On Friday evening, Cornell students noticed a new addition to McGraw Tower. Atop the scaffolding-clad clocktower, eagle-eyed Cornellians spotted an orange orb. The pumpkin has returned to McGraw Tower.
A legendary Cornell prank
For the new-to-Cornell students or those otherwise unaware with the annals of their alma mater’s history, the pumpkin-ing of McGraw Tower has been described as “the greatest prank in Cornell history.”
On October 8, 1997, a still-unknown prankster climbed to the top of the 173-foot clocktower with a 50-pound pumpkin in tow. He summited McGraw’s spire and impaled the pumpkin upon it. The next morning, campus awoke to an orange fixture and a completely anonymous perpetrator.
The McGraw pumpkin was an immediate sensation, earning a 24/7 webcam and coverage from far beyond Cayuga’s waters. Too heavy and too high to move, the administration decided to let it decay and clean up the mess later.
The pumpkin survived through the winter, slowly decomposing but still in place. It was not until March – five months after the object’s arrival – that the administration sent the provost up in a crane to pluck the pumpkin off McGraw Tower. The removal did not go to plan. A gust of wind blew the crane’s bucket into the top of McGraw Tower, snapping the spire off and sending the pumpkin falling back towards Earth.
Then, as now, McGraw was under renovation. The pumpkin, or what shriveled remains were left of it, impacted on scaffolding twenty feet below the tower’s apex. The provost still ascended in the crane to retrieve the pumpkins remains and, upon arriving back on terra firma, gave the mass of orange directly to a plant scientist to verify that it was, in fact, a pumpkin.
There were earlier attempts to verify the pumpkin-ness of the object. In those five months, Cornell’s administration sponsored engineering teams’ efforts to bring samples of the matter back from the top of McGraw. In an era before drones, students attached needles and drills to weather balloons to gain useful samples of the thing.
Upon study by the field-leading plant scientists at Cornell, the university concluded with certainty that the object was a pumpkin. To this day, the prankster remains anonymous.
Return of the king
Returning 26 years to the present, McGraw Tower is once again under renovation. McGraw “has not seen renovations on this scale since 1998.” Nobody seems to have put two-and-two together that the last time McGraw Tower was pumpkin-ed was the last time it was ensconced in scaffolding.
Now, covered in construction once again, McGraw has once again received a bright orange hat.
On Friday afternoon, Cornell sidechat posters noticed an orb on top of the scaffolding. Skepticism of a potential photoshop turned to optimism as more users posted images from different vantage points.
Today, the Review sent a camera to capture images from the balcony of PSB. While the Review cannot confirm the genetic material of the vegetable as our forebears did in 1997, the images strongly suggest that the pumpkin has returned to McGraw Tower.
Needless to say, the scaffolding makes the most recent pumpkin-ing of the clocktower much less impressive than its predecessor. Students received the pumpkin’s return with praise and excitement. The simple vegetable has – at least for a moment – united a campus in dire need of a brief respite from the outside world.
