The joke’s on you

 What could shower parties, streakers, and snowballs have in common?

These antics, along with The College Reporter’s last April Fools Edition featuring stories about the “hotness” of F&M admits and the digital President Fry, provide just a few examples of the many pranks carried out across campus throughout the years. F&M students have a strong tradition of prank-pulling, dating back to the mid-1800s. 

 Throughout the 19th Century, F&M students played a number of tricks on each other, their professors, and the College’s faculty. While current students may enjoy sitting outside on the quad, socializing with friends, or taking a trip downtown for some extracurricular fun, students during the College’s earlier years looked to pranks as their main form of entertainment. 

 Especially when F&M was an all men’s college, pranks provided a break from the monotonous everyday routine of attending school in Lancaster, which was not as developed at the time. Rules, regulations, and students’ regard for their professors were much different then as well, so students often received little or no punishment as a result of their shenanigans. 

 In these early years, students pulled a variety of pranks ranging from rolling a log down the stairway of the College building in the middle of the night in the 1850s to painting all the chalkboards with white paint in 1857 to throwing snowballs at professors through open windows in the 1870s. Most of the pranksters carried on unpunished, unless they received a small reprimand or lecture. 

 There have also been modern-day pranks throughout the College’s more recent history. In the late 1950s, a group of Chi Phi brothers pulled one of the most famous pranks on one of the college’s priests. One spring evening in 1959, a few members rolled brother John Herr’s jeep into the lobby of Hartman Hall. The next morning, it took a few students involved in the prank, along with a number of the College’s faculty and staff, to roll the jeep back out of the hall and down the stairs. 

 F&M saw an increase in pranks along the quads and in the dorms in the ’60s and ’70s. In 1978, 19 students donned swimsuits for what might be F&M’s first official “shower party,” making headlines across the country in the Arizona Republic. This prank, along with a number of streaking expeditions run by adventurous students in the 70s and 80s, marked a new, more scandalous pranking style. 

 In the past few decades, the student body’s prank-pulling has significantly decreased, definitely not reaching the proportions of those first years of F&M. As the school year winds down, we’ll have to see if this age-old tradition will continue to dwindle or if it will return ... the joke’s on you!