I wrote a blog entry about pranks recently and I neglected to mention that October 2007 marked the 10th anniversary of the great pumpkin prank at Cornell (my grad school alma mater).
Somehow, a group of students got a HUGE pumpkin on the top of Cornell's McGraw Tower spire (where the chimes get played), which is an extremely tall building. The thing probably wouldn't have stayed up very long, but the weather got really cold, which caused the pumpkin to freeze and stay on the tower. The pumpkin then stayed on top of the tower until the weather warmed up in the spring. It fell down one or two days before my visit as a prospective graduate student (evidently in a blooper during an attempt to take it down). Sigh... I just missed seeing that wonderful sight in person.
The pumpkin continued to decay over the years and "The last extant piece of the gourd sat beside a brain display in the Department of Psychology." (That sentence just amuses the Hell out of me.)
Anyway, given my association with Caltech pranks, I feel remiss in not having previously told this story on my blog and only my recent Cornell alumni newsletter reminded me of this awesome prank. It's still not known who the perpetrators were and I believe that how they did it might not be known either. (There was an article in The Cornell Daily Sun late in my graduate-school career that -- without identifying the perps -- claimed to state how the pumpkin was hoisted atop the tower, but my understanding is that a nontrivial number of people were disputing the purported methodology.
The same prank happened at Cal on top of the camponile. They took it down the next day, but they also never figured out how someone got up there.
ReplyDeleteAlan Hiller