Their noses are always buried in a book.
Don’t they know how to have fun like in the old days?
Take November 15, 1938...
Now that’s when Penn students really had fun. It was a Rowbottom (we’ll explain later) sparked by “football frenzy.”
The fun lasted four hours. It took 300 cops to end the fun. Cars were overturned. Bonfires blazed. Gasoline was poured on the trolley tracks on Woodland Avenue and set on fire. Traffic was stopped. The cops and the firemen were pelted with eggs and water bags. Someone tried to steal a cop car.
Fourteen students were hauled off and charged with various crimes. Newspapers across the nation carried wire service stories about the fun at the University of Pennsylvania that year.
Or take the annual “Bowl Fight” pitting the freshmen class against sophomores. It was a beloved, university-approved 50-year tradition that ended in 1916.
OK, things got a little out-of- hand that year. One student died. Five needed hospital treatment and about 20 suffered minor injuries.
Another great tradition now gone was the Sophomore Cremation involving effigies of the worst, most uninspiring professors, set ablaze in a grand bonfire while the school band played a dirge.
Let us briefly try to describe the Bowl Fight, which started the year the Civil War ended – perhaps, by ex-soldiers who missed the battlefield...
The origins are obscure and the rules kept changing and it was unique to Penn. It involved a large wooden bowl held by the sophomores. The freshman class would try to break the bowl. The sophomores would try to grab a designated freshman – called the bowl-man – and stuff him into the bowl.
It sounds like a cross between rugby, wrestling, football and a tug-of- war. Punching was not allowed.
Eventually, there were two periods, referees and half-time rest. When the bowl got too difficult to break, the contest was decided by how many hands were on the bowl at the final whistle.
On the other hand, the Rowbottoms were spontaneous riots that grew until “the wonton destruction of private and public property” made the front pages of every Philly newspaper.
Poor Joseph Tinsman Rowbottom (class of 1913) was a good, sober student with rowdy hard-drinking friends. So, one warm spring night in 1910, in the wee hours, the drunks came into the yard of the Quadrangle dorm. The boozers started shouting at the top of their lungs, “Hey (or Yea) Rowbottom.”
Rowbottom, and every student in the dorm, was now awake. Windows flung open and students started throwing pitchers, wash basins and assorted junk at the drunks. Soon everyone started screaming “Rowbottom!”
Thus, a tradition was born on the Ivy League campus.
At first, the Rowbottom riots were only in the spring when young men get rambunctious. Then Rowbottoms broke out after big sporting events.
Some of the most destructive Rowbottoms came in the 1950s. The last Rowbottom we can document was in 1966 and was so feeble that the Daily News put it on Page 14. In less than a dozen paragraphs the story said Penn students blocked traffic briefly and threw eggs following a championship basketball game. The cops broke it up without calling in firemen or even one Riot Call.