CHICAGO — The 35th annual University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt — which is nominally a scavenger hunt but closer to a campus tradition wrapped inside a multigenerational class reunion bundled into an elaborate prank requiring the cooperation of hundreds of students, dozens of faculty, family, friends and government officials — concluded Sunday night. The winners were the students and alumni of the Snell-Hitchcock residential hall.
To win, they jumped through hoops. Many hoops. They located a list of scavenger hunt items from the first hunt in 1987. They found an official Olympic condom. They flipped a pancake 35 feet. They brought a mariachi band into a restaurant. They invented a beer glass that screams whenever it reaches room temperature. They constructed a Rube Goldberg machine that played music. They sewed a Magic Eye-style quilt depicting the walking trails of Millennium Park. They built a scale model of a 3200-series CTA train car with working doors, an LED sign for stops and automated announcements. They secured the written endorsement of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
They were far from alone. There were 15 teams and about 300 contestants. The list of stuff to find, do and/or construct was 243 items long.
They had four days.
According to tradition, the hunt begins with the release of the list on a Wednesday in May, then ends, sardonically, with the judging of contestants on Mother’s Day. If you stumbled across Scav, as it is known in Hyde Park, you would struggle to decide if it was a crafting fair, a science fair, a spirit rally or a Dadaist art revival. For a time, Guinness World Records claimed it as the world’s largest scavenger hunt.
“But I see it as an exercise in project management,” said Scav judge Cat Scharon.
“I think of it as Mardi Gras meets the Great Books meets Theater of the Absurd,” said John Boyer, college dean at the University of Chicago. “It’s a fascinating cultural transaction, but when students start to build nuclear reactors in their dorm rooms, it gives one pause.”
He’s only half-joking.
“Mostly we thought this would be fun,” said Diane Kelly, one of the founders of Scav who is now a research associate in neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts. The idea came from fellow student Dean Chris Straus, now a professor of radiology at the school. In the 1980s, “we were just University of Chicago students, which means we spent a lot of time studying. This was before people were calling it the school ‘where fun goes to die.’ The student body was intense, so a weird event just before finals was welcome.”
But in keeping with the school’s pedigree as a home to Nobel Prize winners, the kind of place with the brainpower to build the world’s first nuclear reactor beneath what is now the bleachers of its football field, things got baroque pretty fast. That first year, the list of hunt items was relatively modest, including a zoo souvenir and a bus ticket to Iowa. By 1999, two contestants, using scrap metal, carbon sheeting and thorium powder scraped out of vacuum tubes, constructed a working nuclear reactor in their dorm. “When we put together these lists, we laugh a lot, because we don’t actually expect anyone to make some of this,” said Sabrina Sternberg, who led this year’s judging. “And then they do.”
Just before the Scav judges released this year’s list of hunt items, just before midnight, dozens of students gathered in the courtyard outside Ida Noyes Hall on 59th Street. They were grouped into mobs, waving flags and signs, and taunting each other. Which evolved into: “Give us the list! Give us the list!”
That’s the first tradition of Scav.
After receiving the list, there is also a breakfast the following morning, a couple of parties, a formal dinner, a silly Olympics for additional points (hence the pancake toss), and new this year, the construction of a snowman on the quad (using only coleslaw). But the list and the hunt itself is the thing, and past lists have asked for: a CPR dummy, an Aztec death whistle, the longest churro, a Stradivarius violin, half a bowling ball, Toni Preckwinkle, proof that a University of Chicago diploma is as absorbing as a Brawny paper towel, a CT scan of a Furby, a gingerbread house of ill repute and one share of Green Bay Packers stock. For points, Scav contestants have eaten their own umbilical cords, gotten engaged, been circumcised, shot music videos, made wine in three days and undergone appendectomies. They have coordinated entire dorms into raising and lowering the window shades to replicate a game of Tetris on a building facade. They have gotten tattoos that read: “Sorry about the syphilis. Can we still be cousins?”
Some items on the list are puzzles, while some demand creative interpretation.
But then, so does just about everything else having to with Scav.
Even as students were outside chanting “Give us the list!” the judges were huddled in Ida Noyes Hall, drinking and goat wrestling, pressing shoulder against shoulder for dominance, chanting: “Two judges enter! One judge leaves! Two judges enter! One judge leaves!” They wore sailor caps, just because. One of them, Reed Mershon, broke away and walked to the courtyard and, as “Give us the list” hit a crescendo, he said: “I’ve been waiting three years for this.” The past couple of years, they had virtual Scavs, and while contestants said these worked surprisingly well, the camaraderie was missing. The judges, most of whom were recent alums, felt a responsibility to keep the tradition humming.
So just before midnight, the teams were invited into the main hall of the building. The judges gathered on a staircase and tried to explain a few rules, but the room grew loud, rowdy, chaotic. One student played an accordion, another was dressed as an armadillo.
