Parental College Pranks by folks "of a certain age"

Parent Cafe
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<p>Rather than continue to hijack the “7 Sisters” thread, there has been an excellent suggestion to start a new thread dedicated to pranks pulled in college by those of us of a certain age. (Well, those that we will admit to. ;))</p>

<p>Let me tell you about “Operation Crumple.” Gather half a dozen friends. Save daily newspapers for approximately 2 weeks. Add two unsuspecting underclassmen along with one “above reproach” upperclassman. Have the “above reproach” upperclassman lure the unsuspecting underclassmen out of their dorm room by inviting them to go out for ice cream. Now the 6 friends with the newspapers take the newspapers over to the underclassmen’s dorm room and stand there for two hours crumpling up newspapers until the entire room is filled from floor to ceiling with newspapers. I mean the entire room, no exaggeration. The six sneak away to vantage points where we can watch what will eventually happen.
The underclassmen came back, opened their dorm room door, and the shock that they got. We put the finishing touches on the project by tossing them into the room. We have great pictures from this prank, and still talk about it at reunions.</p>

<p>Edit: Unfortunately, I found out some 25 years later what happened to all those newspapers. (I had never thought about that as a 20 year old, of course.) The occupants of the room painstakingly removed all the newspapers from their room and ended up filling up all the shower stalls on the floor with the newspapers. The poor women who cleaned the dorm had to deal with it! I still feel guilty.</p>

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<p>HAHAHAHA…! Good one, momof3! I would imagine that the cleaning lady ran the water on the paper and made it into a smaller, manageable (though heavy) amout of paper.</p>

<p>We did several pranks at school. Having transoms over the doors helped enormously when things were tied to the doorknob and placed in plastic buckets perched precariously on the transom, to nail unsuspecting victims coming out of their dormrooms.</p>

<p>One of my favorite pranks was done by using rubber gloves from chem lab. We had watched something on tv- I think it was a creepy episode of “The Twilight Zone” where some famous piano players hands were cut off and still playing the piano. Anyone remember that episode?
Anyway, we blew up a plastic glove and lowered it down (at night of course) to the window from the window above. Then we called the victim and said something stupid to make her look out her window. You could hear the screams all over the dorm!! Then when the poor victim ran out of her room in horror, someone snuck in and put an alarm clock under her bed, set to go off at 4 am. So, when she finally got to sleep after the “hands” incident, she was awakened at 4 am but couldnt find the alarm clock. Gosh we were mean!</p>

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<p>^^^^LOL, Jym!</p>

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<p>The prank we pulled in college probably was a lot funnier to watch than it will sound here, but since we’re on the subject :slight_smile: </p>

<p>I went to Mary Washington College, which was all girls for the first two years I attended - it went coed in my junior year. My freshman dorm was quite small, maybe around 60 girls, and we had a housemother. She was a nice, refined Southern lady in her late seventies, but she could be quite strict with us at times. </p>

<p>One Saturday night, most of the dorm residents had left for the weekend (MWC was quite a suitcase school in those days) and things were pretty quiet. Our housemother turned in for the night fairly early, and we knew that she would be getting up to go to church in the morning at 8 AM, as was her habit. </p>

<p>Our dorm had a “parlor” - sort of a large living room with sofas and coffee tables. There was a large desk in one corner where a student assistant sat and signed visitors in and out or called dorm residents on the P.A. system when they had a gentleman caller (I kid you not - when a guy showed up to pick up his date, we’d hear an announcement over the P.A. – “Mary Smith, you have a caller” - guess this was the South’s version of Gracious Living!
The housemother’s room was right off the parlor, behind where the student assistant sat at the desk.</p>

<p>Anyway, that night we all decided to move every stick of furniture out of the parlor so that when the housemother came out to go to church the next morning, she would see it and have a cow :eek: It took us a logn time, but we quietly moved every sofa, chair and table out of the parlor and into the hallway. We rolled up the rugs and moved them out, unplugged all the lamps and moved them to the hallway, and even unscrewed the plastic switchplate covers over the electrical outlets. The only piece of furniture we couldn’t move was the student assistant’s desk, and that was only because it was too big to fit through the hallway doors. For some reason, we thought this was hilariously funny, and we all set our alarm clocks so we could get up early and watch the housemother come out of her room and see the empty parlor.</p>

<p>Just as we expected, she opened her door a few minutes before 8 and came out to find the student on desk duty sitting on the floor next to the desk (because her chair was gone). She about had a heart attack, I think, and got really angry at the poor clueless student (who wasn’t part of the prank the night before). I wish I could reproduce her thick southern accent here, because I can still hear her saying “WHO is responsible fah this? Ah wont y’all to tell me WHO did this!!” We were all hiding in the hallway peeking through the French doors trying to see and hear what was going on and she was so mad she never saw us. She just announced that she would deal with it when she got back because she didn’t want to be late for church.</p>

