One of the saddest episodes shown recently, and repeatedly, on the television news channels was based on an alleged ceremony in Illinois. What may have been a traditional initiation event involving senior and junior class girls from a Chicago area high school degenerated into a pathetic mess. As a result of this obvious mayhem, five of the junior class girls required medical treatment.

This is the time of the year when graduations are taking place all over the nation. These &uot;rites of passage&uot; involve students in kindergarten, grade school, middle and high schools, and colleges and universities. For these graduates, their parents and relatives, and friends and neighbors, these are the occasions to take pride in worthy accomplishments and real passages to newer stages in life. It certainly isn’t a time for stupidity or violence.

Watching those Illinois girls and their video-taped actions, reminded me of a really strange initiation rite which was once a stupid student tradition in my original home town out in Oregon.

In that era the community’s educational system was based on four grade schools. For grades seven and eight the students went to junior high school, or what folks now like to call middle school, in the central part of the city. And just across the street was the high school.

One could assume that the transition from grades eight to nine would involve nothing more than a spring graduation, summer vacation, and going across the street to another school in the fall. This scenario worked for the girls, but not for the boys.

For an unknown number of years the &uot;rite of passage&uot; for the boys to officially go from the junior high to the high school was to cross the street. However, this movement was closely supervised by the seniors and other boys in high school and involved more than just crossing the street from one building to another.

This alleged local tradition, or symbolic stupidity, was based on the concept of the freshmen boys gathering on the junior high side of the street at a designated time during the first week of school. On the other side of the street were the upper class boys.

The initiation ceremony was based on a very simple act. All the incoming ninth graders had to do was run across the street. However, they had to wait until a car or truck came along, then dash across the street right in front of the moving vehicle. Evidently the gimmick was to come as close to the front fender as possible and hope the driver could quickly find the brake pedal.

I’m not too sure if all the ninth graders went in one group, or in smaller groups. I also have no idea as to whether or not the local police, school administrators, parents, or vehicle owners actually tried to stop this insane stunt. (After all, kids will be kids.) Anyway, this particular high school initiation caper came to a sudden end one September afternoon.

In one of the wild dashes across the street, a freshman boy stumbled and fell in front of a car. One version I’ve heard said he died at the scene. Another version said he died at the local hospital a day or so later.

Now this particular student wasn’t just the son of one of the local lumber mill or mine worker families. The father of this student, who I happened to know as a family friend, was the owner of a local business. He forced what may have been up to that time a somewhat indifferent collection of school administrators to absolutely ban any type of initiation foolishness in the local school system. Thus, by the time I went from grade school to junior high, and across the street to high school, there wasn’t any stupid &uot;rite of passage&uot; to hinder or endanger my education, or even life.

Tribune feature writer Ed Shannon’s column appears Fridays in the Tribune.