My Greatest Prank
You may appreciate this story. Or not. But first, some background.
MASTERS OF THE PRANK
I have been a connoisseur of pranks and practical jokes for over 60 years. It began when I was in high school. I suspect it was when I was a sophomore in 1957. One of the other workers at the record store where I worked, probably Paul Weber, gave me a Christmas present. It was a book by H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker. In this delightful book, I learned about the two greatest practical jokers in American history, Hugh Troy and Jim Moran.
Troy was the grand master. He began his pranks as a child, and he never stopped. There is a book about him, which I bought a few years ago, written by his son: Laugh with Hugh Troy (1983). Two of his pranks have remained with me ever since I read about them in 1957. They provide evidence of his genius.
Troy was born in 1906. In 1935, the New York Museum of Art held America's first exhibition of the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. On the day it opened, Troy was one of the first people to attend. He was not alone. A lot of people tried to get in. There were so many people that it was hard for anybody to see the paintings on the walls.
Troy got an idea. He was convinced that the would-be sophisticates really were not all that interested in van Gogh's paintings. He went home. He designed a simple device to test his theory: a wooden box with black velvet. There was a glass lid. He cut off a piece of beef, and he placed it in the box. On the outside, he attached professional lettering. The announcement said this:
This is the ear that van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress December 24, 1888
He sneaked it into the museum. He placed it on a display table. He said later that most of the crowd gathered around his display in preference to viewing paintings. It took over an hour for somebody on the museum's staff to figure out that this was a hoax, and to remove it.
The other stunt I have appreciated most of all. Why? Because I love to hear about the workings of bureaucracy. This one was the flypaper caper. During World War II, Troy was a newly commissioned second lieutenant. He was an engineer. He was stationed at the Army Air Corps base in Richmond, Virginia. He was given a desk job. Predictably, he had lots of reports to fill out. Most of it was trivia, and it bugged him.
Bugged him. Keep this in mind.
His commanding officer lived by the book. He was a true bureaucrat. He told Troy to fill out the papers and stop complaining.
One afternoon, he was inspecting the mess hall. This was in August. Window screens were not yet installed. The mess sergeants put flypaper all around the mess hall on the walls. Troy, genius that he was, conceived a plan. He went back to his office and designed a report that would record every day the number of flies caught by the flypaper.
He mimeographed off several dozen of these reports. He filled in the figures. He made them up. At the end of the week, he sent the first batch of reports to the Pentagon. He kept a carbon copy for his files. He did this for a month.
At this point, another second lieutenant from another company visited his office. He asked him about the flypaper report. The C.O. had demanded that he send his flypaper reports to the Pentagon. Washington had contacted the C.O. about the fact that the only mess hall that was sending the flypaper report was the one that Troy was in charge of.
Without missing a beat, Troy went to his filing cabinet, pulled out some of the carbon copies, and showed them to the junior officer. He then gave him a copy of one of the mimeographed reports so that he could use it as a model.
It doesn't end there, at least according to the legend reported by his son. The junior officer still had a question.
"There's one thing here I don't get. You say 'flies this week' and 'flies last week.' When you check your flypapers, how do you tell last week's flies from this week's?"A genius capable of the grand conception of the Flypaper Report was also capable of working out its details. "A very good question," Troy assured him. "You're the first one who has had the vision to ask it. The answer is,"—and it came to him at that instant—"I have a sergeant follow me around with a matchstick and a saucer of ketchup, and as I count each fly, he daubs it. Simple! No sweat at all. Some sergeants prefer mustard as a dauber, but we here in B Company find that ketchup has a certain something that mustard lacks."
From that time on, the Pentagon received its weekly flypaper reports from companies besides Company B.
Troy was a gifted amateur. Moran was a professional. He always insisted that he was not a practical joker. He referred to his pranks as mental hotfoots. He usually had commercial support for them. His first one was in 1938. He traveled to Juneau, Alaska, where he sold an icebox to an Eskimo. There is a web page devoted to some of his more famous stunts: http://bit.ly/MoranStunts.
A year after he died, the Leftist British newspaper The Guardian ran a story on an exhibition of publicity stunts in London. The author recognized genius when he saw it.
It was Moran who sat on an ostrich egg for 19 days, four hours and 32 minutes before hatching it to publicise the novel The Egg and I. He searched for a needle in a haystack for 10 days to promote a piece of real estate. He climbed from one horse to another in a Nevada river to urge voters to vote Republican after the Democrats had urged voters not to change horses in mid-stream.And it was Moran who created the greatest soundbite the world has yet known. To publicise some bizarre product, Moran excelled himself in stuntland and tried to send an extremely short man up into the air above Manhattan's Central Park on a vast kite. Inevitably, the New York cops intervened and banned his foolhardy behaviour. An outraged Moran gave a press conference where he said: "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park."
Magnificently said!
A MODEL PRANK
I went to high school with a man who was involved in what I regard as the greatest of all college stunts, even though it was illegal: breaking and entering. It involved the University of Washington’s halftime card display performance at the Rose Bowl on January 2, 1961. The Rose Bowl is in Pasadena. Also in Pasadena is the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech. This is academically the best school in Southern California, and probably tied with MIT in terms of brainpower. Here is an accurate description.