<p>Well, as soon as her car pulled away, we all got to work moving everything back into the parlor just like it had been the night before. It didn’t take us as long as it did to move it out, and it was all back to normal when she got back from church. She walked in, looked around, and never said another word about it! I don’t think she ever found out who was responsible. Just like momof3sons, we still talk about this one at our reunions :)</p>

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<p>patsmom,
I was laughing out loud just reading this before I even got to the end (which I couldn’t have guessed!). And just so you know, even in Boston we had “gentlemen callers.” The girl on “bell duty” would have to call up to the room and make the announcement.</p>

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<p>The traditional gag was to take a big manila envelope, fill it full of shaving cream, and slide the open end under the door of the victim. Then all you hd to do was jump on the envelope and “splat”-the shaving cream ejected into the room on the other side of the door.</p>

<p>We also played gags on professors with manila (interoffice) envelopes. One was in the biology building. A few of us had research projects that kept us on campus over the winter break. One student was doing something with drosophila (fruitflies). She had a bunch left over after anesthestizing them, so we decided to put them, along with a lot of yeast to take care of their appetites, in a large manila envelope. Keep in mind these critters mate and multiply like crazy. So, we swept all the “asleep” fruitflies into the envelope with the ample stash of food, and left them in one professors mailbox in the building thoughout the entire winter break. I heard people talking about all the fruitflies all over this guys office after winter break, but I never saw the immediate result when he opened his mail!</p>

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<p>JYM, we had transoms also - they were usually kept open all the time. The “stuff the dorm room” game worked well enough through an open transom. Balloons took longer than newspapers but were enjoyably noisy to clean up later.
The one my husband and old friends always bring up involves lots and lots of clear Knox gelatin dissolved into a bucket of boiling water and then ladled into the toilets downstairs on the girl’s floor below theirs. It was always freezing cold in the bathrooms (windows ajar for ventilation even in snowstorms) and the water set up nice and firm and clear. They did feel sorry for the cleaning lady and appologized later - she said it helped clean the rings off the porcelain bowls!</p>

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<p>^^ hahaha. Where’d you go to school, dragonmom??</p>

<p>And patsmom-- did anyone get a picture?</p>

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<p>Jym, ditto on the shaving cream. We also loved the bucket of water on the top of a half-opened door (we usually tried to “get” someone who wasn’t just coming back from their shower! :eek:)</p>

<p>Ahh, those were the days. And to think DD doesn’t want to live in an all-girls dorm! ;)</p>

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<p>I love the shaving cream in manila envelope one – might even try that at the office one of those days :)</p>

<p>Jym, I think we took pictures of the parlor all emptied out, but no one got a picture of Mrs. Asbell’s face because we were hiding when she came out.</p>

<p>I remember another one we did in the same freshman dorm when we had a substitute housemother while Mrs. Asbell was on vacation. This other lady was known to drink a bit, so everyone saved up their empty beer cans over the week that the substitute was in residence. She left on Sunday morning and the regular housemother returned late Sunday afternoon. In the interim, we were able to get inside her room and fill the trashcans with empty beer cans. Keep in mind, this was a dry campus at the time and anyone getting caught with alcohol in their room was kicked out. Of course, that didn’t stop us from getting beer…</p>

<p>We never did find out what Mrs. Asbell said when she returned and found the wastebaskets filled to the brim, but we never had that substitute again, either.</p>

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<p>LOL patsmom! That’s priceless!!</p>

<p>We had a little messageboard for phone messges down in the lobby where the messages were left when someone was out (this was before everyone had phones in their room). Anyway, when it was about that time of year for peole to be hearing from med school or grad school about interviews or admission, we would leave messages that sais soemthing like “Please call Dr. So and so regarding your application” And the phone number we wrote down for them to call was to dial a prayer :D</p>

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<p>OK, this isn’t exactly a college prank, but I still think it’s great. A guy I dated in college pulled this one off with his buddies from his high school.</p>

<p>In front of his high school was a large lawn. One night just after they had graduated from h.s., he and his frends showed up at the school with a grass seed, fertilizer and a drop-spreader. They had stakes and strings, and staked out a giant “81” (their graduation year… I’m showing my age!) on the front lawn. Then they used the drop-spreader to give a nice dose of grass seed and fertilizer in the staked out area. They pulled up the stakes, took their gear, and left. Two months later, when it was time to leave for college, they drove by their alma mater. There in blazing green on the front lawn was a giant “81”. I suspect it took a couple of years to completely blend back in with the rest of the lawn.</p>

<p>Patience, patience… but rewarding!</p>

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<p>My favorite prank was as sophmores, the first day the freshmen moved into dorms we’d put on work clothes, knock on the door of all the freshmen in the rival dorm and tell them we were there to hook up their phone. (Yep back in the days when each dorm room would have a phone on the wall…) We’d take the cover off, unhook a certain wire and put the cover back on. Then, in the middle of the night we’d start calling dorm rooms (the numbers were always the same, ending in the dorm room number…) and hang up. Disconnecting the wire meant the phone would keep on ringing until the wire was hooked back up.</p>

