Howls of Ivy

Herd-Running collegians who vent their exuberances on such unimaginative monkeyshines as panty raids, water fights and the crowning of campus spires and public monuments with chamber pots, among recent phenomena, are several cuts below those sparkling wits who, a few years back, had the brilliant audacity to sign up a milk-wagon horse for several courses at a small midwestern university. Nor are they likely to attain the stature of that college's dean of men when the hoax was revealed. "This is the first time," he said, wryly, "that we have enrolled a whole horse."

College men with a predilection for pranking have been at it at least since the Middle Ages, when roistering undergraduates at the University of Paris discovered the myriad uses of the stink bomb. While many of the early pranks (a tack on the chair, a freshly baked pie in a bed) had no more subtlety than a flung tomato, the undergraduate has at times revealed a genius for japery that goes far beyond the everyday genius he displays in the classroom.

Shrine to the cerebral caper in this country is Cornell University, venerated as the site of many of the tricks of the great Hugh Troy. Muralist and illustrator, Troy is well known today, but as a devilishly clever prankster he's probably immortal. Troy's gags were marked by notable originality and great flair. For example, he once borrowed a rhinoceros-foot wastebasket, trophy of some mighty hunter's safari to Tanganyika. Late one night when new snow lay thick on the Ithaca ground, he and a buddy climbed into their raccoon coats, and slipped outside with their ungainly prop. The rhino foot had been weighted with scrap iron, and they held it between them on two 15-foot lengths of stout rope. Remembering that a running animal does not plant his feet straight down, but drags them a little, they went to work artfully duplicating the beast's footprint pattern and carefully erasing their own tracks in the snow.

They were snoozing peacefully next morning when the bedlam began. A crowd of wild-eyed students had assembled at the first footprint, and it wasn't long before a professor learned in zoology was excitedly sent for. "Rhinocerotidae," he hissed as he peered at the tracks. "Beyond any doubt, Rhinoceros unicornis -- and a fat one, to judge from the depth of his prints." With the pince-nezed professor in the lead, the mob bayed down the trail that led to Beebe Lake, source of Cornell's drinking water. The lake was frozen over, and covered with snow, and the prints ran straight out to a jagged hole in the ice 50 feet from shore. Even today, undergraduates stoutly maintain that Cornell's drinking water has an odd, rhinocerosy kind of taste.

Professors were often the butt of Troy's spirited shenanigans. One of them, a calculus mentor capable of intense concentration, invariably wore high rubber overshoes whenever it rained. Troy "borrowed" the gentleman's galoshes one sunny afternoon, painted large, lumpy bare feet on them, then covered his art work with lampblack. The first good rain washed the lampblack off, and the professor, deep in concentration, ambled about the campus oblivious to the stares, giggles and guffaws that attended him.

Troy was the first American to employ the street-digging ruse, one of the most imitated and successful of all practical pranks. During spring vacation, Troy appeared on Fifth Avenue in New York early one morning with a crew of men, picks, shovels, pneumatic hammers, barricades and lanterns. With Troy supervising, the men dug all morning. The men dug all afternoon. They worked hard. They made a tremendous excavation. At dusk, they collected their tools, put up the barricades, lighted the red lanterns, and walked quietly away. That was that.

(Troy's genius found expression at a tender, pre-college age. As a stripling, he used to delight in an original game he called "Getting Grandma Behind." This was a painstaking process involving rigged calendars, fake newspapers and other bits of subterfuge designed to convince Grandma that Thursday was really Sunday and she better start making the fried chicken.)

The undergraduate cutups at America's oldest university belie the classic picture of the Harvardman as an unimaginative, proper sort. When Rudy Vallee's star was brightest, it was a Harvard frosh who lobbed mushy mangoes at the matinee idol as he crooned the lyrics to Something to Remember You by. Another undergraduate, Edward Reed, president of the Harvard Lampoon, disguised himself as a cute little coed, with wig, skirt, blouse, falsies, cotton stockings and a touch of lipstick, then joined the May Day hoop-rolling race of the Wellesley College seniors in 1939 -- and won handily. As he stood before the class to claim his reward, seniors crowning him with a wreath of spring hibiscus accidentally knocked his flowing blonde locks askew. The jest discovered, the astonished Wellesley girls promptly tossed the imposter in a nearby lake.

