Well I think you remembered quite enough!
I can never look Jo Ann Castle in the face again.
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I remember doing this (in New Zealand!) when I was a kid. I can’t remember if I copied someone or if I was just doodling though. Drawing it is easy, 2 sets of 3 vertical parallel lines, one above the other, then its easy to join them together into an S by trying to join them up.
Did these easy-to-draw dogs appear all over notebooks in other places? Mostly girls’ notebooks? I know it wasn’t only my school, but I’m not sure how widespread they were.
That’s not quite it, but it’s as close as I can remember.
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Saw this often in middle school (late 80s). It was popular with the metalhead and stoner kids. I always thought it meant ‘stoner’.
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Must be one of those songs with endless verses accumulating each generation. Thanks for sharing though! 
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I’ve seen it used in graffiti in the late 1970s, though (east coast).
Growing up, I was more interested in making hexaflexagons and drawing platonic solids; in spite of the fact that “S” is my first initial, this form held little appeal for me. I preferred a more swoopy cursive for my own name.
I made this comic about its origins - [Super S] (http://payload271.cargocollective.com/1/2/78859/7736722/Stussy_580.jpg)
Its from a series I created called GrayScales
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I blame Dave Matthews.
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I doodled this on my high school notebooks too, in the mid-1970’s. They went along with an early interest in infinity symbols, the snake eating its own tail, M.C. Escher and Mobius strips. I’m still a sucker for a story, a song, or a hiking trail that ends where it begins, but with a twist along the way.
I also recall that S/8 shape, like in Steve Maher’s wonderful illo, above, in some sort of military or organizational patch I saw as a child- but sideways; a “lazy 8”- in gold braid. My dad was in the US Army Corps of Engineers, so it might have been on one of his uniforms or hats.
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hello
its also (roughly) the SUZUKI logo. I drew it as a kid in the 70’s, and after seeing kids draw it in Liverpool England (in 2002), and my 7 year old nephew draw it in a suburb of Las Vegas (1994), I believe its already in our in-born OS.
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Now I’m more interested in that song than the S.
That sounds 1880s to 1920s to me – WWI maybe? Using the word “cot”, the outhouse joke, the nail-trimming joke… well. I know what I’ll be Googling today.
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I never saw the “S” in Wichita, Kansas in the 20th century, but damn, those dogs were everywhere.
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Though this doesn’t answer the origin, I thought that it’s spread had something to do with the ease in which it could be etched into a wooden desk, sort of like the story of why Chinese characters look the way they do. It’s much easier to etch along the grain rather than across it.
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Friends of mine drew it back in the late 70s and early 80s in semirural San Diego County. They always claimed it was the Suzuki logo, and they used it in a motocross context. It isn’t quite, but I used to think they were right.
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Weird cultural thing: apparently the influence of religious police in Iran (who tend to be young themselves, and who take violent exception to normal teenage activities) has driven a hyper-rapid evolution of youth culture.
The slang used by 14 year olds is impenetrable to 16 year olds, who in turn use slang incomprehensible to 18 year olds, etc.
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Growing up in California in the 80s, the only time I saw that style of S is in graffiti. Perhaps some 60s psychedelic concert posters like from the Fillmore?
Edit:
Top left S (in Otis) from a Fillmore poster from 1967 for the Otis Rush/Grateful Dead. Not quite it because of the flattened top, but pretty darn close on the inner-lines. Or the “S” in Sun at the bottom two thirds if you rotate it counter-clockwise so the hump is on top.
were you able to find anything?