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<p>You’d be surprised of the amount of water a latex condom will actually hold when filled slowly with a garden hose. It is an exponential expansion, and quickly exceeds a manageable size and weight if transport is attempted by one person.</p>

<p>Kind of acts like a greased pigling, or 5 gallons of uncontained jello, but substantially heavier.</p>

<p>When placed on a roomate’s mattress, it becomes quite a conundrum to remove, especially if all the linens have been removed and can’t be used as a means of transport.</p>

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<p>Lafalum, that reminds me of yet another Mary Washington story! (Gee, I never thought I was such a hell-raiser till I started dredging up these old memories…)</p>

<p>Anyway, I was a college student in the late sixties, early seventies, when hippies were the big thing. We had lots of day-glo posters on our walls and the requisite black lights that made them glow. We heard somewhere that you could mix Tide with a little water to make a paste and you could “paint” with it and it would glow under a black light, so we tried it out on our walls in our room and it worked great! We painted some graffiti (if I remember correctly, it was sort of obscene :p) and thought it was very funny because it was invisible in regular daylight but it showed up under the black light.</p>

<p>Well, about 5 years ago, I traveled up to Fredericksburg VA for a mini-reunion with my roommates and suitemates and we took a side trip to visit our old room. It was now a triple occupied by 3 guys, which was really weird to see since there were no guys living on campus back in the 70s, even when the school finally went coed. Anyhow, we asked them if they ever noticed anything strange about the wall and they said yes! They said that wall had been repainted many times, including once while they lived in the room, but that there were always these “stains” that looked like parts of words that the paint wouldn’t completely cover - it always bled through. They couldn’t read what it said but it was definitely visible as some kind of shadow or defect in the paint. After we finished cracking up, we told them that we were the culprits 30 years earlier who were expressing a little bit of hippie rebellion, I guess. </p>

<p>I’m sure Tide has changed their formula many times since 1971, and I doubt that it glows in the dark anymore. Now I’m just wondering if it had some kind of harmful chemicals in it with a half-life like uranium to make it stay up on the wall for 30 years. :eek:</p>

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<p>Winning the Oscar in the “Wish I’d Known That” catagory - ViolaDad and the condom-water-balloon story!
My sorority had “sleeping porches” - unheated big rooms full of bunk beds where everyone slept. It became obvious pretty quickly who wasn’t using their bunk on the weekends in favor of their boyfriend’s apartment. Pranks were common but the best we could come up with was hauling their mattress and all linens out onto the fire escape. Sunday night there were some frantic, frutive hunts…</p>

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<p>My wife and I had the ultimate prankster as a roommate (four of us shared an apartment). Saran wrap stretched tightly over the toilet, black shoe polish on the toilet seat. She’d switch the position of the raw and hardboiled eggs on the fridge door. Loved to fill the lower third of your bedsheets with uncooked rice or cornflakes. </p>

<p>She’d play hide the toilet paper, hide the condoms. Her favorite was hide the alarm clock. She’d leave for the weekend, the clock set to go off between 3 and 4am, and always well hidden in our room. Of course we never looked before going to bed. It finally met its demise one night when I pitched it through the window screen and hit the parking lot below.</p>

<p>A frustrated actress, she had a penchant for role playing. I was studying for a final in an intensive 20th century German history seminar and had been deeply immersed in review for a solid two days, leaving my desk only to use the bathroom. She burst into my room, the strains of “Deutchland Uber Alles” blaring from her phonograph, dressed like Hitler, complete with mustache and jackboots. She goose-stepped twice around the room and left. I laughed so hard I peed my pants. Where she got the uniform, I’ll never know.</p>

<p>There’s one more dress up story that is so politically incorrect I could not possibly conceive of posting it in an open forum. I will, if pressed, relay it via PM. Just ask me about “Evelyn, the maid”.</p>

<p>She had a successful post college career in law enforcement, eventually retiring from the FBI. Kinda makes you wonder. I still miss that girl.</p>

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<p>Me! Me! Violadad! Send me a PM with the details. Sounds like my kind of woman!</p>

<p>Did you read that we also pulled the “alarm clock under the bed” stunt ? We had strange senses of humor back then…</p>

<p>We also decided to add a few paragraphs to someone’s senior thesis (she left it in her typewriter). So, in the middle of some History or Poly Sci or Religion thesis (I dont recall) was a verse or two of “Mary had a little lamb” :D</p>

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<p>I didn’t do any pranks in college. I did participate in some building takeovers and protest marches, but those were serious endeavors for folks like me who were in college in the late 1960s-early 1970s. I don’t even remember hearing about college pranks done then.</p>

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<p>Ah, you rebel, nsm :D</p>

<p>I remember hearing a story (can’t verify its complete accuracy) about when the students took over the college president’s office in '70-71 at my college (it was the year before I started). The story was that when they took over his office, he calmly said " don’t make a mess, don’t make any long distance phonecalls, and lock up when you leave" and walked out. Pretty classy, I’d say.</p>

<p>The first time I ever drove in Manhattan was the day of the big Columbia protest march down 5th Avenue. i was scared to death that I would hit a protester!</p>