Some 25 years ago, when pranksters acting suspiciously like Harvardmen made off with Massachusett's Sacred Cod -- the five-foot symbol of the Bay State's most important industry -- the theft aroused all of Boston, Cambridge and the surrounding countryside. Gendarmes -- liberally supplied with phony tips by Harvard students -- dragged the Charles River basin for the valued relic and came up with nothing. Then they charged into the basement of an M.I.T. Building and ripped open a large, mysterious crate which had been smuggled inside only to discover an open can of sardines in the bottom. Finally they had to haul down a clever paper counterfeit fluttering atop the Lowell House tower. After college and state officials threatened fearful punishment to the miscreants, an anonymous phone call directed the Harvard campus police chief to an isolated intersection on the outskirts of Boston. In a dead-of-night, no-questions-asked deal, the Sacred Cod was dumped at his feet -- Chicago style -- by the occupants of a speeding Stutz Bearcat. Harvard's undergraduate publications, the Lampoon and the Crimson -- traditional antagonists -- have to this day accused each other of the dastardly deed.

Members of the antic Lampoon staff were old hands at campus horseplay directed at their arch rival, Yale. In 1929, in a carefully planned maneuver, they made off with a section of the Original Yale Fence which, in hallowed tradition, had been used as background in every official photo of a Yale letterman or athletic team since the 1870s. Because the fence was conservatively valued at $10,000, the frolic constituted nothing less than grand larceny. Yale officials received a flood of telegrammed clues (from Harvard students, of course) suggesting the whereabouts of the fence. One wire from Niagara Falls reported that the ancient structure had been seen "taking the plunge." Another informed the harried searchers that the famous fence was now guarding the premises of a notorious brothel in New Orleans. When a bag of soggy ashes marked "Yale Fence" was delivered to the authorities, ostensibly from a local crematorium, Harvard's president brought firm pressure to bear on his charges. Harvard Lampoon staffers confessed the theft at a dinner tendered the Yale Record men, and reluctantly returned the missing fence.

Some 50 years ago, when saloon-smashing Carrie Nation visited Yale, the coltish undergraduates dreamed up a special prank with a built-in Bronx cheer for her. At the very height of Mrs. Nation's fame as an agitator for temperance, a genial group of students founded the Yale Temperance Society, a howling misnomer if there ever was one. Pretending to be dedicated disciples of the lady with the hatchet, the society's happy hypocrites wrote wry letters to various newspapers on "the horrors of hooch" and even carried on a beery correspondence with Carrie on "the shame of the universities."

With the strategic suddenness that made saloonkeepers tremble at an unfamiliar step, the formidable lady swept down upon the president of the society in person one day. Undaunted, he immediately made arrangements to have Carrie address the student body informally, from the steps of Osborn Hall, and the word was quickly passed.

Mrs. Nation looked down on a sea of happy, well-scrubbed faces. A group of carolers greeted her with a stirring chorus of Here Comes Carrie Nation. Hardly acknowledging the tribute, she promptly sailed into her attack on the Devil's Brew and at each pause in her oration, solemn choristers would lift their voices in harmony. Their selections ranged from Give Us a Drink, Bartender to such ephemeral ditties as Show Me the Way to Go Home, done up with hymnlike embellishments and sweeping harmonies that had Carrie nodding her head in approval.

After the lecture, while stalwarts of the Yale Temperance Society flanked out to the city's leading saloons to warn the proprietors of Carrie's presence, Mrs. Nation herself was whisked to an afternoon tea hosted by the officers of the Society. A photographer was produced and Carrie agreed to pose with the officers in a final burst of understanding and unanimity of purpose. Those in her sight posed in attitudes of rapt respect, their outstretched hands (continued on page 50) howls of ivy (continued from page 40) proffering naught but glasses of water, but behind Carrie, leering drunkenly and holding uptilted bottles to their lips, low comics gave the scene all the fun and frolic of a Roman revel. The prized photos were later doctored to add the rich foam of "Hellbroth" to all the water glasses, and cigarettes were distributed freely, even between the unstained fingers of the famous prohibitionist herself.

A nimble-witted fellow with the unlikely name of O'Grady Sezz and a zany turn of mind used to liven the passage of time at fair Columbia. In his senior year, Sezz copped the competition for a new baccalaureate hymn, which was promptly set in type in that year's graduation program before anyone -- assembled mothers, fathers and the full faculty -- noticed that the first letter of each line made up a stunning series of four-letter acrostics. No one could disprove O'Grady's indignant claim that it was all due to purest chance.

O'Grady understood the blatant effrontery necessary to the successful carrying off of a ruse. Once, when he had put off writing a term paper for philosophy until deadline time, he whistled up his courage, typed a title page reading "Schopenhauer's Hidden Motives" and clipped it to a dozen sheets of blank paper. Next day, as he was about to hand the work to his professor, a halfsob snuck from his lips. He hung his head and mumbled, "I can't do it. It just isn't my best work," and then proceeded to rip the manuscript into strips. The professor, much moved, extended Sezz's deadline.

