College Fads

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College Fads

Over the course of the twentieth century, each generation of college students seems to have been identified in the public mind with mindless, often madcap fads, perhaps adopted as a silly counterpoint to the demands of intellectual life. Some of these phenomena have become iconic markers of their decades: the raccoon-coat craze of the 1920s, goldfish swallowing in the 1930s, panty raids and telephone-booth stuffing in the 1950s, piano smashing in the 1960s, and streaking in the 1970s.

The goldfish-swallowing era of campus lunacy peaked in the spring of 1939. Although there were political events unfolding in Europe that would lead to World War II, newspapers devoted much space to this college fad. It all began when Harvard freshman Lothrop Withington, Jr. told friends that he had observed goldfish being swallowed on a Honolulu beach, and that he had done it himself. Someone challenged Lothrop, and a $10 bet was made, leading to a demonstration in the freshman dining hall on March 3, 1939. While cameras recorded a bit of history, Lothrop picked up a three-inch goldfish by the tail, dropped the little wiggler into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Whipping out a toothbrush, he ceremoniously cleaned his teeth. Before sitting down to a dinner of fried sole, he remarked that the "scales caught a bit in my throat."

During the economic depression of the 1930s, there was no large annual college-student migration to Florida, and the less expensive fad of fish-swallowing sufficed for springtime excitement, becoming at once a kind of intercollegiate sport. Frank Hope of Franklin and Marshall College topped Withington by salting and peppering three goldfish and putting them away without chewing. The following day, a classmate named George Raab swallowed six fish. Harvard's Irving Clark vaulted far ahead by force-feeding himself two dozen of the little creatures, also announcing his willingness to eat beetles, spiders, and worms. Subsequent records were soon posted and quickly bested on campuses nationwide: University of Michigan (28), Boston College (29), Albright College (33), and MIT (42). When a student at Kutztown State in Pennsylvania broke the record by swallowing 43, he was suspended for "conduct unbecoming to a student."

After a professor of anatomy at UCLA concluded that an average-size male could safely down 150 live goldfish, the all-time record is reported to have zoomed to 210 fish at one sitting, swallowed by an anonymous BMOC (big man on campus) at St. Mary's University. Within a month, students were looking for variations on the theme, but the munching of 78-rpm phonograph records at the University of Chicago or the masticating of magazines at Lafayette College never captured the public imagination as did the swallowing of little live fish. In the late 1960s goldfish swallowers reappeared briefly on college campuses, but during that hectic era of student protests, such meaningless pranks were generally ignored by the press.

In the spring of 1952, an outbreak of panty raids began at the University of Michigan. When 600 students gathered outside a dorm to listen to music on the first evening of spring, someone shouted, "To the women's dorms!" Suddenly the mob of male students forced their way into a dormitory and began dashing into rooms to steal lingerie. Copycat raids quickly followed at colleges and universities from coast to coast. To a writer in U.S. News & World Report the fad seemed inappropriate for a nation at war in Korea, and he asked why the panty-raiders were not "in the army if they have so much energy and so little to do?" Some university officials tried to resist, but at the University of Miami panty-obsessed males tore down a heavy wire fence to get to the girls' dorms. A wily director of women's residences at the University of Indiana took the opposite approach and left a barrel of women's underwear in plain view, ready to be confiscated by the fistful. That same spring at Ann Arbor, where the madness had begun, 500 coeds broke into the men's dorm in search of Jockey shorts and other male underwear. Panty raids have not been revived later, as many fads have been, and one writer suggested a reason: "Probably because the age of sexual permissiveness has rendered such symbolic action as this meaningless."

Telephone-booth stuffing began on American campuses in the spring of 1959, spreading out from California. At UCLA seventeen men squeezed like sardines into a conventional seven-foot high booth, followed quickly by an eighteen-man stuffing at California's St. Mary's University. With all their planning and knowledge of physics, students at MIT could only break that record by one. When students at Modesto Junior College in California reported thirty-four men in one booth, the record was investigated and then thrown out because the booth had been laid on its side, permitting considerably more horizontal stuffers to be accommodated. The most aesthetic booth-stuffing occurred in Fresno, where coeds in one-piece bathing suits gracefully wedged themselves into a booth submerged in a swimming pool. The fad began and ended in the spring of 1959, and was copied several years later by a brief fad involving students stuffing themselves into Volkswagens.

In 1963 a jangling, cacophonous din rose on college campuses as students used sledgehammers and axes to shatter full-size pianos. Students at California Tech did the job in 10 minutes, 44 seconds, but a Wayne State crew set the ultimate record: 4 minutes, 51 seconds. A Life Magazine writer called the piano hacking "Andante on a Choppin' Theme," noting that the grand finale was "Chopsticks." Since it was a time of student protest, one of the Caltech choppers called the act a comment on the "obsolescence of society." One group of dismemberers called its members by the academic-sounding name, The Piano Reduction Society.

From late January to mid-March, 1974, when the nation was suffering through a grim economic recession as well as the pains of the Nixon impeachment inquiry, there suddenly appeared the most merrily scandalous of all the college fads: streaking. Beginning in the warmer climates of California and Florida, nude students began to leap from behind bushes and dash across campus, parachute to earth in their birthday suits, and bike through the town en masse and unclad. Soon the fad spread throughout the country, even to the University of Alaska, where streakers dashed out in sub-zero weather. The new craze was difficult for student governments and town fathers to combat. The mayor of Dover Township, New Jersey, threatened to fine streakers one dollar for every pound of flesh they exposed. In Honolulu a male student streaked through an official governmental assembly, declaring himself loudly, "the Streaker of the House." Spring graduations at many colleges and universities were marked by the shedding of caps and gowns for a short streak. Newsweek magazine called the fad "the sort of totally absurd phenomenon the nation needed after a winter of lousy news."

For the most part it was a male phenomena, but Laura Barton, a freshman at Carleton College, was widely recognized as the first female streaker when she appeared au naturel for a curtain call following the college production of Measure for Measure. The record for the largest crowd of streakers is claimed by the University of Georgia, which mustered 1,543 nude students for a race through campus. They had been preceded in fame by students at the universities of South Carolina, Maryland, and Colorado.

The commercial value of the fad soon became recognized, and a Connecticut jewelry company sold medallions plated with silver and gold, inscribed for the "free spirit shedding his inhibitions." Psychological theorists explained the phenomenon as "the peaking of the sexual revolution, which made public nudity, long a taboo, an annoyance for some and an amusement for others."

—Benjamin Griffith