Picture students wearing tie-dye and pooka shells from Hawaii—that was Gunn High School in 1976, Assistant Principal Kim Cowell’s senior year. Despite the deceptively laid-back fashions, Gunn has always been an academically rigorous school. “The first question is not if you’re going to college but where you are going to college,” Cowell said.

Cowell attended Loma Vista Elementary School, now known as Juana Briones, and the old Terman Junior High School. At that time, elementary school consisted of kindergarten through sixth grade. Junior high school spanned seventh grade to ninth grade, and senior high school encompassed 10th through 12th. One of the highlights of her time at Gunn was being the setter for Gunn’s Central Coast Section (CCS) Championship volleyball team her senior year. “If you look up on the gym walls where the CCS champions are recorded you can see it,” Cowell said.

Athletics aside, the basic Gunn courses were very similar to today with a few slight differences; there were no Advanced Placement classes and there was only a three-year social studies requirement. In her senior year, Cowell took a year of World History II instead of Economics. With college as the goal, most Gunn students hadn’t realized their potential until after graduation. “It’s a really rigorous school and I had a genuine intellectual curiosity, which is still true,” Cowell said. “However I didn’t learn how smart I was until after I got out of high school.”

As an assistant principal, Cowell is able to compare the Gunn of the past with the one of the present. “Parents were more willing to allow students to fail and pick themselves up,” Cowell said. “[Now] changes in college acceptance have greater implications for how parents deal with their children around administrative issues.”

Gunn was not always all work and no play. In addition to 1976’s bicentennial status with plenty of patriotic celebration, there was also a memorable incident with the infamous Horticulture Club. In an effort to parody spirit rallies, the club had a “beat ‘em, bust ‘em, that’s our custom” rally. “They did a dance on the quad…the finale was to drop their pants and show the letters of the motto,” Cowell said while laughing. However, this release of inhibitions contrasted with a stricter dress code. The consequences for that kind of behavior are now more severe. “I would have been sent to the office if I had worn pajamas to school,” Cowell said.

Indecent exposure was not the only distinguishing factor of the class of ‘76.“We had snow for one of the first times,” Cowell said. “A bunch of guys went up to the hills with their pick-up trucks and brought back snow. We had snowball fights out on the amphitheatre.”

The Palo Alto community has also changed over the years. Housing was more affordable and people were less affluent overall. There were also more families who had lived in the city for generations. “It’s always been a community that’s been involved,” Cowell said, “That’s a wonderful feature of Palo Alto.” Palo Alto has kept the tradition of the May Fete parade. Cowell participated in the parade when she was five, dressed up in a majorette costume stitched by her grandmother.

Palo Alto continues to have many endearing quirks. “There used to be a law [that said] there could be no alcohol served within a mile of the campus,” Cowell said. In order to save downtown Palo Alto in the 1980’s recession, the law was repealed.