Remember Penn back in the day? When guys wore three-piece suits to class, gals were few and far between and rooms in the Quad were equipped with crockery? Not really? You weren’t born yet? Yeah, we weren’t either. But don’t fret! There’s no better time than Homecoming to reminisce about the days of yore with alumni who are way older than you. After all, those good ol’ days gave rise to some of Penn’s most seminal rituals: the “toast” to the Red and the Blue, for example. A little jaunt into the Penn archives reveals the histories of all our beloved Penn traditions. But wait, there’s more! We also found records of some of Penn’s most bizarre and exciting rituals, long-abandoned for reasons ranging from apathy to illegality. We discovered that from around the turn of the century on, Quaker traditions got a little rowdy, a little competitive and a lot messy. Guess some things never change.
Sophomore Cremation
This tradition is just as morbid and inappropriate as it sounds.
Beginning in 1877, sophomores dressed in dark robes and mortar boards and met near the U.S. Mint downtown. Accompanied by the school band, which played funeral dirges, the sophomores processed back to West Philadelphia carrying small coffins containing the class Syllabus and Plate (we don’t really know what these things are, but they sound official). They moaned and wailed and sang funeral hymns, and when they finally made their way back to campus, they burnt them.
Yes, an actual cremation. Don’t worry though, it gets a little worse!
Around 1880 students lost the urge to burn these mysterious artifacts and instead opted for their least favorite textbooks. Sounds a lot more fun and cathartic. Well, the tradition quickly evolved to burn not their least favorite textbooks, but actual effigies of their least favorite professors! That has to be illegal today, right?
The ceremony was, for their credit, mostly lighthearted. Students gave speeches and sang silly songs about the professors they were condemning to Hell, so that makes it okay. One speech from 1911 stated that the lucky professors that year were chosen “for annulling our rights, taking away our leisure hours, giving us stones for bread, pressing on us preventives to sleep, and in general, for rendering Life a Funeral to us.”
Like all good and virtuous Penn traditions, the cremation was discontinued in 1930 due to violence provoked by insolent freshmen who thought it was a good idea to pelt the sophomores with rotten eggs.
Push-Ball Fight
One of the shortest-lived of traditions at Penn involved freshmen, sophomores and balls. Well, one ball, to be specific.
While the rules morphed over the course of a half-decade, the Push-Ball Fight held one thing constant — the use of a humongous ball, five feet in diameter or greater (this was Freud’s hey day, after all).
The fight took place where all epic Penn battles do — on Franklin Field. The ball began in the middle of the field, with sophomores on one side and freshmen on the other. When the starting whistle blew, the teams rushed to the ball with the aim of pushing it across the other team’s goal line. In 1908 the first team to score a goal won, but the rules got a little more complicated in the years to come.
The game was divided into two halves, with the winner being the team that scored the most goals in the time period. And the kicker? The ball couldn’t touch the ground — if it did, there was a face-off of sorts to get it going again.
The resulting game was essentially a cross between soccer, hot potato and whatever you call it when someone throws a beach ball into the crowd at a party.
The Push-Ball Fight began in 1908 and lasted a mere five years before it was deemed too boring for immortalization and was abandoned for other absurd traditions that were recognized as “truer indications of class strength.”
Wait, undergraduate committee of 1913, you mean one class’s ability to push a gigantic ball onto the other class’s side of a playing field isn’t indicative of that class’s strength? Sounds like these turn-of-the-century Quakers were just becoming less confident in their collective upper-body abilities.
Bowl Fight
Back in the day, Penn was big on freshman/sophomore rivalries, and no tradition exemplified this more brutally than the Bowl Fight. The first actual fight occurred in 1867, and it is just as bizarre as it sounds.
The rules of the fight were changed many times during the custom’s history, but a few basics always stayed the same. The freshmen chose one of their classmates to play the role of bowl man, while the sophomores were responsible for bringing a giant bowl. If the freshmen could break the bowl, they won. If the sophomores could put the bowl man in the bowl, they won. We imagine this was super comfortable for the bowl man.
The bowl got thicker and harder to break over time, so it was decided that freshmen just needed to have more hands on it than the sophomores when the fight ended in order to win. Other changes to the rules involved splitting the fight into halves (one devoted to the bowl man and one devoted to the bowl), changing the fight’s location and enforcing time limits.
Even early on, people were (rightfully) concerned that the fight was a little too violent. In addition to the bruises and black eyes that came with wrestling over a giant bowl, some people went and got themselves kidnapped. In the later years, the teams would attempt to kidnap the opposing team’s class leaders. The class president was a prime target.
Unfortunately, the tradition came to a tragic end after the Bowl Fight of 1916, when freshman William Lifson was killed and at least five other students were seriously injured. Downer.
Class Day
With the end of the Civil War came a Penn tradition that has long since disappeared into the historical archives. On June 2, 1865, the remaining 25 graduating members of the senior class organized the very first Class Day (there were originally 50 in the class — war has a funny way of making school seem less important). The ceremony consisted of a day of formal activities followed by an uproarious dinner with a “who’s who” guest list, plenty of wine and fancy-schmancy foodstuffs.
