The Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961

December 22, 2005

It began in Lloyd House during Christmas vacation in late December 1960. Typically during the holiday vacation, the houses were left open for students who were campus-bound over Christmas. This particular year, a number of idle minds were sequestered in Lloyd House when the local newspapers began to run of series of articles publicizing the upcoming Rose Bowl game between the Washington Huskies and the Minnesota Gophers. The game was to be televised nationally in living color. Washington, naturally, was not going to miss the opportunity to show off some very elaborate halftime card stunts to an estimated thirty million people watching all over the country.

GIVEN: The probability of Caltech's football team playing in the Rose Bowl game is essentially zero.

HYPOTHESIS: This does not preclude Caltech from being REPRESENTED at the Rose Bowl.

CONCLUSION: The challenge was obvious.

A group of some 14 Lloyd men contributed to this effort. Their leader reports that "the hardest part of the stunt was getting the initial data. It took a whole week of phoning around to finally find out that the Minnesota band was staying at Oxy and that the Washington football team was staying at a hotel in downtown Long Beach. We visited the Oxy campus and talked to the band people there and found out that only the home team (Washington) would have stunts. Up until that time, Minnesota was the target since Oxy was closer. A day or so later I phoned one of the football players from the hotel lobby in Long Beach and found out that the band would not be coming until right after Christmas, and would be staying at Long Beach State."

On the appointed day, the group's leader showed up at the Long Beach State dorms and asked to see the head cheerleader from Washington. He said he was a reporter for the Dorsey High School Dorseygram, the school paper. Our intrepid hero turned out to look young enough to pass for high school age, and in fact was an alumnus of Dorsey High School in Los Angeles. Washington's head cheerleader was pleased at the attention and spent considerable time explaining just exactly how card stunts work, and how they are planned and executed. He was flattered and impressed at the level of interest being displayed in the technical details of how it all worked. He was even kind enough to allow a determination that all of the instruction cards and the master sheets were kept in a single satchel under one of the cheerleaders' beds.

This is what was learned about the nature of card stunts from the interview. First of all, each stunt is constructed by plotting out a "master plan" on a large sheet, showing which card color is to be held up by each member of the card stunt section. From the master plan, individual instruction cards are derived for each member of the section.

Everyone who sits in the card section has (and usually sits on) several large cardboard squares in a variety of colors. With the cards come an instruction card (something like a 3" by 5" card), telling which color each individual is to hold up for a given stunt.

The stunts are sequentially numbered. An individual instruction card might read:

1--RED

2--BLUE

3--WHITE (etc.)

Execution of the card stunts is normally accomplished by the cheerleader talking to the members of the card section (in Washington's case, 2,232 students) over a loudspeaker. He may say something like, "The next stunt is number 13." As a member of the card section, you look at your instruction card, and it says "13--GREEN." So you find the green card and hold it in your lap. The cheerleader then says, "O.K., everybody, Ready? FLIP!" You quickly flip the green card up in front of your face, green side facing out. When the leader is satisfied that everything has worked and the world has admired the mosaic you've all created, he will say, "O.K., everybody, Ready? DOWN!" You then flip the card back down onto your lap, and stunt #13 is over.

Equally important is the concept of counting. A person might be instructed to hold up two cards back to back, say blue and red. On the beginning of the stunt he is to hold up blue. Then the cheerleader starts to rapidly count off numbers "1, 2, 3, . . .." When a person's number is called, he flips from blue to red. This gives animation to the stunt. The instruction might read 3--BLUE/RED (13), which means stunt #3, BLUE card at the beginning, and switch to RED at count 13.

Unless you know ahead of time, there's no way that you, as an individual member of the card section, can figure out what composite picture or word the entire section is putting together for the outside world. Until the thousands of cards are held up, there's no way the card stunt leader can tell exactly what's going to happen either.

And, of course, that was the key to Caltech's Rose Bowl appearance. The trick would be to change the instructions without Washington realizing it ahead of time.

"We staked out the dorm until the band went to dinner that first day of the interview," reports the group's leader. "While they were at dinner, we picked the lock and we borrowed one instruction card. The locks were good; they needed a key to relock them. Rather than gamble with being caught, we left the door unlocked. Since we had to go in a total of three times, we were rather lucky."

The "borrowed" instruction card went to a local printer, who was instructed to print replicas exactly like the original, in sufficient quantity to replace all of the cards (2,232). The printer did the typesetting right, but printed on new manila stock rather than faded old grungy cards like the original. The better part of a day was spent in frantic research on oxidation aging, dying, baking, and other means to match the card color. A dye technique did the job, but it was a liquid process and wrinkled the cards. It was finally decided to risk the substitution as it was, since all the old cards would be replaced with new ones. At any rate, by New Year's Eve, the new cards were ready to have the colors and count numbers stamped on them.

