“Where’d you go to high school?”

by Mary Poletti

It’s as St. Louis as Budweiser, Stan Musial, pork steaks & adding an unnecessary R to the name of our first president. It’s the age-old question on which our entire social caste system is based. It unites the St. Louis diaspora across the country.

“Where’d you go to high school?”

SLU High

I spent a lot of time in Broken Arrow, Okla., in 2003. For the rest of college, whenever I met someone from the greater Tulsa area, which was rather frequently, I asked him/her: “Where’d you go to high school?” I was invariably met with a look of utter confusion. Ask the same question to the roughly 300 St. Louis kids at my small college in central Missouri, and they’d immediately & brightly respond.

And, of course, then you could judge them accordingly.

To my knowledge, no one knows where the high school question originated, how it became the number-one source for social judgment or why it is exclusive to St. Louis. A professor at SIUE announced in February she’d be doing a study on the question, positing that perhaps it made outsiders feel uncomfortable.

For better or for worse, that’s sort of what it’s designed to do, isn’t it? Find out just how St. Louis you are?

What other innocuous question so perfectly encapsulates your entire life history in socially judgeable form? If you went to public school, which high school tells us where you grew up & one of two cultural truths about you: Either you weren’t Catholic or ultra-Lutheran (otherwise you would have gone to Lutheran North/South/St. Charles), or your family didn’t have the money or inclination to send you to one of the area’s fine private schools. If you went to a private high school, you were probably Catholic; which high school reveals geography in a very general sense, but more to the point, it reveals your social standing. You would never automatically assume a girl who went to Cor Jesu came from wealth; you might assume that about a girl who went to St. Joe’s.

Now, mix in the reputation of your school, and you have your image ready-made!

Early in my junior year of college, a meme floated around my campus that asked how many kids from a given St. Louis high school it took to tap a keg. The answers proved illuminating, if humorously so, about high schools I’d never really even heard of, growing up in the Metro East. My tiny private high school in Belleville played sports against a motley assortment of private & Special School District high schools: Logos, Yeshiva, Life Christian, Thomas Jefferson, the North/South/West County Techs. Of those, only Logos had produced even one kid at my college (and she turned out to have been an old opponent of mine on the volleyball court). I knew nothing else of St. Louis’ high schools except the way the various private school alumni at my little college represented them to me, and so I carried those humorous descriptions with me for a long time.

When I was at Mizzou, I knew only a handful of St. Louis kids (most of the folks in my prestigious master’s program were from out of state). I casually asked every one of them where they’d gone to high school. One girl said Visitation. I decided on the spot that we could never be friends. Shameful? Probably. She might have been a really nice girl. (Although she was a VP Ball veteran who called her dad by his first name, so…) But that’s how St. Louisans roll. We pass judgment based on where you spent your adolescence.

Generalizations? That’s what it’s all about. They don’t account for the anomalies. A kid who went to Ladue might have grown up in a crappy apartment in Olivette. My boyfriend’s younger sisters commuted 40 minutes one way to go to Rosati-Kain. I had a suitemate in college who grew up in Benton Park, the daughter of Eritrean refugees, but went to Rockwood Summit. Busing still happens. There are such things as scholarships. High schools close; my boyfriend’s & my mother’s both did.

But these are anomalies, say the staunchest supporters of the high school caste system. The generalizations are still useful, they say. They’re a framework through which to understand people — without ever really taking the time to understand them, perhaps — & maintain the bubble in which we live.

By the way, did you know the woman who plays Phyllis on “The Office” is from St. Louis? Did you know she went to Cleveland? Now there’s some solid South City cred.

Mary Poletti is a marketing professional in the financial industry & a resident of the City’s St. Louis Hills neighborhood. She went to Governor French Academy, which you’ve probably never heard of. What now?