The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

A History of Senior Pranks at

Weston High School

 

By Jonathan Klaassen &

Jonathan Earle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every spring, high schools across the country witness the yearly ritual of the ‘senior prank.’ It is, by now, a national pastime as familiar to us as fireworks on the Fourth of July. The image of conniving seniors concocting ludicrous schemes has been seen again and again in popular movies and television shows.

In its thirty-seven year history, Weston High School has seen more than its share of senior pranks, ranging from small-scale mischief to full-blown vandalism. In this paper, we will examine the pranks that have taken place at Weston High School in order to discuss trends, determine their purposes and nature, define the ideal prank, and relate what happens at Weston High School to the age-old conflict between youth and the establishment.

The first ten years of Weston High School’s history were relatively prankless. It seems students were too preoccupied with glaring national issues like the Vietnam War and the women’s’ rights movement to rebel against their local school administration. This began to change when America’s involvement in the war ended in 1973. Around that time, a brave and pioneering WHS senior scaled the flagpole in front of the school and placed steel-belted tires over it.[1] “The administration spent weeks trying to get them off,” recalls Sal LaRusso[2]. The success of Animal House in 1978 is indicative of a youth culture yearning to return to the trivial.

Rebellious seniors during this era also managed to fill the donut in the main lobby with water and fish––creating a veritable aquarium which they mockingly dubbed “Mr. Higgins’ Pond” after the assistant superintendent.¹ It was among the first pranks at WHS which required considerable effort on that part of the janitors to clean up. For this reason, it draws our disapproval.

In the course of our investigations, we’ve come up with what we believe are the qualifications for an ideal prank. It must be creative, it must be well-executed, but it must also be harmless. As Dave Eger, a former WHS student, remarked “a prank is really on the people who have to clean it up.”[3] When pranks cross the line from harmless to harmful, they become malicious acts of vandalism. As we will see later, a single act of vandalism can break the trust between seniors and administration for years to come.

We can say with certainty that most pranks are not carried out with malicious intent. Like one from the late 70s, early 80s era, in which a group of seniors managed to drive a car onto the auditorium stage before a graduation rehearsal.[4] Another year seniors dressed up a muskrat hole in the south courtyard. Overnight, they set up a house, a mailbox, and a sign much to the amusement of teachers and students the next day.⁴ In 1984, a group of seniors made fake morning announcements which included goofy information but were done in an official manner. They also distributed a fake daily bulletin, a hit with teachers and students alike.[5]

            Some pranks during the 1980s were on the line between harmless and harmful. Once such prank occurred around 1988, in which students hung condoms filled with water on the tree in the cafeteria courtyard.[6] Mrs. Hand recalled the humorous moment when she saw the superintendent, a humorless man named Ottie Norwood, standing by a condom without knowing it. This prank ran the line for two reasons. First, its sexual content made it more embarrassing to the administration than past pranks and secondly because the janitors had to spend time cleaning it up. But it was no where near as bad as what was to come.

            Pranks verging on vandalism have occurred periodically for much of WHS’s history. The first recorded incident was when student spray painted the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in the cafeteria courtyard. Sandblasters were required to remove it––a task which was eventually paid for by the senior class. [7] But the pivotal event which changed the future of WHS pranks forever occurred in 1991.

            Ever since the high school was founded in 1968, it had been tradition for seniors to camp out in the courtyard for one night in spring. Though this required that they use ladders to scale the outer wall of the building, parents and the administration tolerated it because it had always been harmless. It was also a much less litigious age in which school administrators were less likely to be sued if anything went wrong––say if a student were to fall off the ladder and break his/her ankle for instance.

