Easters cancellation 25 years ago recalled
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A Hook journalist recently came across this poster which appears to have been created after the November 1982 announcement that UVA was attempting to cancel Easters, an annual Bacchanal centered around Mad Bowl. The poster shows then-Dean of Students Robert Canevari as the infamous Dr. Seuss character The Grinch attempting to steal a bag filled with jugs of Pharmco grain alcohol.
As historian Coy Barefoot relates in his book The Corner, Easters was known for turning Rugby Road’s Mad Bowl into Mud Bowl. Things may have peaked (or plummeted), Barefoot writes, in 1976 when several thousand students piled into Mad Bowl to swill grain alcohol served up in trash cans and be sprayed by water from nearby fraternities.
As for Canevari, he’s not talking, so we haven’t yet figured out who made the poster. It’s undated, and its only credit line reads simply: “C. Taylor Posters.”
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Had he not been 
It was Chuck Taylor the guy who runs WTJU who did that poster.(well it might have been)
Even better was the next years protest where a guy in a tuxedo and a bunch of girls dressed as playboy bunnies block the intersection of Emmet and University Ave. There were great pics in the CD the next days.
Mr. Barefoot must not be aware that the Mudbowl continued until 1979, albeit not as large. It was called Grain Sunday.You bought a gallon of fruit punch poured out enough to mix in a pint of grain alcohol. Eventually someone went to a fraternity on the hill pulled out a garden hose and the side of mad bowl became an earthen slip-n-slide. This is when it started to get interesting. People covered with mud started to “volunteer” others by throwing them in the puddling mud pits that started to form throughout the bowl after an hour or two of the slip-n-slide. Many a plumber was called the next day to unclog the drains of dorms of Lambeth and other places after the celebrants had to take showers. Good Times!
What about U-Haul?
When I was growing up here I always thought U Hall was the tradition where a bunch of fratties rent a U-Haul truck and turn it into a party bus.
But, I don’t think it happens anymore. What a shame, there couldn’t possibly be anything wilder than piling 50 people and some sluts into a Uhaul and driving around running over bushes, train tracks, whatever? gets in the way.
Brilliant! What a concept! Do it again! The Great U-Haul Flux Capacitor! Rewind: October 1982, two Sigma Chis were decaffienated and 62 others were sardined when the U-Haul truck in which they were riding (Brilliant!) overturned on US 29 and was slammed by a car on the way to a party at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg. Mebbe if they had stopped farther North for the sweeter and richer Briarpoons, oh, well… hindsight is making the folks back home so very proud! Those were the good ol’ daze! Fast forward 25 years: The Lawn IS looking a tad crowded… let’s do it again!
We have Starbucks now to prevent decaffienation.
RE: 82′hoo (well it might have been)illustration: tis not I
I can take a half-way way decent photograph but could not illustrate my way out of a paper bag.
I remember being in high school, around 1980, when the Daily Regress ran a front-page photo of students parading in Mad Bowl around a junked car that had been towed to the field and torched. Flames a good six feet high were licking off the roof and the students were gallavanting around the car carrying toilet plungers sloshing over with some sort of refreshment — probably the grain punch referenced above.
One of the facotors that led to the UVA adminsitration’s cancellation fo the event was the Easters rep by the early 1980s was such that college students along the entire Eastern seaboard were roadtripping to Charlottesville for their piece of the buzz.
With all the ensuing sexual assaults, fighting and vandalism, the event became more than the public safety infrastructure could handle — police, ER personnel and so forth were swamped.
I have been to a few wild parties in my life and been around the planet twice, but seldom have I seen so much hell being raised as went down during Easters Weekend. It is nothing short of a miracle that nobody died.
That grain punch got people so wasted, so quickly, that there was probably little time to enjoy the revelry before many of them went straight to blackout phase. During one Eastyer weekend, one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen in my life was crawling hands & knees on the sidewalk on the east side of Rugby Road one Saturday night near Beta Bridge, trudging through her own vomit, which was flowing in a steady Technicolor stream. Two of her gal pals were walking alongside, but making no discernable effort to help her.
I remember media coverage of a sad situation also about 25 years ago when a party at a 14th Street apartment turned tragic: some cat accidentally dropped his girlfriend off a balcony and she landed head first on the pavement. Both of them were trashed, ‘natch.
Once again… the Lawn is too crowded. Let’s have another U-Haul.
As I recall the announcement came in December and became the template for future actions by UVa administration where there was likely to be a resulting tempest in the student community (see entry for “Sweeney Quietly Moves into Lawn Pavilion, Summer 2007″).
The announcement of Easters’ cancellation came after the end of classes, December ‘82, after the Cavalier Daily and University Journal (RIP) had ceased publication for the semester and while students’ collective attention was elsewhere (exams). Divide and conquer, right?
Yes, there was the poster and there was protest upon students’ return in January, but there was not the firestorm one might have anticipated. The strategy worked. The Man won.
read this on the u-haul:
http://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=LNA/MGArticle/LNA_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173353004524&path=