Since my day job is being a college professor, I hear more anecdotes and legends told about academic life than most other topics. I've scattered examples of these stories through my books and columns, leading many readers to wonder about similar tales they've heard on campus.
For example, John T. Yantis of Highland Village, Texas, wrote:"I was surprised to learn that a story I had taken as truth was probably an urban legend. As a freshman at Texas A&M University in 1968, I was told by older students that my introductory calculus professor had once answered the usual first-week question about pop quizzes by saying that the class could expect one when he entered the room via the back window.
"He was a slight man with physical impairments that made it difficult for him to walk, so there was some nervous laughter at this announcement, especially since the class met in a second-floor classroom.
"There was no balcony off the room, but only a small ledge outside the rather large windows.
"One day near the middle of the semester, the story went, a window at the back of the room opened, and in crawled the professor. He stood up and distributed a stack of pop quizzes to the astonished class.
"I always believed this, and have repeated it numerous times."
One person to whom Mr. Yantis wouldn't have to tell the story of "The Acrobatic Professor" is Marie H. Lewis of Baton Rouge, La. She wrote:
"Your campus stories prompted my husband to recall some about a chemistry professor at Mississippi State named Seeley, a terror to all the agriculture students.
"Once students asked when they would have an exam. He replied, `The day you see me come into the classroom through the transom.'
"The next day he brought a ladder with him, set it next to the door, climbed in through the transom and gave them an exam.
"When he retired, a cartoon of his head sticking through a transom was supposedly published in the campus newspaper."
This chemist named Seeley is probably the same Mississippi State professor who was alluded to without name or field in the October 1961 edition of Reader's Digest. This account concludes, "in climbed their professor - grinning happily and clutching a three-page quiz in his hands."
The Texas A&M version is a new one on me, and joins the similar stories already in my file. I've been told the same story about a German professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; a mathematician at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.; a history professor ("Jumpin' J.B. Clark") at Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville; and the best-known of all the acrobatic professors, Professor Guy Y. ("Guy Wire") Williams, who taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1906 until his death in 1968.
All of these instructors reportedly had promised classes never to give a pop quiz until the day when they entered the classroom through the transom. And all of them, the stories claim, kept their promises.
Guy Y. Williams is the earliest American professor I know of to be credited with the transom-climbing prank, and campus folklore claimed that he had once been a circus acrobat, thus explaining his agility.
Even though none of the eye-witnesses to Williams' supposed feat are still living and none of the biographical writings about him mention him ever working for a circus, one official source does refer to him as "a skilled gymnast and acrobat."
Guy Y. Williams was even once described in a history of the University of Oklahoma as "the colorful, acrobatic professor of chemistry."
Three photos of Williams accompany this published statement: In one he's mixing chemicals, in the second twirling a lariat, and in the third he's shown "startling his classes with an impromptu handstand on the corner of his desk."
Acrobatic, yes, but Williams is still not climbing through a transom, and there are no pop quizzes mentioned.- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to him in care of the Deseret News.