Spring Weekend or not, partying links students from many generations

Thursday, April 23, 1882, Storrs brothers Charles and Augustus take a gentle stroll through the rolling grounds of Connecticut's new university.

"Oh, brother," said Charles. "This gallant scheme of ours has truly come to fruition. The keen lads of this institution will be this generation's finest farmers."

"Oh, indeed, brother," replied Augustus. "But I feel something is amiss. Final examinations will transpire in but a fortnight, and the youth of our fair school is consumed in a fever of study. Do they not require a respite from the tedium of scholarly contemplation?"

"Oh, yes, brother!" cried Charles. "It is the dawn of spring, and festivity is required for this forthcoming End-of-Week. Shall we arrange the students a maypole? We could place it near the carriage house, or perhaps in X-meadow. And we shall capture the merriment on daguerreotype for later perusal!"

And so Spring Weekend was born.

Now, we've come a long way since Chuck and Augie's day. Spring Weekend is now a campus institution, drawing thousands of partygoers to hotspots such as Celeron, Carriage House, and X Lot. But is our generation's Spring Weekend the most intense it's ever been? How is the current party atmosphere at UConn different from what it was in our parents' college days, back in the late '70s and '80s? After all, this was an era when the Connecticut drinking age laws were in total flux, changing from 18 in 1972, to 19 in 1982, then 20 in 1983, and finally to 21 in 1985. So Spring Weekend must have been pretty crazy, right?

"To be honest, I can't remember a single Spring Weekend," said Karen Fitzgerald, an alumnus from the class of 1982. No, not because Spring Weekend parties were just that intense, but simply because they weren't very different from any other UConn party.

"There were so many package stores on campus, you could call and they would come right to your door. It was like pizza delivery, except with alcohol," Fitzgerald continued. "Grain alcohol was big. Which was scary because it was so potent and you couldn't smell it when you mixed it."

Fitzgerald went on to say she could remember dorms with "rugs soaked in beer and kegs rolling down the stairwell toward you so you'd have to press against the wall."

"Absolutely a madhouse," said Chistopher Bennett, a UConn student from 1983-1988. "There's no other way to describe it. We used to roll kegs down from one end of the Jungle [North Campus] to the other." According to Bennett, he and his friends would often race kegs through the dorms to see who could throw them out the window first.

"No one got written up for underage drinking," Bennett continued, explaining that no one, students or administration, seemed quite sure how to enforce the laws.

"My first year they started banning kegs. They banned people having parties in common areas because it got so crazy. But then they said as long as you're 'in transit' you can't get written up. So as long as you were moving from one room to another, you were fine," said Bennett.

"My second year in the Jungle, there was this massive party. There had to be five hundred people in the building. An RA showed up, and everyone started walking so they would be in transit. So the party just made a big loop around the building."

In response, the RA turned off the building's power, hoping everyone would disband after the lights went out. So what happened when he returned to dispel the grumpy students?

"Everyone picked him up, tossed him hand over hand through the party and threw him down the stairwell," says Bennett. "He didn't come back to bother anybody."

Fitzgerald said she remembers people riding motorcycles through hallways, and parties where entire dorms would turn their furniture into bonfires. Bennett said he could recall students climbing the water towers, that cow-tipping was more than just a silly stereotype, and students sometimes had contests to see who could make it the furthest through the sewers.

"That was always fun, but we ended up very smelly," said Bennett.

So next time you think you had a pretty crazy Spring Weekend, remember another age. An age when men were men, CA's were RA's, and UConn parties were so intense that Spring Weekend was barely a blip on the radar. Remember generations past, and appreciate all that they contributed to the proud history of the University of Connecticut.

"All the stuff that went on may have been what changed all the laws," said Fitzgerald.