The flip-card show got off to a well-coordinated start. Everything went smoothly, and the crowd marvelled at the colorful images forming, as if by magic, at the command of the cheerleaders. It wasn't until the 12th image that things began to go a little wrong. This image was supposed to depict a husky, Washington's mascot. But instead a creature appeared that had buck teeth and round ears. It looked almost like a beaver.The next image was even worse. The word 'HUSKIES' was supposed to unfurl from left to right. But for some reason the word was reversed, so that it now read 'SEIKSUH'.
These strange glitches rattled the Washington cheerleaders. They wondered if they might have made some careless mistakes when designing the complex stunt. But there was nothing for them to do about it now except continue on, and so they gave the signal for the next image.
What happened next has lived on in popular memory long after the rest of the 1961 Rose Bowl has been forgotten. It was one of those classic moments when a prank comes together instantly, perfectly, and dramatically.
The word 'CALTECH' appeared, held aloft by hundreds of Washington students. The name towered above the field in bold, black letters and was broadcast to millions of viewers nationwide.
I was watching the Rose Bowl that day. I remember seeing this. The television camera was focused on the students performing the card stunts. It became clear that something was wrong, but I don’t remember if the commentators mentioned this. I do recall very clearly that one of them commented on the Caltech display, mentioning that Caltech was a local college that would never get into the Rose Bowl. He said it was decent of the University of Washington to mention Caltech.
To this day the Great Rose Bowl Hoax, as it was soon dubbed, remains one of the best known college pranks ever perpetrated. Neil Steinberg, author of a classic study of college pranks, If At All Possible Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks, wrote that "few college pranks can be said to be more grandly conceived, carefully planned, flawlessly executed, and publicly dramatic" than the Rose Bowl Hoax.It was the sheer public spectacle of the prank that set it apart -- that it was staged not just at a college football game, but at the nationally televised Rose Bowl, probably the most famous annual college football game of all.
The story of how they pulled it off is here: http://bit.ly/RoseBowl1961.
MY PRANK
The only stunt that I can remember designing and pulling off was in the fall of 1966. I was a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside. I was working on my Master’s degree. I was renting a room from the Ference family. The oldest son worked for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. He worked as a typesetter. At some point, he mentioned that there were scrap rolls of newsprint that were thrown away because the print run for the day did not use all of the paper. The partial rolls were not worth saving. I think these were about 4 feet tall when standing on their bases. I really don’t remember.
I got an idea. On the side of a small mountain behind the university, there was a huge concrete C. It stood for California, meaning the local university. It could be seen for miles.
Every year, the university had Parents Day. Parents would come from around the state to visit the campus which their children were attending. It occurred to me that this would be an opportunity to have a little fun at the expense of the liberal faculty that controlled the humanities departments.
I asked the typesetter to bring home several discarded roles of newsprint. I approached a friend of mine I had roomed with as an undergraduate, John Fawcett. He and I were joined by several other students, as far as I remember. I don’t think we could have done it alone. But I don't remember putting together a team.
My goal was to convert the Big C into a huge hammer and sickle, which was the symbol of the Communist movement. It worked. We took the rolls of newsprint with us when we drove to the Big C. We then laid out the rolls of paper to create a hammer on the Big C. We also created a handle for the C, turning it into a sickle. We used rocks to hold down the edges of the paper. I think it took a dozen rolls of paper to make the hammer and handle visible.
I can date this: the evening of November 16 and the early morning of November 17. I remember this for a specific reason. After our work was over, John and I sat on the back of his car on the trunk. For some reason, it was not cold. We were talking, and we were looking at the sky. We kept noticing shooting stars. The sky was clear at night in those days. Lights from the city did not interfere with visibility. It turns out that this was the most spectacular meteor shower of the 20th century. That’s why I can date it. http://bit.ly/Meteors1966.
Here is where I have some doubt as to the dating. November 17 was a Thursday. In retrospect, that was an odd day for Parents Day. Saturday, November 19 makes more sense. Could it be that what we witnessed was not the main meteor shower but a secondary shower on the morning of November 19? I doubt it.
The prank worked as intended because there was major haze on the morning of November 17. It was not possible to see the mountain or the Big C. At about 10 in the morning, or maybe a little later, after parents had arrived, the haze began to lift. At that point, people could see the hammer and sickle on the side of the mountain. This was not the public relations message that the university's administrators wanted to send to parents and also the city. It was visible for about two hours. Then the Big C reappeared.
I was talking a few days later with an administrator I knew fairly well because I had worked with him in student government when I was an undergraduate. He told me, not knowing that I was the prankster, that it had taken two hours to organize a maintenance crew to take down the paper. I did not reveal to him that I was the one who had designed the prank. Discretion is the better part of valor. I was not a suspect. I did not have the reputation of being a Communist. I was working on my first book: Marx's Religion of Revolution (1968).
I hate to think that this is the only prank that I ever designed and pulled off, but I don’t remember any others.
MY LESSON
In retrospect, it was good that I did not indulge in what was something of a fascination of mine. It was probably in 1970 that I contacted Dwight Chapin, who was Nixon’s appointments secretary. I was looking for a job. I had gone to Boys State with him. I thought he would remember me. He did. He wrote back and said that there might be the possibility of a job with the Nixon administration. That did not work out. Chapin later went to prison for his involvement in what was known as the dirty tricks campaign against Senator Muskie. In retrospect, I wonder whether I would have been pulled into that project. I might have been tempted. It was right up my alley.