Imagine it: Cahaly was fitted for a top hat and morning coat and Elsie was decked out in peasant costume. The Sheriff of Cambridge County was to open the ceremonies, and the Harvard band was to play. But at 2 a.m. the night before the Big Day, the bird disappeared from the off-campus apartment in which it was residing. No festival. Two graduate students, probably Swarthmore graduates and bitter, who lived upstairs, had casually stolen the bird. Not knowing what to do with it, they handed it over to Alfred E. Vellucci, Cambridge City Councilman, who nabbed prize television time by announcing to the Boston press that it would be presented back to the Lampoon in the Crimson offices on election eve.
The lbis, however, has far from dominated the hoaxes and scandals centering around the Lampoon building in Freedom Square, including a long history of hassles with courts and police due to charges of obscenity in their magazine, with such articles as "Desire Below the Mason-Dixon Line," a 1935 parody of Faulkner.
Among the most famous was the stealing of the Massachusetts State symbol, Boston's Sacred Cod, a large wooden fish, on April 26, 1933. According to the Boston Post of April 27, 1933, "Since 1798 until some time between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. the sacred, silent emblem of Massachusetts had held a place of honor in the state House."
THE whereabouts of the cod remained unknown for over a week while evidence piled up against Harvard culprits and eventually pointed to the Lampoon. Guards told newsmen elaborate stories of a "curly haired boy" standing near the cod, holding a large, long florist's box. 'But," one guard said, "from him came the breath of something other than lilies. It was a sort of alcoholic fragrance." The alcoholic fragrance turned to a drunken stench as the city of Boston got increasingly enraged. The Post reported angrily that "the thief was intoxicated...badly in need of a shave...wore brown clothing...had curly hair." Barber shops were combed for a sign of a curly haired boy. A long car chase in Newton finally gave the cod over to Harvard police, and no charges were pressed.
Then in 1936, another great symbol of state was threatened by the Lampoon, this time the Supreme Court. On May 8, 1936 the nation awoke to find the official flag of the U.S.S.R. flying over the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., with a copy of "Down With Capitalism," a recent issue of the Lampoon, at the base of the flagpole. Representative Tomas Blanton (D.-Tex.) literally rushed to the rostrum of the House "to warn his colleagues and the country," "suspecting that the flag might mean the signal for social revolution," according to the Boston Post
In their haste to get the insidious banner down, Washington firemen resorted to burning it off with a blow torch, before the Party could gather its forces, leaving pieces of red ash to settle around the steps of the Supreme Court.
It is somewhat ironical to note that in almost no incident were the Harvard lads penalized for their pranks. Despite the grossest of local, state, and federal misdemeanors piling up against them, the Harvard name and the sanctity of its privilege would seem to show its mark in most cases. Yet, despite recent atmosphere of flippancy towards laws and rules, it would seem that a major prohibitive factor in the pranks market lies in fear of trespassing or lawbreaking. A perfect example of this was in the elaborate 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings plotted by the Lampoon last year. Rich and jubilant after a tremendously successful Play boy parody, the Poonies hired elephants and specially designed bows and arrows to re-enact the great battle right here at Cambridge-on-the-Charles. All the arrangements were made amidst great excitement and relative secrecy. What stopped the warriors from their brave encounter? They were refused permission from University Hall. The apocryphal answer they were given, the word from on high, stopping them, not to speak of their elephants dead in their tracks:
"Undergraduates are not allowed to rent elephants."
Times have changed.