On May 31, 1996, about 30 Class I students broke into campus in the early morning, intending to carry on the long-standing senior tradition of pranking the school on senior skip day. The acts these individuals committed could not be considered humorous. The cruel messages spray-painted on the library walls and the meaningless damage done to numerous school computers disrupted the school’s functioning for the remaining weeks of the year. Former Head of School Richard Baker allegedly called the prank “a final and regrettable symbol of the Class of 1996.”
Arriving in 1977, Mathematics Faculty Tilesy Harrington recalls the well-meaning nature of pranks early on. Memorable examples include a year when Head of School Ted Gleason’s office was inundated with balloons, and one when a Volkswagen Bug was placed on the roof of the old library. Music Faculty Michael Turner fondly recalls a class that altered the hourly bell chime system. “At least a couple of students got access and reprogrammed it so it played Christmas carols,” he said. Over time, senior pranks started to lose this charm. “When it was just light-hearted, it was absolutely delightful. But that was in the ’70s. It was a less experimental age to be in high school back then. Boundaries were crossed later on,” Harrington said. While the shift to more mean-spirited pranks was gradual and occurred due to numerous factors, the senior prank of 1984 was certainly a powerful catalyst.
“Ours was the best,” former SLC President Demetri Coupounas (N ’84) said. I had the privilege of meeting with him to get an in-depth recollection of the night it went down. “This is absolutely not s— that anybody should have copied. You can get shot doing stuff that I’m about to tell you. But it was what we wanted to do at the time, and then we freaking did it,” he said. The night of May 16, 59 members of the Class of ’84 entered campus through the woods in full camouflage gear. “I knew how to get us in without making a sound, and we knew exactly where security was. We posted observation at two different points to overwatch the security on campus, and we had radios to alert us to any movement by security,” Coupounas said. With four students assigned to security duties, and one inside manning the radio, 54 were left to get to work inside. Students and faculty couldn’t believe what they saw when they walked into assembly the following morning. “You walk into Lawrence Auditorium and there’s not one seat in the room,” Harrington said. As people settled in on the cement risers where their seats used to be, a Class I student drew the curtain to reveal 400 seats in a pile on the stage.
As the Class of ’84 headed to Cape Cod that morning, Buildings and Grounds was left to clean up their historic mess. “When they unbolted [the seats] and moved them out, they bent the frames. And so to get them back into place the right way was a disaster,” Harrington said. Even once the seats were miraculously restored in time for graduation, they were never quite the same. “The numbers were all totally mixed up,” Turner said.
After this incident, the floodgates essentially opened for pranks to be as destructive as possible. The tradition became less about being clever and more about being more obtrusive than the prior senior class. In 1990, the seniors painted over a collaborative mural on the walls near the snack bar with white paint. In 1993, 10 seniors set up trip wires around Shattuck Schoolhouse. Former Buildings and Grounds Faculty Bill Davis, who was responsible for cleaning up after the seniors year after year, tripped over one of the wires, breaking his back and neck. In addition to the tradition’s disruption, pranks started targeting specific faculty. “There were several in a row that were directed at making life really, really hard for the librarians,” Turner said. Some entries in this series included shuffling the library’s card catalog, placing and setting off dozens of alarm clocks behind books, dispersing crickets throughout the building, and the aforementioned graffiti vandalism in 1996. It got to the point where the night before senior skip day in 1990, librarian Mary Nickerson was seen heading for the library with a sleeping bag and pillow to guard the space throughout the night.By the mid-’90s, Baker came to the conclusion that the tradition could no longer justify its own existence, and there haven’t been any major senior pranks in nearly 30 years. Asking Coupounas if he would take all of the seats out of Lawrence again if given the chance to relive high school, he said, “Of course I would do it again. I just told you all the reasons why. We weren’t f—— around. We weren’t vandalizing. We needed to come together as a class. That’s the first and by far the most important thing to happen.” Coupounas said that prior to the prank, the grade was very divided. “It’s an awesome class. Three months before we graduated, we were not an awesome class at all,” he said. He cites the planning that went into the prank as the moment when they all came together. “It was a unique, wonderful, valuable bonding experience,” he said. Today, the Class of ’84 is a substantial contributor to the annual fund, and the class has produced the last two distinguished graduate award winners. “You don’t get this without that,” he said. Some would hope that our community is at its strongest when Class I students aren’t engaging in habitual vandalism and injuring our cherished faculty, but we may never really know.