The next step was to obtain the master instructions. During the "interview" visit, it had been learned that the band and the cheerleaders would be at Disneyland on New Year's Eve. "We waited until the busses were loaded and gone, and picked our way in again." The master instructions were quickly removed to Lloyd House.

In 1961, New Year's Day fell on Sunday. The Rose Bowl Game was thus scheduled to be played on Monday, January 2, providing our heroes one extra day to get ready. It turned out that Lloyd was having a party in its lounge on New Year's Eve. The dining room thus became the staging area for "improving" Washington's planned card stunts. A total of 15 card stunts were scheduled. In part they were going to salute science, the theme of the upcoming Seattle World's Fair.

The first 11 stunts were fundamentally unaltered. However, the group couldn't resist providing some "technical improvements." For example, a picture of an Erlenmeyer flask had sharp corners. They were nicely rounded so as to be more realistic. In effect, Tech enhanced Washington's stunts (at no extra charge). Stunts numbered 12, 13 and 14, however, were completely reconfigured.

The process of accomplishing all of this involved spreading out the large master plans for each stunt on the dining room tables and either making up new master plans, or making relatively minor modifications, as appropriate. Once the master plans were set, the replacement set of individual instruction cards could be marked with the appropriate sequence of colors. Essentially the entire dining room was utilized to spread out the master plans and the cards in order to accomplish this. As the party progressed in the house lounge, various people would wander in and out of the dining room to help with the marking process. The atmosphere naturally was a festive one--more and more so as the evening progressed!

Because of the extra day to wait, there was nearly a catastrophic leak. One of the guys' guests was a girl from Minnesota. When she saw what was going on, and it was explained to her, her eyes grew wide and she bolted for the door. A dilemma ensued. Should she be held not merely overnight, but for a whole additional day? Luckily, when it was made clear that the stunt was against Washington, and not Minnesota, she promised to keep quiet.

As the marking progressed and the hour grew later, there was some fear of not completing and returning the cards by the time the cheerleaders returned to their rooms. Thus every warm body was asked to help grab a stamp, find an empty spot, and plug in a color, toward the end of the project. For this reason (and most likely the state of sobriety of the participants as well), some of the stunts came out rather motley, through no fault of the original card stunt committee.

Finally the new set of 2,232 cards was complete. Along with the original master plans, the new cards were conveyed back to Long Beach State. "When we returned to Long Beach State, lights were on in several of the dorm rooms, but the cheerleaders' room was dark. Three of us went into the hall and assumed the usual lock picking position (two leaning casually against the wall facing outward and shielding the one in the middle, squatting and working feverishly on the lock). Time crawls, and then `ping.' The pick breaks off in the lock. We decide to stick it out and try again. Finally after about ten minutes, the door yields. We slowly replace the instruction packs and the master instructions in the satchel so it looks just like it did originally. People move around down the hallway, but don't come our way. We make a clean getaway!"

On January 2, NBC's television cameras panned the Washington rooting section to share their halftime entertainment handicraft with the large nationwide audience. The first 11 stunts were uneventful. The improvements added by Tech's crew of "consultants" went unnoticed, except by the Lloyd House audience.

Stunt number 12 was supposed to be a picture of a Husky. "We rounded his ears and gave him buck teeth" Voila! A beaver!

Stunt number 13 was supposed to spell out "Washington" in script, beginning with the letter "W" and flowing from left to right, as if being written by an invisible hand. What actually happened was that the dot over the letter "i" appeared first, then the word began with the letter "n," and "Washington" appeared to be written, but flowing from right to left. (This was accomplished by merely reversing the count instruction numbers on the cards. The guy who was to flip on number 1 ended up flipping on 120-something. The guy scheduled to flip last on count 120-something flipped on number 1.)

So far the announcers were keeping up. The idea had been that each stunt was getting a little more out of hand, but not enough to really get excited about.

Stunt number 14 was a different matter. This was totally changed to a block "CALTECH" in black on a white background. There would be no mistake about it. There wasn't. The announcers were silent (although there are some reports that the TV announcers speculated that perhaps Washington was saluting Pasadena's famed technical institute in connection with the "science" theme of the World's Fair). The cheerleaders aborted the routine, and the band marched off the field. The card section was totally confused.

Caltech had indeed made it to the Rose Bowl!

Little did Washington (or the national audience) know that card stunt number 15, which was to conclude the show with a picture of the American flag, had been absolutely unaltered, had Washington but chosen to go on with the final stunt! But the group in Lloyd House knew it, and loved it!

Editor's note: There have been numerous accounts of this well-known prank by various newspapers and magazines over the years. Although some of the details recounted here vary from other published accounts, the editor thinks this is the most accurate.

From Legends of Caltech, copyright 1982, Alumni Association, California Institute of Technology. Used with permission.
Visit the Alumni Association online at http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/. Legends of Caltech is available at the Caltech bookstore, on the Web at http://www.bookstore.caltech.edu.
Photograph: 1961, copyright, Caltech.