Twenty years later, pranksters donate more than $138,000 for student innovation awards

Alumni who turned Willy’s Statue contribute to engineering undergraduate support

BY B.J. ALMOND

Rice News staff

Twenty years ago on April 12, the statue of William Marsh Rice in the Academic Quad did an about-face when 11 adventuresome students found a way to hoist the one-ton Willy into the air and turn him halfway around to face Fondren Library.

To celebrate the milestone anniversary of what has become one of Rice’s legendary pranks, alumna Theresa Bujnoch ’88 produced a one-hour documentary about the stunt. Titled “180 — The Spin on Willy’s Statue,” the video will premiere at 6:30 p.m. April 11 at the Rice Media Center, courtesy of Bujnoch, the Rice Historical Society and the Rice Engineering Alumni. Rice students, faculty, staff and alumni are welcome to attend the free screening.

Twenty years ago on April 12, the statue of William Marsh Rice in the

Academic Quad did an about-face when 11 adventuresome students found a

way to hoist the one-ton Willy into the air and turn him halfway around

to face Fondren Library.

TOMMY LAVERGNE

After the movie, most of the pranksters will participate in a panel discussion moderated by John Boles ’65, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History. In addition to discussing how they pulled off the infamous feat, the participants will officially announce the establishment of the Willy Revolution Engineering Undergraduate Innovation and Excellence Fund at Rice, made possible by their pooled contributions of more than $138,000 to the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Although Bujnoch was not one of the pranksters, she was dating one of them at the time — Chris Cannon ’88 — and has since married him.

“I’ve heard about the prank so many times over the years,” Bujnoch said. “It’s a great story, and there was no better time to tell it on video than the 20th anniversary.”

How students secretly turned a 2,000-pound statue 180 degrees in the middle of campus without a crane is fodder for “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” Photos prove that Willy did indeed face Fondren, but back in the ’80s, students did not have the luxury of cell phones with built-in video cameras to record the escapade for posting on YouTube.

With no film or video of the actual stunt, Bujnoch had to be resourceful. She found a short newsclip from a local television station that shows Willy being turned back around by a professional crew hired by the university. She also unearthed photos at Fondren’s Woodson Research Center. But the heart of her documentary is the many people she interviewed about their participation in and/or memories of the monumental effort.

She tracked down eight of the 11 pranksters, who are now spread out across the U.S., for interviews. “They still have a fondness for each other,” Bujnoch said. “Some remember the prank as the coolest thing they’ve ever been involved with. And they speak so highly of Rice, what a great student body it has — creative, intelligent and a little bit irreverent.”

She said some of the pranksters have gone on to build impressive careers at such companies as eBay, Sun Microsystems and Apple. One helped design a robotic ground vehicle that recently competed in a field test sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “They’ve all done so well, and they wanted to raise money to benefit other Rice students.” The fund they established will sponsor Rice undergraduate engineering majors’ innovative design or research projects and related travel.

Bujnoch also interviewed John Q. Smith ’86, an alum who took part in the first attempt to move Willy in 1986. He and other students managed to lift the statue that year, but they were unable to turn it. Smith’s plan served as a template for the 1988 spin, which entailed pulleys, winches, ropes and two 20-foot wooden A-frames, but Smith was not involved that year.

Among the other alumni that Bujnoch talked to for her documentary were Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Gray ’88, who was editor of the Thresher when the student newspaper reported on the prank; Boles, who wrote in his book “A University So Conceived” that the students’ “talent for whimsicality produced one of Rice’s most memorable pranks”; and attorney Jim Greenwood ’58, a member of Houston City Council in 1988 who wrote a letter to the Houston Chronicle in support of the pranksters. Greenwood still has one of the T-shirts that students sold to reimburse the university for the cost of having Willy returned to his original position.

Willy’s Statue has been at the center of the Academic Quad since 1930. Formally known as Founder’s Memorial, the monument is the tomb of university founder William Marsh Rice, whose ashes are deposited in the base.

In his book “The Campus Guide: Rice University,” alum and adjunct lecturer of architecture Stephen Fox ’73 notes that Willy’s Statue has been absorbed “into the actions and stories of Rice,” particularly through “spontaneous student actions,” such as crowning Willy with pumpkins, hats and shaving cream. Bujnoch’s movie includes a photo of Willy wearing a pumpkin, but the focus remains on the mission that took place in the middle of night and the fastidious planning that made it successful; there was nothing willy-nilly about turning Willy.

The eight ’88 pranksters who talked to Bujnoch are Alex Kazim, T.J. Brudner, Chris Cannon, Kelly Miller, Patrick Dyson and Brian Sweeney — all from the Class of ’88, Greg Heath ’89 and Debbie Schmidt Dyson ’89. Logistics problems prevented her from interviewing Christopher Ryan ’88 and Tom Reeves ’89.

Kazim, who is now CEO of Tokoni.com in California, still has vivid memories of curious Houston police officers stopping by his mother’s house the night of the prank as the gang assembled the A-frames and test-lifted a car. As luck would have it, those same officers happened upon the night Owls as they were transporting the unwieldy A-frames to campus atop a pickup truck, and the police provided an escort to ensure safety on the roads. “When that happened, we felt that we might actually be able to do this thing,” Kazim recalled.

He said the group was surprised by the impact the prank had. “We were attracted to this project because it was hard and fun. After we did it, we went back to our dorm rooms, called the Thresher and left a message that the statue had been turned. We didn’t expect it to go much beyond that. When it showed up in the Washington Post and a number of other papers, that was kind of weird.”

During her interviews, Bujnoch got the good-natured conspirators to reveal just about everything, including such reconnaissance duties as disabling the lights on nearby buildings and using code names and headsets to monitor vehicular and pedestrian traffic from rooftops.

The one thing they don’t reveal is the identity of the 11th prankster, the so-called “mastermind,” who wants to remain anonymous and was not interviewed. “He thinks it should remain a mystery,” Bujnoch said.