MEANWHILE, IN THE NEWSPAPERS.COM ARCHIVE: 
Perverts and Flashers and Drugs, Oh My!

April 15, 1982 was evidently a busy day for sexual deviants in Ferdinand, Indiana. One creeper was seen kissing children at the Ferdinand Elementary playground. A few blocks away, another guy appeared to be stalking a local housewife. And finally, over at the high school, a dude clad only in a jockstrap was exposing his naughty bits to the girls' tennis team.  

I love how colloquially this article is written. "Give the girls a show"? "Bent over for a rear view"? "Playing with himself"? Absolutely no pussyfooting around with vagaries like "committing a lewd act," and such. I applaud that choice. Sometimes, it's good to be blunt. 

I do take umbrage with the author's assertion that "these incidents turned out to be harmless." I mean sure, no one was kidnapped or killed, but I wouldn't call a mental case running around a school playground kissing small children "harmless," or, for that matter, some degenerate incel in a jockstrap flashing his dick and asshole at teenage girls. 

Looking at stuff like this, it's easy to see how my fellow GenXers, free-range kids raised by the "Eh, you'll be fine," school of child-rearing, went on to become hyper-vigilant control freaks once they had children. While I am eternally grateful that I grew up before helicopter parenting was a thing, still, I understand how and why it came about. 

We've seen and heard some shit, y'all.        

Speaking of some shit, this little item is from the July 29, 1982 edition of The Ferdinand News:

Heheheheheheheh, "marijuana trip." I kinda want to read Dr. Curt Scarborough's Basics on Abused Drugs, because anti-drug literature from the 1970s and '80s is a hoot! It's often peppered with phrases like "smoking grass" (I love it when old people call it "grass"!) and "all hopped up on the dope." Totally reminds me of the scene in Better Off Dead where Lane's dad, reading from a book titled Youth and the Drug Explosion, attempts to "rap" with his son.    

Of course, seeing as it was 1982, the warnings in Dr. Scarborough's book would soon be rendered obsolete on the day Nancy Reagan launched her "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign. Sure, people scoffed at the time, but you know what? Her efforts totally paid off. She single-handedly eradicated all drug abuse and addiction in the United States. Everyone immediately quit doing everything all at once. Kids started going to church and doing their homework instead of smoking doobs and hanging at the arcade. Strung-out yuppies flushed all their cocaine down the crapper and drank herbal tea. Famous punk artists quit heroin en masse and joined various religious orders. It's all completely true. 

So hey -- thanks, Nance!

The '80s were a trip, man.