Pranks for the Memories

By Tony Kornheiser

Sunday, November 23, 1997; Page F01
The Washington Post 

There are college pranks, and there are college pranks. But
you can stop calling now. I think we've got a winner.

This guy put a cow on the dome of the historic Rotunda at the
University of Virginia!

It happened 32 years ago, and for all that time the identity of
the perpetrator remained a secret. For 32 years the poor
county sheriff had this unsolved "Bovine B&E" on the books. It
turns out the man responsible is now president of Nasdaq. His
confession was front-page news last week.

(Apparently, one of his friends cowed him into it. Now I'm
milking the story. I'd butter stop with the puns before I look
like an udder fool.)

The perp's name is Alfred R. Berkeley III.

Make that "Bossy" Berkeley.

He put the cow 50 feet above the ground, on the dome
Thomas Jefferson designed. The president of a
multi-billion-dollar stock market. Oh, man, I wanna party with
you, Alf.

Got any hot stock tips? Anything about to moooooove up?

(And get this: The reason Alf put the cow on the roof was to
outdo his dad, who once hung stuffed animals on the tree
outside the U-Va. president's office. I shudder to think what
Alf would have done if his dad had hung U.N. inspectors from
trees, like Saddam Hussein.)

All right, class, let's compare and contrast: The president of
Nasdaq puts a cow on a roof. The president of the country
says that, in college, "Yeah, I took a toke on a joint -- but I
didn't inhale."

What does that tell you about hands-on, take-charge
leadership?

The Nasdaq guy ought to be president of the United States.
Here's his slogan: "Make Cud, Not War."

The only disappointing thing in an otherwise totally uplifting
story is that Mr. Berkeley has expressed regret at dragging the
cow up about 100 steps and coaxing it onto the dome. "I have
a lot more of an adult view at age 53 than I did at 20," he said.

Nobody's buying that, Alf. You put a cow on a roof. You're a
legend. You can run that maturity jive in public, but here's what
you're saying in private: "High five, baby!"

(Livestock are part of a hallowed prank tradition -- remember
the horse in "Animal House"? Dorfman was supposed to shoot
the horse, and he didn't know the gun was loaded with blanks.
So he shot into the air -- and the stallion dropped dead of a
heart attack. After being sedated and hauled from the dome,
Mr. Nasdaq's cow died of Valium-related causes. Sadly, it's
always the hoofed animals who suffer.)

After I read about the cow, I went around the newsroom
asking people what college pranks they wanted to confess to.
And there's actually another local cow heist to report:

Two guys at the University of Maryland got the idea of
"borrowing" a cow from the veterinary barn and depositing her
in a women's dorm. An accomplice I'll call Elsie helped by
opening the door to the dorm.

"They led her to the elevator, and the floors were linoleum tile,"
she recalled. "So the poor cow kept sliding. The sliding made
her nervous. The more nervous she got, the more cow pies she
deposited along the way. Anyway, they put her in the elevator,
and pressed 8."

And then what happened?

"The door opened. She got off."

And then?

"She enrolled, didn't she?" my friend Liz asked. "Didn't they
give her a football scholarship?"

Liz went to Yale, so everything about Maryland sounds funny.
Liz couldn't recall any pranks at Yale. The students were
probably too busy reading Sir Isaiah Berlin and voting stock
proxies.

"The only thing they had when I went there was streaking," Liz
said. "That's why I went to Yale. It was idyllic. I saw naked
men all over campus. I said, `That's for me!' "

Actually, there was a famous prank at Yale in the mid-'70s.
Some Yalies persuaded a grad student in chemistry to brew
them up a chemical that smelled just like human vomit. They
poured it down a ventilator shaft in the dining hall, and the smell
was so gross that the dining hall had to be closed for months.
The ringleader ended up, years later, being a speech writer for
George Bush -- who later famously blew lunch in Japan, but
we won't get into that.

Many people at The Post -- too many -- went to Harvard and
Yale. Their livestock pranks typically involve cyclotrons,
cloning and transplanting the head of a cow onto the secretary
of state. I prefer the good old days of panty raids. Now, with
coed dorms and political correctness, boys are going on panty
raids to find something clean to wear. (Hey, here's a campus
prank: How about slipping some Pergonal into the dean's wife's
punch, and waiting for her to give birth to septuplets!)

Okay, my turn. Thirty years ago at Harpur College (the
Harvard of Route 17) there was this party off campus. And at
this party there was a bowl of mints. And people were really
hungry, they would eat anything, because they had what was
commonly referred to at the time as the "blind munchies." (I
won't go into why, because I'm up for an ambassadorship.)
And a friend of mine had the bright idea to stir the mints with
his . . . well, not with his hand. 

And I know who ate the mints. But I'm not talking until they
make me president of Nasdaq. 

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company


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