For decades, every time a visitor heads downstairs into the Caltech Athenaeum Rathskellar for a burger and a brew, he has been confronted with a poster-size, blown-up, grainy but still magnificent black-and-white photograph of one of the greatest of the Caltech pranks.

Though the institute hasn’t fielded a football team in many years, when it did, the Beavers were never invited to play in a Rose Bowl Game. Oh, they played in the Rose Bowl all right — lots of their home games were there — but never on Jan. 1 in the then-traditional Big Ten-Pac 8 matchup.

Yet the poster shows quite a campus presence in a card stunt in the student section in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day with 100,000 spectators filling the stadium. The University of Washington tickets were on the east side, so that the photo also takes in the San Gabriel Mountains and the towering eucalyptus on the concourse. At the center of the picture, where the Washington fans had meant to spell out their own brand in a mosaic of thousands of hand-held cards, the word “Caltech” appears instead.

It was a magnificent ruse, right up at the top of a long tradition of trickery from the tiny college’s brain trust, with an undergrad student body of less than 1,000.

Thirty million viewers on NBC also saw it. Then that black-and-white photo was published later that January in a follow-up article in the Pasadena Star-News. But the original color image had gone missing for decades — until now.

Monday evening I got a note from Shelley Erwin, head of the Archives and Special Collections at Caltech, telling me that the original Kodachrome slide had been tracked down and donated to her archives, and pointing me to its online story: “The photographer, Bruce Whitehead, had just arrived in Pasadena to take up a research fellow position in physics. He got a ticket to the game and a seat on the 50-yard line through his father, a Rotarian with connections to the committee that oversaw the annual Rotary float for the Rose Parade. He just happened to be aiming his camera in the right direction as the cards flipped up into position. Whitehead loaned his slide to Caltech’s Public Relations office, and a black and white photo of the prank was published on the cover of the January 1961 Engineering and Science. Whitehead then put his slide away for 52 years. Not until he was tracked down recently by Lee Molho and agreed to donate the slide to Caltech did his original see the light again.”

Molho was one of the team of pranksters — none of whom had tickets to the game, by the way — who called themselves the Fiendish Fourteen and infiltrated the UW organization to pull off the prank. Engineering student Lyn Hardy pretended to be an innocent high school journalist and interviewed Washington’s head cheerleader about how such stunts worked. He learned that by changing the 2,232 instruction sheets, they would control which cards were turned up. From the Wikipedia article on the prank: “The students broke into the Cal State Long Beach dorm rooms where the Washington cheerleaders were staying, and removed a single instruction sheet from a bedroom. They printed copies and altered each page by hand. On New Year’s Eve, three of the Fiendish Fourteen reentered the cheerleaders’ dorm building, and replaced the stack of old sheets with the new.”

And with such simple subterfuge, small moments in history are made. Any Oregon or FSU students out there up to such a task?

Twitter.com/publiceditor. larry.wilson@langnews.com