April Fools’ Day is a time for pranks and tomfoolery. People play funny practical jokes on each other on the first day of April in a tradition popularized by the English in the 1700s. But it wasn’t always a day for trickery.
“Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563,” says history.com.
“People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. These included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as poisson d’avril (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person,” according to history.com.
Over the years, North Central students have played their share of practical jokes. Some were even done by previous Chronicle staff members. Today we’re sharing the best of North Central’s pranks as reported in the Chronicle over the last few decades.
#1: “One day the silverware in Krohler Dining Hall disappeared. The next morning, when the library was opened, the librarian found the silverware. It was in place settings at all the tables. Seated at the places were all the sculptured busts of famous historical characters that are in the library,” remembered Dr. Verne Dietrich in 1974 before leaving the college.
Dietrich was even involved in a prank himself when he allowed a student to set off a cherry bomb under the desk of another student who fell asleep in class every day. “‘He didn’t fall asleep anymore after that!’ chuckles Dietrich,” said Chronicle staff member Anne Marshall in 1974.
#2: Vandalism in Naperville has had its extremes, and in one example from 1998, it filled the Chronicle’s front page with stories of rampant vandalism and “senseless tree damage angering the community,” while another story noted door locks being filled with super glue.
#3: A lot of times, pranks are funny and don’t cause a lot of damage. This was the case in the spring of 1998 when seniors turned the South End lawn (now Jefferson Plaza) into a trailer park with the “modular units from the renovation of Old Main” complete with pink flamingos, said Chronicle staff.
#4: But other pranks and vandalism can cost thousands of dollars in damages as they did when a student broke into both Kaufman Dining Hall and Krohler Science Center in January of 1999. In Kaufman, cereal and syrup were strewn across the floor and aerosol cans were put into microwaves that subsequently exploded, causing the fire alarms to go off. Beakers, containers and computer monitors were smashed, preserved animals were destroyed and experimental animals were let out in Krohler, effectively destroying months of research done by faculty and students.
#5: It’s common to fear your towel being stolen while showering in a residence hall bathroom, and for one girl back in 2001, that fear became reality when a prankster took a girl’s towel from the bathroom and she was left there with nothing to cover herself, as reported by Kevin Manno. “As luck would have it, someone finally showed and stepped into one of the other showers. Her only option was to take the towel of the new arrival,” said Manno. The new arrival? Her roommate, who was finished showering and left without a towel before the girl could even get dressed.
#6: Water balloons are a great way to cool off in the summer months, but students decided to make January of 2002 that much colder for Naperville commuters by slingshotting the balloons out of either Seager Hall, Townhouses (now Schneller Hall) or the since destroyed Student Village causing passing cars to swerve.
#7: “Delivering pizzas on the weekends is your way of making a few extra bucks,” Jake Seuntjens writes in a May 2004 Chronicle article. “It helps put the $2 a gallon gas in the tank of your 2001 Chevy Cavalier and pays for you to take your significant other to the movies once in a while.” First off, it would be nice if gas was still $2 a gallon. But, that night in 2004 was just a regular night for a Hungry Howie delivery driver when his van was stolen between Student Village and the Townhouses. Naperville police believed it to be a North Central student simply playing a prank since the van was recovered close by on Ogden Avenue the next morning, but one officer did go so far as to speculate that the van could’ve been used for a drive into Chicago to pick up some heroin.
#8: What about the great chair prank of 1952? Well, that was conceived “in that den of iniquity, the college newspaper office…” as written in the North Central College Alumni News: Annual Report 1992. So yes, the Chronicle staffers back in 1952 moved all the chairs from Old Main classrooms to the roof. And we’re not sorry.
Contributing reporting by Bob Tomaszewski and Kelsey Weivoda
