For student smokers at Cheyenne East High School in the 1980s, there were several options when the urge to light up hit.
It was common for Wyoming high schools to designate areas where students were allowed to smoke, and at East the courtyard outside the cafeteria offered a spacious gathering place for sanctioned student smoking.
Dan Ballinger, East Class of 1983, laughs at the memory of jean-jacketed students stomping their feet in the cold and huffing down a cigarette between classes. Today, the continuing decline of smoking among teens and spread of smoking bans lend a surreal quality to the memory of kids lighting up without a care at school.
“You could walk out of the boys’ locker room, which led to the parking lot, and you could smoke there,” remembered Ballinger, now a valuation analyst for a global bank in Massachusetts.
When reminded of the laissez faire attitude educators had toward smoking in the 1970s and ’80s, the memories came rushing back during a recent phone interview with Cowboy State Daily.
“I never smoked, but I was astonished by how many people smoked,” said Ballinger, recalling how his smoker friends would “be jonesing hard around 10 o’clock. They’d run out for a quick butt. That’s what they called it. A lot of them smoked a pack a day.”
Then there was the time in Mr. Stephens’ psychology class when a fellow student sitting behind Ballinger asked him to sit up straight. With Ballinger serving as a privacy screen, the student proceeded to puff a cigarette and take a hit of pot.
“It was like 7:05 in the morning, and I was sitting so straight like I was at West Point,” said Ballinger, adding he was thankful Mr. Stephens never noticed.
It Was The Culture
Back then in Cheyenne, smoking was so prevalent that when you walked into the Bowl-A-Rama, you couldn’t see across the bowling lanes because everyone was smoking. There was just a cloud of tobacco smoke and the disembodied sound of balls hitting pins.
Like social media memes showing kids jumping Big Wheels without a helmet and no one wearing a seat belt in a 1970s station wagon, memories about bygone student smoking areas at high schools continue to surface on the internet.
One Gen Xer remembers a green-fenced corral as the sanctioned smoke zone at his high school. Another can’t shake the visual flashbacks to “Smokers’ Wall” just outside another school’s main entrance. At one point, someone used transparent adhesive spray to display a tab of LSD amid all the “Smokers’ Wall” graffiti.
On Reddit, the stories pour out like loosies from a shared pack, with one poster confessing, “I bummed a smoke more than once from my vice principal. He was scary but cool.”
Another singled out those “smoking cheerleaders. Yep that was us. One lived literally on Smokers Corner across from the high school.”
School-adjacent gathering spots like that one just off campus often fell into a gray area — a smoker-friendly no man’s land where the smokers made the rules.
High school parking lots also operated in the shadows, offering a place to try on a spectrum of behaviors.
Scenes from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Dazed and Confused” celebrate the high school parking lot as a kind of hormonal United Nations, where all types of kids mixed, each navigating different tribes and rituals.
The designated smoking area behind a high school in the 1980s. (OldSchooCool via Reddit) 
A pair of students smoke outside a public school before class. (dpa picture alliance via Alamy) 
A group of students smoke and talk outside a public school. (Shaun A Daley via Alamy) 
(Courtesy Photo)
‘Those Were The Partiers’
Jay Richard, Wyoming grower of humongous pumpkins, car detailer and Worland High School Class of 1986, doesn’t know if smoking was explicitly allowed in the parking lot at school, but he’s certain cigarettes were a smoldering signifier of one thing: “Those were the partiers.”
He set the scene: The coolest car was a Camaro IRoc Z, but many preferred a square-body Chevy pickup. Krokus, Journey and Billy Idol blasted over FM radio. In the warm months, Richard sported active wear by Ocean Pacific. In his OP shorts, he mostly kept walking past the smokers, but he remembers the rank smell of Camel cigarettes, the sound of someone deploying aerosol hairspray and the sight of freshly-feathered bangs.
“Girls with the big hair, the bright colors, the 19 gallons of Hair Aqua, whatever that stuff was, ozone killer,” said Richard, who would go on to work at a car dealership where buyers were charged $34 extra for the Dodge Caravan with a “Smokers’ Package,” which came with a cig lighter and ashtrays.
“Otherwise, it just came with a little felt compartment that you put your change in now, you know?” Richard said.
Richard remembers restaurants and the bowling alley in Worland offering new smoking sections sometime in the early to mid ’90s.
Smoking’s Glory Days Are Over
That trend continued as smokers receded to increasingly isolated islands of nicotine acceptance.
Schools pushed students, teachers and staff off campus, creating tobacco-free zones. Then bars started kicking their nic-addicted customers to the curb, with some building shanty town shelters so smoking could remain a year-round pastime.
Nowadays, jean jackets are wearable the next day, no longer saturated with second-hand stench. And public health continues to improve.
Today, cigarette smoking in the U.S. is at a low point, according to eight decades of trends analyzed by Gallup research.
“Currently, 11% of U.S. adults say they have smoked cigarettes in the past week, matching the historical low measured in 2022 (and nearly matched at 12% in 2023),” Gallup reported in August. “When Gallup first asked about cigarette smoking in 1944, 41% of U.S. adults said they smoked. The current smoking rate is about half as large as it was a decade ago and one-third as large as it was in the late 1980s.”
That’s when Cheyenne East High School started its transition away from offering multiple on-campus locations for student smoking.
By the time Zane Christoffersen started classes at East in the late 2000s, the idea of students smoking in the courtyard without fear of detention was an alien concept.
Christoffersen, Class of 2010, works at Ernie November in downtown Cheyenne. He said the skate park across Windmill Road from East became the unofficial smoking area while he was a student.
Sometimes Christoffersen smoked elsewhere, and everytime the pleasure came with the risk of getting caught.
“My mom drove by the mall one time and saw me and my friends out there smoking,” said Christoffersen, who went on to quit. “She was not happy.”
‘Smokin’ In The Boys Room’
The 1973 Brownsville Station hit “Smokin’ In the Boys Room,” which also was a hit when covered by Motley Crue in 1985, feeds on the displeasure teen smoking evokes in parents and teachers.
Cigarette smoke is really hard to conceal. It generally takes more than the perfect posture of the student seated in front of you to conceal smoking.
Bathroom stalls still offer cover, but it requires savvy and teamwork. As the song goes:
A-checkin' out the halls
Makin' sure the coast is clear
Lookin' in the stalls
No, there ain't nobody here
These days at Cheyenne East High School and other schools around Wyoming where student smokers once enjoyed their own officially recognized smoking sections, there’s an odorless alternative that’s easily puffed all over school.
Vape pens are the new Marlboros, offering exhales that are far easier to conceal.
A Wyoming Department of Health survey from 2022 found that roughly one in four Wyoming high school students are e-cig or vape users.
But unlike the norm for their grandparents who smoked, there are no known designated vaping areas for Wyoming high school students jonesing for a drag.
Contact David Madison at david@cowboystatedaily.com
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
