Fifty Years Later Class of 1968 Senior Prank Still Rockin’ the Campus
By Mary McLean Orszulak G'10
At this year’s Golden Bear Weekend, members of the Class of 1968 returned to campus to celebrate their lasting legacy. Rock on!
May 16, 2018 marked 50 years since members of the Class of 1968—Karl Jurgen, Rick Holland, Shelby Kaplan, Bill Piersol, Barry Roberts, Ken Cotty, Peter Duhamel, Dean Fraser, George Gaunt, Bob James, Bob Joyal, Dave Kenison, Ted Rauh, and Fred Siegfried, along with Dan Castellano ’69 and Jeff Roche ’69—deposited The Rock in the center of campus.
Five decades later, it remains a campus icon used by student organizations as a message board to announce events from SOAR to Commencement. In the simple desire to “leave their mark on campus,” at 4:30 a.m. Jurgen and his cohorts used a material handler and a borrowed truck to move the massive boulder from a construction site at Allen and Cooley Streets. Later that morning, as the campus community gazed in awe at the new campus landmark, a small plane dropped thousands of ping-pong balls carrying messages of congratulations to the Class of 1968.
Each new message on The Rock requires a new coat of paint. This close-up of its surface tells a colorful story of events and celebrations that it has announced for more than half of the University’s history.
