A 13-foot sailboat effortlessly floats from the rafters of Frary Dining Hall.
One of two doors into the mathematics department magically disappears overnight, leaving only a seamless stretch of blank wall in its place.
A safe containing student grades literally vanishes from Holmes Hall, discovered weeks later underneath the building’s creaking floorboards.
Pranks have played a storied role over the years at Pomona. One of the most ambitious took place 50 years ago, with the pranksters only claiming credit 37 years later. The dossier they back-channeled to Pomona College Magazine resulted in a 2012 story finally solving one of Pomona’s most enduring mysteries: Who replaced Chopin with a bust of Frank Zappa in the frieze on the face of Big Bridges?
John Irvine ’76 works on the Zappa frieze
John Irvine ’76 and Greg Johnson ’76—juniors at the time of the prank—told PCM clandestinely that they “weren’t huge Zappa fans at the time,” even though he had lived in Claremont for a while. They dreamed up the prank when they learned the Mothers of Invention rocker was coming to play Bridges in April of 1975.
“We were looking up at the front of Big Bridges and said, ‘Well, gosh, he should have his name up there,’” Irvine recalled. They envisioned Zappa right alongside other greats—Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert—over the front entrance. Chopin, they decided, was dispensable. “I’m not big on the Romantics,” Irvine explained.
Pulling off the prank took two intensive weeks of preparation. Obstacle one: how to get onto the roof of Bridges Auditorium? Johnson calculated they could lay a ladder between (long gone) Renwick Gym and Big Bridges and, perched more than 30 feet above the ground, crawl four feet across from one roof to the other. “Being young college students, we were stupid enough to do that,” Irvine told PCM.
Johnson and Irvine measured the space they would need to fill: a whopping 15 feet in length and five feet in height. Which led to obstacle two: how to make a replacement frieze light enough to hoist into position, but heavy enough to stay in place. Their answer was Styrofoam in an aluminum frame, with a papier-mâché bust of Zappa anchoring one end and a marijuana leaf the other. (Zappa was against drugs, but, the pair admitted to PCM, “Hey, we know, but it was the ’70s.”) They built it in a dorm room and were putting it together late at night in the Wash—when it began to rain. A quick move to the Mudd-Blaisdell trash room was almost a disaster. The next morning was trash day.
To overcome obstacle three—getting caught—Irvine and Johnson recruited the help of the Statpack, a group of fellow math and statistics students. They modeled the movement of Campus Security patrols in the wee hours of the morning to find the optimal time for evasion. Sometime between 2 and 3 in the morning, the 60- to 70-pound frieze was installed on the front of the building. The statistical modeling must have been sound, because until they finally took credit via PCM in 2012, the prankers’ identities went (almost) undetected. As PCM noted, “Frank Zappa was now shoulder to shoulder with Beethoven and Bach on the campus’s most imposing edifice. Chopin had been shown up, and the two math majors had succeeded in pulling off a highly visible prank.”
Just one miscalculation: Zappa’s bust joined the roster of the greats a week after his concert at Big Bridges. “We kind of got an incomplete,” Johnson told PCM. “We weren’t quite ready in time.”
