berkeley co-op stories: Big C Circus

[nibot]

House traditions and recreations were not restricted to 2315 Dwight Way and environs, of course. It is claimed that members of the hall in the late ’30’s were responsible for destroying a vaunted Cal tradition, the Big C Circus. Held every four years, the Big C Circus featured a parade down Telegraph Avenue full of floats built by various living groups, classes, and other subcategories of the student community The parade preceded a carnival/sideshow in Edwards Field. For one of these circuses Barrington decided to enter a float. One must understand two facts about Cal student life and current events to appreciate the Barrington contribution. First, Berkeley and Stanford University were then, as always, involved in a sports rivalry. Second, Stanford’s Hoover Tower had just been raised in honor of Stanford’s most famous graduate. The Barringtonians, full of Cal spirit, gathered together all the trash—tin cans and the like—that they could find, stapled it all together into a vaguely phallic shape, balanced their sculpture on a flatbed truck, labeled it Hoover’s Last Erection and rode this creation past the unamused gaze of Robert Gordon Sproul and the Berkeley administration. A member of that administration subsequently cancelled the Big C Circus.

— The Green Book, Page 21.

Comments

[fireflies100k.livejournal.com]

That's funny--I've heard Storke's Tower on the UCSB campus called Storke's Last Erection (by my mother, actually). I guess Berkeley is just lucky that its tower isn't named after anyone...err, wait I guess it's Sather Tower, isn't it? Is that Jane Sather or Peter Sather? Jane Sather's Last Erection has rather different connotations...

[nebulousmaze.livejournal.com]

At least that's a good way to end it. :p