A Lull, and Then...
Almost 10 years later, Hicksville High School became the target of a long series of bomb threats. They received no publicity at first, but as 1964 began, members of the Board of Education and Nassau County Police spoke to the press about what the school had had to endure as 1963 waned.
Newsday, January 2, 1964
As the previous year wound down, fifteen separate incidents had caused evacuations and inspections. On at least one occasion, two threats had been made on the same day, each triggering an evacuation. The President of the School Board (probably assuming that each incident cost students an hour of class time) stated that two full days of class work had been lost.
Based on my personal recollection, that estimate was too optimistic. It likely did not take into account, for example, that students often left one class after about 15 minutes, missed a second class completely, and upon returning to the school had to wait to be told how the schedule for the rest of the day was being adjusted. Even in the shortest evacuations, at least one full class and nearly half of another class was lost. Moreover, the inspections sometimes took longer - for example, absent students were not in school to unlock their lockers for inspection, and police/fire respondents had to determine what might be in those lockers.
The bomb threats ceased after Newsday printed the story, but not immediately. Three more were called in, bringing the total to eighteen. By my own unofficial calculation, together all of that year's evacuations cost me (and many others) a full week of class time.
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Who was the perpetrator? Rumors abounded. I was told by a friend that newspapers had identified "a woman in Huntington" as the person responsible, but I could never find the article which reported that. Other students blamed a lonely old lady (no one I knew ever saw her or was told her name) who liked to give snacks to the students. I was told by someone else that a certain high school senior was found to have called in the single threat made to the Junior High, but again, no one else knew anything about it.
As suddenly as they had begun, the bomb threats of 1963-1964 ceased. I have searched the Newsday and the Daily News archives, but I have found no report of anyone's being apprehended for making them.
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