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Smoot Retires
Status: Update about a classic college prank
NPR reports that Oliver Smoot has retired from the board of the American National Standards Institute. Fans of classic college pranks will recognize Smoot as the official unit of length of the Harvard Bridge. Here's what Neil Steinberg writes (in If At All Possible, Involve A Cow: The Book of College Pranks) about how the Smoot came into being:In the fall of 1958, the pledge masters at MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha house, dreading the approaching freeze, charged their pledges with remedying the bridge situation. They gave them the task of marking off the bridge so that a person crossing could know how far it was to the other side without looking up. The unit of measurement selected by the frat elders was the body length of one of the pledges. That role, and immortality of a sort, fell to the shortest member of the pledge class, Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. One October night, Smoot, several fellow pledges and an upperclass overseer, armed themselves with white paint and headed for the bridge. There they laid Smoot end over end, painting a Smoot mark at every 5'7 interval delineated by Smoot's body. The Harvard Bridge is long, and by the end they were picking up Smoot and moving him along. The bridge measured precisely 364.4 Smoots, plus one ear.
Ever since 1958 the Smoot marks have been diligently repainted and have become a Boston landmark, their preservation embraced and encouraged by the Boston government itself. It seems kind of ironic that Smoot himself, the man who embodied a unit of length, ended up on the board of the American National Standards Institute.
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Categories: Pranks Posted by Alex on Thu Dec 08, 2005 |
Comments (4) |
| More from the Hoax Museum Archives: | |||
What kind of a name is Smoot
Posted by booch on Thu Dec 08, 2005 at 07:26 PM
"What kind of a name is Smoot"[?]
1)last
2)sur-
3)cool
4)ideal for a unit of measurement
And I hereby nominate the smoot, with base-ten increments for our new national measurement, since we just can't see our way to the metric system.
Can you imagine? Centismoots, Millismoots, Kilosmoots...
Posted by karen in Reno on Thu Dec 08, 2005 at 10:04 PM
1)last
2)sur-
3)cool
4)ideal for a unit of measurement
And I hereby nominate the smoot, with base-ten increments for our new national measurement, since we just can't see our way to the metric system.
Can you imagine? Centismoots, Millismoots, Kilosmoots...
There was also a Hawley-Smoot Tariff, about which Dave Barry has made extensive jocularity in his book, "Dave Barry Slept Here".
Posted by eriC draveS in Over here somewhere on Thu Dec 08, 2005 at 10:16 PM
I assume that Smoot of Hawley-Smoot was the same Smoot about whom Ogden Nash wrote this:
" Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)
Is planning a ban on smut.
Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.
And his reverend occiput.
Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut.,
Grit your molars and do your dut.,
Gird up your l-ns,
Smite h-p and th-gh,
We
Posted by Ledasmom on Sun Dec 11, 2005 at 11:17 AM
" Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)
Is planning a ban on smut.
Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.
And his reverend occiput.
Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut.,
Grit your molars and do your dut.,
Gird up your l-ns,
Smite h-p and th-gh,
We
Comments: Page 1 of 1 pages