Several of the most notable and pungent collegiate pranks fall into the no-such-person category: the creation of a fictional student. Ephraim E. Di Kahble was a famous Princeton phony of 1935, the brain child of five undergraduates who undertook to make him the most talked-about freshman on campus and get him elected class treasurer. They got him a room. Just before the Princeton-Dartmouth game, a sellout, they bought several newspaper ads: Di Kahble was willing to pay a stiff premium for a couple of ducats to the game. A surprising number of students found they had an extra ticket on their hands and hurried around to his digs. But Eph was always out. Neighbors in on it insisted that he was over in the library cracking the books.

Another time, Di Kahble advertised for "congenial company" to ride with him in his new car to New Haven for the Yale game. At least 50 undergraduates descended on his room that time. When Di Kahble advertised in a New York paper for an orange-and-black guinea pig, reporters, intrigued by the ad, soon had him on the wire. He quietly explained that he thought the Princeton Tiger mascot too ferocious a symbol for an Ivy League school, wanted to replace it with a gentle guinea pig of similar coloration. Princeton alumni all over the world wept at this evidence of hopeless decadence among the younger generation.

Di Kahble was succeeded at Princeton by the flagrantly fictitious Adelbert l' Hommedieu X. Hormone, the creation of one Harvey Smith, secretary of the Princeton senior class and the fellow who provided the Alumni Weekly with glowing accounts of the mythical Hormone. Placed among that vaguely remembered group who, for one reason or another, drop out at the end of the freshman year, Bert Hormone was remembered by Smith for "his unruly thatch of flaming red hair, his endless supply of dirty limericks, acquired from cowhands on the King Ranch where he spent his boyhood." As told to alumni everywhere, Bert was shanghaied into the Foreign Legion after a night of roistering in a Marseilles bordello, then kicked around the Malay Straits for a while. Now, Smith wrote, Bert was running his own saloon in Bali, with a floor show of Balinese belles "that would make what I remember of the Folies-Bergère look like Miss Spence's girls putting on a performance of Peter Pan." A notable number of alumni wrote in to say that it was sure swell to hear news of old Addie l'Hommedieu, whom they all remembered so well.

For sheer explosive deflation of pompous authority, one Hugo Frye may have been the most effective of all ghostly students. Frye was breathed into life by two editors of The Sun, Cornell's student newspaper, and their yarn was a simple, dignified one: a Cornell graduate years ago, Frye had been the founder of the Republican Party in Upper New York. He had been a pillar of the G.O.P., one of its foremost theoreticians, and a giant of a man in every way. The Sun proposed a dinner in his honor and dispatched elaborate invitations to bigwigs of the Republican Party. They bit. Vice-President Curtis congratulated the assembled straight-faced students on "paying respect to the magnificent memory of Hugo Frye." Secretary of Labor Davis extolled him as "that sturdy patriot who first planted the ideals of our Party in this region of the country." State Senators, Representatives and squads of lesser luminaries climbed on the bandwagon with similarly inspired expressions of devotion to the great Hugo Frye. They never caught on.

Political skulduggery on a lesser scale a couple of years ago brought about the election of "Lamont' Dupont" to freshman office at Harvard. Touted by his backers as "handsome, debonair, and wealthy beyond belief," Dupont's name was speedily accepted by the nominating committee. The candidate's letter of acceptance, impressively formal and heavy with sealing wax, came in from Jamaica, B.W.I., where he reportedly idled as an honor guest at Government House.

Dupont's arrival at Harvard was as impressive as his letter. His campaigners had worked hard, and a large crowd awaited a close look at the gilded youth whose favorite sport was falconry, and whose sponsors had suggested the futility of voting against him "since he owns us all anyway."

Flanked by two trench-coated bodyguards who communicated in French. Dupont's big black limousine rolled right into Harvard Yard, long forbidden to motorcars, and the candidate alighted. He was dressed in impeccable morning attire and he addressed the gaping serfs from the steps of Widener Library. He was firm: "Good blood may not, as some would suggest, be an absolute requirement for common office, but certainly a gentleman's appearance, if not his substance, is necessary in even the meanest candidate.... In spite of the vulgarity which has characterized the campaigning of my opponents, I will not be deterred...." "Lamont Dupont" won easily. He did not serve, however. He was Robert Hathaway, Yale '60. His backers were prep-school friends who had chosen Harvard.

