11 Sounds That Defined Back-to-School Season in the ‘90s

Back in the 1990s, late August had a soundtrack, and almost none of it was music. It started on television during a Tuesday-night rerun and ran out in the third week of September, when the new binder stopped smelling new. Some of these noises were engineered by companies after your parents’ money, and some were the byproduct of machinery long since hauled to a landfill.

Here are 11 sounds every kid heard during back-to-school season in the 1990s.

1. Andy Williams, in a Staples Commercial
2. The Bus, Exhaling
3. The Bell
4. Channel One’s Theme Music
5. The Trapper Keeper
6. The Crank of the Pencil Sharpener
7. The Overhead Projector’s Fan
8. The Filmstrip Beep
9. The Apple II Drive, Booting Oregon Trail
10. The Scantron Swallowing a Stack of Answer Sheets
11. 30 Soprano Recorders, Roughly in Tune

Andy Williams, in a Staples Commercial

Edward Pola and George Wyle wrote “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” as a Christmas song in 1963, and Andy Williams recorded it that year. Staples has run it against its own meaning since 1994, in a campaign built by Cliff Freeman and Partners: a father sails through the supply aisle to the strings while two children trudge behind him, visibly ruined. Nobody has improved on it since.

The Bus, Exhaling

A school bus with a full air-brake system runs on compressed air, and that long pneumatic sigh at the corner was the system doing exactly what it was built to do. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 121 requires a signal that warns the driver continuously whenever pressure in the service reservoir falls below 60 psi, which accounts for the other bus noise nobody ever explained to you.

The Bell

The bell that ran your day is newer than it sounds. The Standard Electric Time Company, founded in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1884, sold schools and factories synchronized master-clock and bell systems, but automated bells and the public-address systems carrying them weren’t widely adopted until after World War II, and many districts didn’t wire every classroom until well into the 1960s. Until then a teacher with an eye on the clock let you go.

Channel One’s Theme Music

Whittle Communications began piloting a 12-minute daily newscast for teenagers in 1989, two minutes of which were commercials. A subscribing school got a satellite dish, two VCRs, a television for every classroom, and the cabling to connect it, and in exchange agreed to air the broadcast. More than 12,000 secondary schools took that deal, putting the program in front of roughly eight million 13- to 18-year-olds. The last episode ran in May 2018.

The Trapper Keeper

Mead test-marketed the Trapper Keeper in Wichita in August 1978 and released it nationally three years later, and by the end of the 1980s, it was estimated that half of American middle and high schoolers owned one. The first ones closed with a metal snap; the Velcro strap that replaced it early in the 1980s is the reason the thing has a sound at all. More than 75 million have sold, and teachers hated the noise, which was most of the appeal.

The Crank of the Pencil Sharpener

If the grinder bolted beside the shavings can said BOSTON on it, that brand had been around longer than the school had. The C. Howard Hunt Pen Company, founded in Camden, New Jersey, in 1897, bought the Boston Pencil Sharpener Company in 1925 in its first major acquisition, and the line later passed to X-Acto and then Elmer’s. A few turns of the crank bought 30 seconds out of your chair.

The Overhead Projector’s Fan

Roger Appeldorn’s team at 3M demonstrated the first overhead projector with a Fresnel lens internally on January 15, 1962, and production started that August. The machine ran hot enough to need a cooling fan, and the fan is the part you remember—a low drone underneath everything the teacher said, punctuated by a wet-erase marker squeaking across acetate. 3M stopped selling them in 2015, after more than 50 years.

The Filmstrip Beep

A filmstrip’s narration came off a 33⅓ rpm record, or from the early 1970s a cassette, and at the right moment a tone sounded to tell the teacher to advance one frame. Later machines advanced themselves on a 50 Hz tone pitched below hearing. By the 1990s, most filmstrip producers had closed or sold off the business, which makes that beep the most extinct sound here.

The Apple II Drive, Booting Oregon Trail

The Disk II drive couldn’t tell which track its head was parked on, so the software drove it outward into a mechanical stop and kept going a moment longer—the rattle every kid in the lab heard when a floppy went in. Waiting on the other side was usually MECC, whose Oregon Trail was a third of the company’s $30 million in annual revenue as of 1994.

The Scantron Swallowing a Stack of Answer Sheets

Michael Sokolski founded Scantron in 1972 on a business model borrowed from razors and blades: get cheap optical-mark scanners into schools, then sell those schools the proprietary forms forever. The machine reads how much light your graphite absorbs, which is the whole reason a box of No. 2 pencils sat on the supply list every August. By 2012, universities were charging students 15 to 20 cents a sheet.

30 Soprano Recorders, Roughly in Tune

American schools were handing children cheap molded wind instruments long before the 1990s. The Swanson tonette arrived in 1938, and within three years more than half the grammar schools in the country had adopted it as standard pre-band equipment—inexpensive, nearly indestructible, and small enough to store thirty in a drawer. The soprano recorder inherited the job on the same logic, and the sound with it.