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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on Feb 16, 2007 13:10:48 GMT -5
I thought we could gather some Smith traditions here, past and present. I'm curious if current Smithies still practice these things. I'm not talking about the official ones like orientation week, but the things that might get passed on informally from an old man to a new man and so on.
One tradition that I'm not sure if my class started or inherited was sledding down a street over by the zoo. I think it was Wilmar? It was very steep and when snow was present the residents couldn't even drive up or down so they just parked at the top or bottom.
I remember taking some baking sheets from the kitchen and sledding down the S-curve, hitting the curb rails and getting all the way to the bottom.
Then there was the (perhaps) short lived tradition of locking ourselves in room 203. We blocked the door with wardrobes and went back and forth to meals and classes by climbing down the porch pillars from the roof. The occasional whiz break meant peeing off the roof and Mark likes to remind me that when I was a Freshman on my first day I said, "I don't pee off roofs". ;D
Lessee...again, this might have just been a few of us, but we stopped shaving before 1st semester finals and sometimes didn't start again until the next semester. One year I remember going to the barber in Aggieville to get a real shave in a chair and everything.
Ooh, another good one would be the gatherings we had Pillsbury Crossing. Do the new Smithies still go there?
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Post by mschlatter on Feb 22, 2007 10:42:50 GMT -5
Jeremy,
The tradition I remember most from my time at Smith were the Smurthwaite pranks. We were contantly trying to ruin their yard or decorate their house. One year during orientation week, I took a few new guys over there to do some things with eggs, fireworks and other stuff. We had it all planned out. I convinced them that we needed to wear all black, use face paint etc. We showed up at 3:00 in the morning and parked in the neighborhood South of Smurthwaite. Everything was pretty routine until the fireworks portion of the prank. I believe it was Mike Unger who had let off some kind of non regulation fire cracker. It was very loud and sounded just like a gun shot. We took off and got in the car. In no time we could hear sirens all over town. Our imaginations might have been working on us, but we were in a hurry go get back to the house. We were driving a little faster than the posted limit and we got pulled over near Weber Hall. Surprisingly the cop didn't say anything about our unusal attire and let us go without a ticket. We were a little nervous afterwords, but it really didn't stop our enthusiasm for those types of activities.
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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on Feb 22, 2007 16:38:21 GMT -5
Yeah, those are a standby. For some reason, I never went on many of those though. I do recall a panty raid that included Smurthwaite and somebody came back with something crotchless. Do the guys still go to Pillsbury Crossing? Is the place still there?
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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on Feb 22, 2007 17:08:47 GMT -5
Nothing says Tradition like a shower on your birthday. How could *I* forget. and then there's the shower and flour. Anybody have any good birthday showering stories? I think I recall one year Dan spent like ALL day on campus so as not to be caught.
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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on May 11, 2007 10:45:07 GMT -5
Do guys still get duct taped to the tree in the front yard? I wonder when that tradition started.
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Post by chetzki on May 11, 2007 13:54:23 GMT -5
Before 1985 for sure. Chetzki
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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on May 16, 2007 13:06:27 GMT -5
How about the bottle of Old Crow whiskey that got passed around to whoever turned 21. Is that still around or did somebody actually drink it?
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Post by regehr on May 22, 2007 12:35:10 GMT -5
A footnote to the Old Crow tradition: we regarded this bottle as likely containing a deathly poison, but since then I've learned a bit about American whiskey and it turns out that older bottlings of Old Crow apparently contain a perfectly decent bourbon. The version currently on the shelves is supposed to be pretty bad.
So I would hope that if this bottle isn't still around, it was at least passed around on the roof or fire escape some fine summer evening.
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Post by mschlatter on May 23, 2007 8:12:11 GMT -5
Jeremy,
The Old Crow bottle is still being used. I saw it in room 302 this past school year. It has had so many names put on it that the oldest ones are faded out. I could still find mine on there from 1994. I was surprised it was still around. By the way, it has never been opened.
Marvin
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norm
New Man
Smithie 1993-7
Posts: 6
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Post by norm on May 25, 2007 1:42:38 GMT -5
Thanks Marv. I was wondering about that bottle. I'd last given it to Jason Rucker who passed it on to his brother Shawn. I guess my name is still there from 1995. Remember the good old days, when all you needed was a credit card to have microbrew beer delivered by mail-order to the house without any proof of age? That was the internet at its finest!
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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on May 25, 2007 10:56:05 GMT -5
o.O Wow! I was not aware you could do that. In MY day, we didn't even have the internet as we now know it. We just had email and you had to know your way around a text based email editor. I was on the cusp of it though and by my senior year (one of them anyway) I think I was using the precursor of Netscape. My freshman year was the last year they used computer punch cards for student registration too. We were living on the edge back then.
What kind of microbrews did you prefer?
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Post by chetzki on May 26, 2007 15:19:56 GMT -5
What's email?
We had one PC for the house. No one owned one at the time. When I was a senior in high school is was legal to drink beer in KS at 18, but then it was illegal when I was in college until I was 21.
Chetzki
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Post by Jeremy C_88-93 on Jun 29, 2007 10:54:25 GMT -5
I think I may have lived with the first guy to bring a PC to college with him. Sherraden brought his Commodore 64 but all I ever saw him do with it was play games. LOL
The PC in the basement was an HP and I thought it was so cool that I said "Man, I want to work for that company." Heheh. Now I do.
How many guys in the house today don't have a computer of their own?
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Post by Mark Hager 87-91 on Jun 29, 2007 15:23:11 GMT -5
Jeremy: You'll have to tell me if you overlapped with him or not, but Roger Bacalzo had a PC before Sherraden showed up with his. I seem to recall that the HP we had in the basement was because of Roger's relationship with HP (internship?), and that he went to work for HP after graduation. But he had his own, too. I remember playing Hack on it when the downstairs computer was being used for (ahem) more important things.
Mark
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Post by chetzki on Jun 29, 2007 15:50:06 GMT -5
Oh Hack! Yes Hack!
Roger may have been part of it, but we had an alum in the HP ranks that got the basement computer there. Don't know his name. I can't remember RB having one on his own. They sprouted up pretty quick one year when a new crop of Freshman came in.
Chetzkzi
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