William Horace De Vere Cole, a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, was a great British master of the practical joke. He boasted that he had engineered 95 major buffooneries and was never once gulled himself, although H. Allen Smith, the noted American authority, considers Cole only technically correct in the brag: a Sicilian, victim of one of Cole's pranks, pulled a revolver and blew a hole in Cole's leg one time. The master prankster took it philosophically. "What an absurdity, using a real gun," he murmured as they carried him off. "The fellow obviously has no imagination."

Cole was the inventor of the beautifully simple string ploy. He was taking to his rooms a ball of twine one day in London when he noticed a foppish, pontifical man approaching. Unrolling a length of twine, Cole stopped the man and asked him if he would mind helping him in an important engineering project. He handed the man the end of the string, and moved rapidly down the street and around the corner. There Providence had provided just such another chump, to whom Cole gave the other end of the twine. He then ducked into an alley and went along home.

In 1905 the Sultan of Zanzibar and (continued on page 80) (continued from page 50) his royal entourage visited England. Cole, studying more or less diligently at Cambridge, felt the old mazda light up over his head. He promptly dispatched a formal note to the school authorities telling them that the Sultan and members of his party would visit Cambridge shortly. On the appointed day, the topmost echelons of the university and the town, mantled and medaled, presented themselves at the railroad station. They bowed and scraped as the richly robed Sultan and his functionaries descended from the carriages and graciously surveyed the scene. They were given the number-one tour, feted at luncheon, and escorted to the railroad station in the evening after a gala champagne party. The Sultan had been pleased to leave a gift for the president of Cambridge (The Dorsal Fin of the Sacred Shark of Zanzibar). Eagerly looking for their pictures in the papers next day, the authorities choked on their breakfast kippers when they discovered that the Sultan of Zanzibar had spent the whole of the previous day in London. Cole and his friends split the cost of greasepaint and the rented theatrical costumes and went back to their studies.

Dartmouth students once humbled authority in an even more brutal fashion. The townspeople of Hangover, N.H., had voted to levy a poll tax on all students. Bristling with indignation, the undergraduates descended on the next town meeting. Heavily in the majority, they promptly seized control of the meeting and began to pass laws. One called for the city council to lay a canopied sidewalk from Hanover to Colby Junior College, a girls' school 40 miles away; another specified a new town hall to be an inch square and a mile high. Before the meeting was adjourned, the town had been bound to build an eight-lane concrete highway to Skidmore and a direct subway to Smith. The state legislature had to annul the laws, but no more was heard of the poll tax.

The most popular student pranks have always involved mischief in the bell tower, but even this warmed-over cabbage can reach memorable heights in the hands of inspired men. At Harvard some years ago a few perceptive folk began to notice that the clock bell was striking 13 times at noon. At midnight the orthodox 12 strokes were heard, but at noon it was always 13. Clockmakers could find nothing wrong with the mechanism, but every noon it rang 13 times. The student responsible was finally betrayed by the criminal's traditional Achilles' heel: he got careless and someone saw him sitting in his window with an air rifle, waiting for the 12th bong to die away, whereupon he took careful aim and contributed the 13th.

It was at Princeton that the traditional theft of the bell clapper was reduced, early in the 1950s, to mechanized madness. A pair of freshmen, deciding that a new tack was needed, elected to view the matter as a simple technical problem. They adjourned to New York and outfitted themselves at a war surplus store. Their approach was radical: they thwarted locked doors by climbing the outside of the tower. Once in the bell chamber they wasted no time with wrenches: they unlimbered their oxy-acetylene outfit and cut the clapper in two. They weren't satisfied to do it once, and they became so adept that they could have the clapper off 90 seconds after setting foot in the chamber.

This same pair -- they did not, alas, survive to see their sophomore years, but departed Princeton under forced draft -- spent many days in a survey of the underground heating tunnel system of Old Nassau. They wanted to find a central point from which many tunnels branched to many buildings. They found it. One dark night they dumped a truck-load of industrial rags into the manhole nearest it. They set up enormous electric fans in the tunnel mouths leading away from the pile of rags, which they generously saturated with furnace oil. The next day was, of course, critical, but no one found the cache. It was a Friday. A major basketball game was on. At 8:30 the fun-loving freshmen dropped into the tunnel, plugged their fans in, tossed a cigarette into the rag pile and went up to watch the sport. Within minutes smoke was seeping out of buildings all over campus. It looked as if venerable Princeton, all of it, might burn to the ground. Fire apparatus was summoned from distant points. It was a big night. (Some authorities feel that the heavy expenditure involved in this gag -- the big fans, for example, were not recoverable -- argues against the amateur standing of its perpetrators, but others maintain that fun is fun, no matter what it costs.)