Donning the senior class color — blue — the members of the class of 1865 proceeded to honor their fellow classmates with congratulatory awards. So high school, you say? According to the list of “Spoon Men” since that first celebration, the Philomathean Society members snagged the award almost every year. I guess we know who the cool kids were back then.
In 1867, a new award was introduced to the Class Day festivities: the “mock” award. The very first of these was the “Wisdom Cap.” Later years brought mock awards ranging from a “gigantic cigar” to a “monster tuning fork,” becoming even more ridiculous as years went on. The 1880 recipient of the Senior English prize also received a “small bottle of medicine to keep him awake,” only to be trumped a year later by the winner of “two goats, suitably adorned” in 1881. Oh, Penn. So, so strange.
Rowbottom
Rowbottom is a weird Penn tradition in that it wasn’t so much an annual event as an excuse to break everything in your dorm room and wreak general havoc. Let us explain.
The tradition originated in 1910 when a couple students came into the Quad on a regular basis and screamed for their friend, Joseph Rowbottom. No one is entirely sure why they did this so often — some say they yelled because he was a book nerd and they wanted to mess with him; others say he was just a popular guy — but after hearing “Yea Rowbottom!” shouted at all hours of the day and night, other students came up with a response. Their solution? Throw everything they could find in their rooms out the window.
Rowbottom soon caught on across the University and became a rallying cry for general mayhem. It also became much more violent and destructive throughout the years, and sometimes hundreds or even thousands of Penn students would take to the streets of Philadelphia and just start breaking things. This, naturally, was a major problem and made Penn look really, really bad. Lots of people got arrested. Over 50 Rowbottoms happened between 1910 and 1977, and a lot of them were sparked by pretty hilarious events. In 1910, students were disappointed by a lame sighting of Halley’s Comet. In 1928, the power went out. In 1945, the United States defeated Japan! What better way to celebrate total victory?
The best one ever, though, was in 1971, when a DP column questioned the manliness and virility of freshman men. In response, some 300 freshmen tried to storm the women’s dorm, presumably to demonstrate their mad game. So virile.
Also, Rowbottom just sounds really dirty. Hee.
Hey Day
Once upon a time, Penn Athletics ruled Hey Day.
Originally (or not so originally) called “Moving-Up Day,” the day of debauchery and ketchup we know and love featured a long list of athletic events, including a senior-junior track meet, a Penn-Swarthmore baseball game and a senior-junior championship soccer match. Throw in what was called “Senior Singing at Senior Fence” and Sophomore Cremation and you’ve got one diverse afternoon in 1916.
Six years after women were recognized as voting members of our dear nation, Penn finally caught on and created a Women’s Hey Day, one that took place indoors and featured little more than a few stuffy speeches and honorary recognitions. Pretty sure they had tea and cake though. Score.
Distracted by the Depression and whatnot, Penn students’ enthusiasm for the celebration waned in the 1930s. 1940 was a year that threatened the existence of the festivities entirely, as snarky seniors proceeded to poke fun at a poll intended to gauge student apathy toward Hey Day. And with the ‘60s bringing the hippies and gas masks out in protest against Vietnam and biological warfare, respectively, the festivities again took a back seat.
You can thank the 1980s for making the hats and canes actually affordable (and the aughts for bringing the prices back up again) as well as for imbibing the tradition of Styrofoam hat-biting into Hey Day. And while this year’s junior class was filling in coloring books in the ‘90s, Hey Day was threatened once again after a dramatic dropping of Penn’s former president, and again it emerged unscathed.
Honor Men Day
You may think that trophies, plaques and cash money are fitting prizes for the “best” of each graduating class. We at Penn are quirky and unique, however, and are more partial to utensils and dishware as gifts for the most popular among us. This oldie is still around in a slightly more legitimate and politically correct incarnation (award nominees are now vetted by a committee of students and professors, and they include honors for women, too).
The oldest of these awards is the infamous Spoon, historically received by the most honorable senior man. In the mid-1860s, as legend has it, some debaucherous sophomores decided that it would be simply hi-larious to award a large wooden spoon to the “lowest freshman in the third honor group” (we assume this translates to "worst freshman ever"). The spoon contained a sarcastic Latin inscription — those Quakers are always up for an intellectual chuckle! — and by 1865 had become the award for the “most popular” senior as voted by the class.
The Bowl, a replica of one presented to the “bowl man” sophomore in the Bowl Fight, is awarded to the second-best senior.
For the third-best senior is the Cane Award, its origins stemming from yet another Penn tradition. Back in the days when you weren’t a real gentleman unless you rocked a cane, sophomores hated on freshmen yet again by seizing and breaking their beloved walking sticks. Ah, we can almost hear the cries of “but that was grandfather’s oldest cane!” echoing in the Quad. These rumbles became an annual tradition in the 1880s, paving the way for the first Cane Award in 1891.
The final honor award, the Spade, gives its user the power to shovel dirt. But as we know well, with great power comes great responsibility: the Spade winner is given the dreaded task of planting the class ivy.
