Brenda Spencer
GD #12 Cover Girl
Spencer's horrendous and bizarre 1979 school shooting
that killed two and left nine injured (eight were children)
was profiled in GD #12. (Buy it here)
UPDATE: San Diegans seem to forget except when her
parole hearings come up that Brenda Spencer was the first
disturbed teen to snap and make national headlines
shooting up a school.
On the morning of Jan. 29, 1979, Spencer, 16, opened fire
on Cleveland Elementary from inside her San Carlos home
with a .22 semiautomatic rifle as the children were returning
from the playground and heading to class. She killed the
principal and a custodian as he ran to the principal's aid, and
wounded nine -- eight school children and a police officer.
Using a criss-cross directory, a reporter from the San Diego
Evening Tribune was able to get her on the phone during the
six-hour standoff, where she explained, "I don't like Mondays.
This livens up the day," as her reason for her rampage.
Those famous words became the inspiration for the Boomtown
Rats 1979 single, "I Don't Like Mondays."
Released in summer of 1979, the song become a No. 1 hit in
the U.K. and created a controversy in San Diego about the
same time.
To this day, there are rumors about what happened to the
band when they returned to San Diego as part of their 1980
world tour in support of "The Fine Art of Surfacing" LP, which
contained the song. The rumors range from the song being
unofficially banned by U.S. radio stations, to the band being
banned from playing in San Diego. There's also the stories
about the Boomtown Rats playing here in support of the
album (they played the Fox Theater in April 1980) and being
sternly warned not to play "I Don't Like Mondays" by either
city leaders, the cops or the promoters, according to local
legends.
FM 103.7 DJ Jim McInnes says there was no organized
movement to keep the song off the air.
"A lot of the rock stations did not play that song for two
reasons: number one, it brought up an unpleasant local
event...and number two, when the Rats played for a radio
programming convention at the old Roxy Theatre in PB, Bob
Geldof ranted about how radio was in the hands of fools! He
basically killed his band's career by offending the very people
who could have helped make them popular in the States."
While the song's inspiration is no big secret, the memory of
homely-looking Spencer shooting a bunch of nine-year-old
kids -- like Spencer herself -- seem to fade until another kid
shoots up a school or she's up for another parole hearing.
The song has since become an anthem for Monday-morning
commuters, along with becoming an HBO theme-song in
2005 for its Monday original programming line-up.
"I don't like Mondays/I want to shoot the whole day down."
Spencer's next possible parole hearing will be in 2009.