Ned Hibberd's Blog

Twentieth Reunions on college campuses are nothing unusual.

 

But the group that congregated around "Willy's statue" at the center of Rice University's campus was a little different.

This 20th reunion commemorated the most infamous prank in Rice's history: the 180-degree rotation of the one-ton statue in the dead of night, using only muscle power.

 

Here's university founder William Marsh Rice facing Fondren library for the first (and only) time in his 78 years of existence.

 

The 11 student pranksters pulled it off with a lot of engineering talent and a little luck, using a pair of wooden A-frames and three chain hoists.

 

I was on campus that day, and I remember watching an engineering crew turn the statue back around, with the help of a construction crane.

 

It took the professional crew three times as long, in the daytime, as it had taken the students to accomplish in the dark, without the crane.

 

Twenty years later, nine of the eleven pranksters returned to Willy's statue and so did I...

...to shoot a story on the anniversary.

 

 

If you miss the report on Monday night's Fox 26 News at Nine, you can do a search on our website to pull up the video.

Time has taken its toll on all of us...and here's proof.  In 1988, the conspirators were photographed at the statue and the results looked like this:

 

 

By 2008, the photo looked like this:

 

 

Notice NOT ONE of these 40-something-year old men, myself included, were game for climbing up into Willy's lap!

 

Ned