Campus prank goes haywire

It began with the “Jack the Ripper” movie. This horror flick, from sometime in the 1930s, contained all of the classic elements that make for a still viable fright-night feature.

As the main focus on the campus horror movie evening for Halloween, it was supplemented with “Sorry, Wrong Number” and a few shorter films.

The horror evening was held on lower campus, located next to the main street of Grove City, which was called Broad Street. As is common in a western Pennsylvania in October, it was foggy to the point where lights had definite halos around them that a windbreaker was necessary to keep out the chill.

Mike, Ron, Roger and I went to the Pizza Palace after the horror movies, and this was where the problem started. We should have gone back to our rooms. We should have stayed with Brian and Rich.

We should have drawn Neil Smith, the local goodie goodie, into another ridiculous discussion about why horror films were demonic, so we could laugh at him and watch him turn red. But we didn’t. Then it was too late.

Our energy level was approaching giddy as we crossed the lower campus and football field sometime around midnight. The fog was growing thicker and we kept remembering the scenes from the “Jack the Ripper” movie. Most of you know, I presume, what a blocking sled is.

For the uninitiated, it is a piece of equipment used by football linemen to practice blocking. It has a set number (in this case, seven) of padded metal slabs which one uses to practice in place of opposing linemen. A seven-man sled is fairly heavy.

As we crossed the practice field, we caught sight of the seven-man sled and deposited it on top of the Rainbow Bridge, a footbridge which crosses Wolf Creek, the stream separating lower campus from upper campus. We then proceeded back to our dorms and went to bed around 1 a.m.

At three in the morning, the phone rang. Mike answered it and the voice on the other end said “I saw what you did and I know who you are.” Mike turned whiter than usual, said something I can’t write, and dropped the phone. Picking it up (we’d all been awakened), I heard a chuckle on the other end, then — “I saw what you did and I know who you are.” I said something similar to what Mike did and the caller burst into laughter. “This is Joe Kober over at campus police. I saw you guys move the blocking sled. Thought I’d wait until you were sound asleep to tell you to get your butts over here and put it back.”

Clyde Davis is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Portales and an instructor at Eastern New Mexico University. He can be contacted at: [email protected]