[Luke walks over to her. His high school picture is hanging in the display case with the caption “State High Hurdles Champion: 1985 – Butch Danes”]
LUKE: For the love of . . . what’s that doing there?
Here we discover Luke’s nickname in high school was “Butch” (a very manly nickname, best known from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).
If Luke was seventeen in 1985, that would make him the same age as Lorelai, both of them born in 1968. If he was any younger that year, he would be younger than Lorelai, which doesn’t seem likely (it’s a stretch of plausibility that he’s the same age – Scott Patterson is almost a decade older than Lauren Graham). I don’t think he can have been eighteen, because he didn’t do his final year of high school.
Luke said he didn’t have a single positive memory from high school, yet he was a star athlete and a state hurdles champion. It can’t have been all bad. It’s definitely a lot better than what Jess has been through at school.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 
This is in regard to the observation that Luke did not finish all four years of high school. In the 1970s and 1980s many public schools were configured into Junior and Senior high schools. Junior High was grades 7-9 and Senior High was grades, 10-12. I speak from personal experience.
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Thank you. It didn’t seem clear to me, because Luke talks about trade school, without really indicating whether he went or not. He does seem very determined that Jess finish high school, as if trying to make up for something he didn’t do.
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