The elaborate mechanical funny has always been the engineering student's special province and some fairly hairy ones are on record. Some of them are universal, but the practice of stripping an automobile and then rebuilding it in someone's room seems to have originated at M.I.T. At CalTech, the seniors, by tradition, depart for the beach en masse on "Ditch Day" in the spring. Underclassmen amuse themselves during the day by filling senior rooms from floor to ceiling with pop bottles or water-soaked newspapers; they also brick up doorways with steel-reinforced cinder block. One senior returned to find his room largely occupied by a cement mixer, full of cement and running at full bore. Another discovered a meteorological balloon in his room filled with water. A current engineers' specialty is to hang a sheet of metal outside some unsuspecting student's open window and activate the metal with a sound frequency below the human auditory range. As the sound waves ripple through him, the victim squirms and frets, cannot imagine what's wrong with him. If his symptoms have been described to him, in advance, as those characterizing sufferers from atomic fallout, so much the better.

The belled bed is an ancient engineers' gag. The Roman slide-rule kids probably pulled it first, to while away the long nights while the Coliseum was building. It was used in Colonial times, the method then being to drill a hole in the floor of a bridal suite directly under the bed, tie a string to the bedsprings and drop the free end downstairs, where a bell would be hung on it. Modern science has improved all that. Twenty years ago the gag was so popular at a big state university in the midwest that some hapless senior, electing to be married in June, was nearly always nailed. The only difficult part was to find where the happy couple planned to spend their wedding night, and get access to the bed. Everything else was a snap: a battery-powered gong eight or 10 inches in diameter with an inside clapper was riveted to the bed. A pressure switch, set for the combined weight of the newly united couple plus five pounds, was wired to the gong through an armored conduit. All connections were flooded in hard solder. One good jounce would set it off, and almost nothing this side of an H-bomb would stop it.

(A variation on this gag was pulled on two famous Hollywood stars about 15 years ago. They were very famous indeed -- they still are -- and while they were considered among the kindest and pleasantest people in the business, they annoyed the crew on this particular location trip by disappearing into the girl's dressing room for an hour every day after lunch. Everyone had to stand around and wait until they appeared, flushed and contented-looking, to begin the afternoon's work. The electricians finally took the matter in hand. They knew the pair's exact weight, wired the bed with an on-off switch set for their combined weight plus the usual allowance for jounce. They led the wire a long way off, to the commissary hall, and connected it to a medium-sized bell. The idea was an interesting one: since the bell could be heard in the star's dressing room, but not loudly, how long would it take the pair to connect their activity with the distant tolling? Answer: two days. On the third day the steady tolling of the bell suddenly stopped. Tentatively, it rang again, once. Then, after another pause, twice. Then, no more.)

Students at a Scottish engineering school were permanently traumatized when they belled the bridal bed of one of their professors, a man of middle age, great choler and massive strength. He was honeymooning in a small inn near the campus and his students ran their wire to a tolling bell in a nearby home. They sat around drinking beer and making witty remarks. Finally, the bell began to ring. It rang slowly, deliberately, regularly. There was much merriment. The bell continued to ring. It rang steadily for half an hour. An hour later, it had not stopped. No one was laughing. One hour and 47 minutes after it had started, the bell tolled its last defiant stroke. The students were speechless and thoughtful as they dismantled the bell, and envy rankled in them. They never did find out that the good teacher had anticipated them: he had re-rigged their rig with one of his own, a metronome making contact at one end of its swing.

Many a professor has given a similarly brutal comeuppance to the young in his charge. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the noted jurist, was one. He taught Harvard medical students a century ago, and they learned to keep their wits about them. One of his favorite drolleries was to dip a finger into a beaker of urine, taste for salinity, then ask his students to do the same. When the last pale and gagging lad had complied, Dr. Holmes would smile benevolently. "You lack observation, gentlemen," he would say. "And observation is an important factor in medical diagnosis. You neglected to note that while I placed my index finger into the beaker, I tasted my middle finger."

One giant of the pedagogical world, though departed from us these 200 years and more, can still serve the purpose of campus wags. A number of years ago, Harvard University, reveling in tradition and a whopping endowment, erected a group of structures named for the great presidents of Harvard's past: Dunster House, Eliot House, Lowell House. But to the eternal regret of those who persistently champion his cause, no house has yet been built for the man who was president of Harvard from 1709 to 1738. His name? Samuel Hoar.