Family: February 2019 Archives
1968 BANANA SPLITS CLUB OFFICIAL CHARTER MEMBER MEMBERSHIP KIT Complete | eBay
I sent off for this (coupon from the back of a Kellogg's cereal box) when I was small -- would have been 1969, after we moved to the Tulsa area. The thing I loved most about it was the secret decoder. I tried organizing a chapter of the Banana Splits Club on our street. We had one meeting and elected officers, but I think that was probably all. The other kids didn't have the intensity of interest to sustain it. (Wikipedia has a comprehensive article about the Saturday morning TV show, the Banana Splits Adventure Hour.)
ESPN: The day MIT won the Harvard-Yale game
Kyle Bonagura writes about one of the greatest college football pranks of all time:
"Patrons at a small bar in Pocatello, Idaho, were a bit confused as to why a stranger showed up intent on watching the Harvard-Yale football game one day in 1982. He tried to explain, but no one really paid much attention until he offered to buy all the beer.
"Had they been listening, they might not have believed him. He was only there because he received a cryptic phone call that consisted of just three words: 'Watch the game.'
"Still, the message was received. There was only one reason he could have received such a strange call: After four years, plans for an elaborate prank he helped design as part of a group of MIT students -- to this day willing to identify themselves publicly only as the Sudbury Four -- had been put into motion....
"All four had graduated at this point and were either pursuing graduate or additional undergrad degrees from MIT. Once they came up with blueprints for the cylindrical device, they cobbled together parts from wherever they could: a motor from one of their mother's electric can openers, contact points from a 1967 Ford Mustang and, most famously, a piece from a leather motorcycle jacket to create a piston seal....
"'I think we packed it up and sealed it up in 1979 after we had done that six-month underground test and so forth,' one of them said. 'And then I think that was kind of it. I think we all decided we really needed to work on finishing graduate school, getting a job and things like that. We kind of stopped working on it.'
"Added another: 'It damn near flunked all of us out of school trying to get this device built and solve all the problems.'...
"Four years later, in 1982, the Sudbury Four had gone their separate ways, but the idea to deploy the device was still alive inside the Deke house...."
Smoots | Lambda Chi Alpha | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Harvard Bridge is an almost-half-mile span across the Charles River linking the MIT campus in Cambridge with Boston's Back Bay, where MIT was first located and where many of its fraternities are still housed. It is a windy and miserable walk in Boston's long winter. This article tells the story of how, in 1958, the bridge was measured by fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha in lengths of the shortest pledge, 5' 7" Oliver Smoot. The bridge is 364.4 smoots long, +/- one ear. The markings (every 10 smoots, plus a "Halfway to Hell" marker) are repainted each year by the fraternity and are used as locators by local law enforcement. Smoot went on to serve as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization of Standards (ISO), possibly the only time in history that a unit of measure has overseen the standardization of units of measure.
