The Cooties were no more, ended with the same artificial, made-up fanfare as when they arrived.
We would all grow up and move on with our lives, but the residue of those rituals lingers on to this day. We’re adults now, but we still carry around those foil-covered shoeboxes with all the glitter and construction paper, the memories roiling around inside us. We can take them out and look at them and sigh, sifting through the joys, the fears and the wounds each brittle little Valentine’s card might have contained.

And I was lucky to have guideposts that helped me through: the Annie Meadowses and the teachers who smiled when they saw me and made me think I was special.
I got through the Cooties and Valentine’s Day — even that awkward middle school dance a few years later. All the social landmines of elementary school were survived with the help of a few good humans.
Walking home that Valentine’s Day with my Wheaties box tucked under my arm, I thought a lot about life. It was nice to know that love will always be love and that life doesn’t have to be complicated.
Despite the drama of elementary school playgrounds, it’s nice to know that some things never change — like Wheaties, Looney Tunes and guys like Bruce Jenner, who will always be there to show me the way.
Listen to “The Last Man on Earth to Get the Cooties”
Antsy McClain is a Nashville-adjacent singer-songwriter, author and graphic artist who is proudly Cootie-free. Go to unhitched.com for his books, music and events. Use this QR code to download “The Last Man on Earth to Get the Cooties” FREE to readers of The Tennessee Magazine. Yes, he really wrote a song about this.

A brief, not very helpful history of Valentine’s Day
There are more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Catholic church today, and a good many of them are martyrs, killed violently for their convictions. Saint Valentine is no exception.
Valentine’s Day has its origins during the reign of Emperor Claudius II (A.D. 214-270), a ruthless military leader who was known for conquering Britain. Julius Caesar attempted to conquer Britain but failed and now only has a salad named after him.
Wanting to be more than a namesake for a simple but delicious salad containing ground anchovies, Claudius II put all of his eggs, so to speak, in one basket: war. He famously outlawed marriage for young, military-age men because he saw their only value as soldiers in battle. Claudius II had a lot of territory to conquer, and married men with children would just get in the way. Let’s face it, all the letter writing and pining for loved ones are simply counterproductive to world domination.
A young priest named Valentine saw this decree as government overreach and secretly performed marriages of young couples, hence gaining him a reputation as a bit of a romantic. Valentine was imprisoned once Claudius II found out. While in prison, it is believed that the first Valentine’s greeting was written to a young girl. He signed it, “From your Valentine.”
He was beheaded, but other priests, inspired by Valentine’s rebellion to Claudius II, continued the marital practices despite great risk to their lives.
It was a poet, not surprisingly, who first romanticized the holiday, officially turning it from a religious symbol to what we now know as a day for honoring lovers.
Geoffrey Chaucer, famous for “The Canterbury Tales,” wrote “Parlement of Foules” in the 1300s. It’s some 700 lines, more than 100 pages of, well, birds trying to mate. The plot goes like this: Three male eagles have their eye on a female eagle, and drama ensues during the competitive courtship. Not one of the eagles, as it turns out, is successful. And this explains real life and love better than any poem I’ve ever read. I can only assume the female eagle settled down with a nice egret somewhere with a degree in finance and a very comfortable nest in the south of France. And who could blame her?
It is my suspicion that, if not for our hormones that pull us together, men and women would live completely separate lives until we died off, leaving behind a lot of really bad art and poetry.
Sometime in the 18th century, friends and loved ones across Europe and all over America began exchanging greeting cards with wishes of love and devotion. These cards began to be called valentines and are still called that today. Greeting card companies, candy makers and florists soon saw the enormous earning potential of manipulating our basic need for human connection and cashed in on our collective wish to love and be loved.
Footnotes that will make you more intelligent and better looking
1 Although I remember an incident where John “Blimpy” Campbell was running away from a Cooties “carrier” and ran headlong into a shed, for which he was briefly hospitalized. A Blimpy-shaped dent remained in the aluminum siding of the shed for years afterward. We would gather around it sometimes and recall with reverence how the Cooties Outbreak shaped our lives in much the same way Blimpy shaped the dent in that shed.
2 Adults were immune, by the way. This was strictly a childhood disease. If you tried to pass it on to an adult, they’d just look at you like you were crazy. Of course I tried this. I once tapped the playground monitor, math teacher, Ms. Fritz, on the elbow and she just laughed at me demoniacally. It was her normal laugh, actually. She is the reason I hate math.
3 This playground practice might seem like an innocent thing to some, a mere manifestation of “kids will be kids,” but if you’ve been the target of such ridicule, it can be as damaging as India’s caste system, which is also totally arbitrary, made up by the “haves” to exclude the “have nots” from their social circles. These practices are established to keep people in their “place,” and I’ll bet the caste system also started on a grade school playground generations ago by someone saying, “You’ve got Rishaan’s Cooties!” This can also explain our tendency to create country clubs and elite secret societies like Costco, where membership cards are needed to buy really good rotisserie chicken.
4 My 10-year old granddaughter, Anna Jane, reported to me that the Cooties are still very much alive on her school playground in North Carolina. Her face turned grim when I asked her about it, and she said, “Yes, some kids play that game. I don’t like it.” Anna Jane, a sweet, sensitive child — who also happens to be extremely intelligent, very talented and quite beautiful — said it made her sad to see some of the other kids get picked on like that. I then made chocolate chip pancakes for her and her little brother, Henry, who is also quite amazing, super intelligent and unbelievably handsome. If we ever meet, dear reader, I have pictures. Lots of pictures. You’ll see what I mean. I also have three other remarkable people who call me Papa, and I have photos of them as well, which I know you’ll love to look at, one after the other. There’s a video of 7-year-old Emma singing “I Want to Be an Elf” at her Christmas concert that is particularly remarkable. I don’t know how “America’s Got Talent” hasn’t snatched her up yet. Her brother, David, is also extraordinarily awesome in every way, and the newest, Dawson, just a few weeks old now, should be on labels of baby food, I swear. Anyway …