            In 1991, a small group of seniors climbed over the roof to camp in the courtyard just as their predecessors had done in years past. But this time, things got out of hand. Whether or not there was alcohol involved is a matter of contention[8], but what is certain is that a few ‘bad eggs’ broke into the school and went into the cafeteria where they cooked a midnight snack. Whether they intended to break cafeteria equipment or simply broke it by accident (remember, they may have been intoxicated) was not important to the administration when they found out. The students responsible where punished and the tradition of sleeping in the courtyard was brought to a end.[9] The administration’s decision was no doubt influenced by a new fear of lawsuits and liabilities. If future students wanted to continue to prank the administration, they would have to be more creative or more stealthy than ever before, lest they resort again to vandalism.

            The nature of the prank reflects the nature of the students who carry it out, not necessarily the nature of the class. Considering the reprisals of the previous year, one would expect 1992’s prank to be benign at most. Curiously it would be just the opposite. Perhaps the pranksters wanted to lash out at the administration for taking away what they perceived to be their right to sleep in the courtyard. What they did was to rip cement parking stoppers out of their places in the parking lot and stack them across the front entrance.[10] Undoubtedly, it required a considerable effort to return them to the parking lot, so this prank falls short of the ideal. So does the incident which took place around 1995 in which students stacked chairs on the school’s roof.[11] For 1996’s prank, a group of unscrupulous seniors egged the school.[12] It was a creative and moral low point.

            The year 2000’s prank wasn’t much better. That year, the administration bought a graduation clock and put it in the main office so all could see exactly how much time was left until graduation. But as graduation approached, the clock suddenly disappeared. Not long after, the administration received a ransom note from the thieves in which they threatened to destroy the clock unless then principal Ms. Kolek came to school in a clown costume.[13] The story goes that she brought the costume in but never wore it.[14] In any case, the students were identified and the administration threatened to keep them from graduating at which point Mr. LaRusso negotiated to get the clock back and persuaded the administration not to punish those responsible.[15]

            The prank of 2002 broke this string of mean-spirited antagonism between the pranksters and the administration. That year, a group of seniors using blue construction paper managed to transform the school motto in the front lobby from “Honor, Wisdom, Imagination” into “Honor, Wisdom, Vagination.”[16] In our opinion, this prank met all of the three criteria: it was harmless, it was creative, and it left people wondering, “How’d they do that?”

            2004’s prank was more controversial, though in our opinion it was among the best in the school’s history. A group of seniors got a hold of the official school stationary and sent letters to senior parents saying that their son/daughter had failed health and would therefore not be graduating. This precipitated scores of phone calls from angry parents demanding an explanation. Some said that it was cruel to make so much extra work for the administration and put parents through such an ordeal. But we can’t help but laugh at the creativity and efficiency of the act––that so much harmless confusion was created by simply mailing a few forged letters.

            There are several influential factors which determine the nature of a senior prank: the current national attitude, the character of those seniors responsible, the relationship between the seniors and the administration, and the creative genius that goes into their planning. But regardless of whether the prank turns out to be good, bad, or even ugly, what it boils down to is that these rebellious tricks are a manifestation of the timeless paradigm of youthful defiance of regulation and authority. A true senior prank, though, should not be a harmful and destructive act of vandalism. It should be a well-conceived ploy that humors all and expresses the independent potential of graduating students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Bennett, Jean. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Cudmore, Wendy. Personal Interview. 2 March 2005.

Earle, Katherine. Internet Correspondence. 20 October 2004.

Earle, Matthew. Internet Correspondence. 14 December 2004.

Eger, David. Internet Correspondence. 15 December 2004.

Fissel, Patsy. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Glynn, Martha. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Halick, Jo. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Hand, Susan. Personal Interview. 16 December 2004.

Iffland, Tina. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Krasnov, Jonathan. Internet Correspondence. 15 December 2004.

Kupper, Tyler. Internet Correspondence. 15 December 2004.

LaRusso, Salvatore. Personal Interview. 17 December 2004.

Munson, Judy. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Sidoli, Chris. Personal Interview. 14 December 2004.

Siegel, Ed. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Stempien, Bruce. Personal Interview. 9 March 2005.

Westervelt, Robert. Telephone Interview. 9 March 2005.