At the stroke of midnight, the list was introduced and the teams scattered.
They had four days and counting.
But first, one more tradition.
Before being handed the list, contestants must complete a few challenges. The clock is ticking. In the past, lists have been suspended high above the floor and surrounded by “15 feet of lava,” requiring teams to improvise a solution. One year, lists were buried on the beach at Promontory Point. This year was more of a gentle welcome back. Drink from a baby bottle. Find the marked pea in the jar of black-eyed peas. Smash a plate. After each task, a few pages of the 18-page list of items and rules were released.
Typically, what happens then is the teams regroup in their dorms and sort out pages and translate the often cryptic descriptions (“a teammate with a heart of gold”). Some blow up the pages and wallpaper rooms. Some construct spreadsheets and databases. One of the reasons Snell-Hitchcock, which has won a disproportionate number of Scavs, is always the team to beat, said captain Daniel Vesecky, is because their dorm makes Scav a year-round priority, using about 50 dedicated students, then cycling in another 100 or so; they keep stockpiles of random materials they might need, and break the team into specialized groups dedicated to food, science, sewing, construction, etc.
As Wednesday night became Thursday morning, students waiting for their teammates to gather all the pages read through what they had, and there were gasps and laughs.
“I’m so confused,” said Sahana Jain, “they want ... what?”
Another team moved through the hall in a kind of flock, led by Harper Schwab: “OK, first we have to make sense of all this. Item number 74, ‘a working toilet for rodents.’ Easy.”
They passed Max Moncada Cohen, who was saying to his friend Jonah Fleishhacker: “Oh, right here, I’m sure we can do this.” Item number 207: a cinnamon bun hairdo, “using a single, continuous roll of that delicious, gooey dough.” Doable.
And yet, the list itself was labeled: “The Zeroth Annual 2014 University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt List.” This was because some items required teams to arrive at a designated time and place, but the catch was that each of the times corresponded to a 365-day 2014 calendar divided into 15-minute “days,” distributed across roughly 84 hours of Scav. Thus, item number 2: “Meet us at the center quad on June 13th,” but bring your own custom fruit festival, with a cake, carnival games and pageant winner.
Convoluted? Exactly.
Writing the list is a five-month process that starts in January, which is one reason alums tend to play a large role — they have a bit more time than the students. They also use Scav as a mini-class reunion. Some fly in for the week. As with the Supreme Court, Scav judges serve for life. Indeed, Scav is so ingrained in Hyde Park culture now that the list has a five-page style guide. Teams of alumni have formed political action committees. Some seek out sponsorship from local businesses. One team is a nonprofit that wrote into its bylaws the promise that, should it ever win a Scav, it would immediately disband.
None of which, by design, makes much sense. This is exactly why, talking with students and judges, some of them wonder if Scav can survive for another generation.
“Scav’s lost its edge at least three times,” said judge Cass Cohen, dryly.
Students are forever declaring it not as edgy as it was. This year, the usual road trip portion of Scav — which had contestants traveling as far as Nevada for items — was scrapped for logistical reasons. More than one contestant told me they feared for the contest because of the kinds of students that the University of Chicago is attracting now, career-conscious types who seem less willing to waste four days on an esoteric goose chase. But Dean Boyer said every student body tends to worry that the new class is watering down the school’s reputation of eccentricity, “and I don’t see Scav normalizing.”
In fact, he said, the school sort of finds it charming and clever; past undergraduate applications have even incorporated questions from Scav lists into its essay portions.
Kelly said the creators of Scav didn’t expect the event to survive the internet. “Trivia questions themselves became trivial, and when you can obtain a whole lot in 24 hours from Amazon, it’s not a challenge. So stuff you can do and make became prominent. But that’s when we realized how invested people were.” This was 30 years ago. They asked for a soda can with a 5-cent deposit. Indiana, Michigan and Iowa had 10-cent deposits; Illinois had none. So a contestant went to Midway International Airport, boarded a standby flight to New York, bought a can of soda in the airport in New York, then flew back to Chicago.
One point.
Nobody gets every point.
There has never been a perfect Scav score; even the first list in 1987 asked for a dean, “nude, gagged and bound.” This year, no team was able to get a selfie with a shipwreck off Lake Michigan, though at least two teams climbed into dinghies and gave it the old college try. Still, incredibly, Tula Hanson and Audrey Leonard, captains of the Woodlawn East team, got item number 39: “an official statement from the University of Chicago stating unequivocally that ‘the University of Chicago is full of (expletives).’”
They got it from the admissions department, “which responded so fast,” said Hanson.
Woodlawn East, in its first year in competition, came in second place. They won nothing. No prize, no nothing. But then again, first place received exactly the same thing — nothing. Just bragging rights.
Remember, you were young once, too.
