Spring is here, and graduation is just around the corner. In less than four weeks, the Class of 2009 will be gone forever.

We’ll remember ’09 for their shadiness, their beauty, and their creative ways of asking people (mainly juniors) to prom. If they don’t take action soon, we’ll also remember them as the class that didn’t play any senior pranks.

Senior pranks are a long-held Garfield tradition. Each prank reestablishes the roles of seniors, underclassmen, and administrators within the context of a school. The seniors cause mayhem; the underclassmen respond by laughing or screaming, depending on the type of mayhem; and the administrators rush around trying to restore order while hiding their own amusement. A good senior prank breaks the monotony and refreshes school spirit. Garfield needs that right now.

“There’s been a gradual decline in spirit ever since I got here,” Garfield teacher Steve Miranda said.

Miranda arrived at Garfield at the beginning of the 2000 – 2001 school year. He called that year’s graduating class “frightening.”

“When I first came here, when I went to my first spirit assembly… It looked like a Nazi rally,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. The cheerleaders would go over to the seniors, and… It was so loud and violent I thought a riot was going to happen!”

Today’s student body seems calm in comparison. School colors dominate on spirit days, but the out-of-control sense of spirit currently lies dormant. In these last four weeks, it’s up to ’09 to bring it out.

The mini-blimp at the homecoming assembly was a step in the right direction, as was the forbidden lust between students and dinosaurs at prom. But lasting infamy doesn’t result from such minor antics. The antics need to be big. They need to be disruptive. They need to be on a level somewhere between an earthquake and an inter-grade mosh pit involving people and snakes.

If the seniors want to be legendary, they may want to consider incorporating livestock into their pranks. One year, according to Garfield folklore, some students brought cows into the building and led them up to the top floor. Because of the way cows’ knees bend, they couldn’t get back down the stairs.

“I didn’t see it happen,” Abe Benson-Goldberg, class of 2007, said. “But I heard it was ’03.”

Amanda King, class of 2003, denied the rumor.

“As a proud graduate of the class of ’03, I have to say that I’m beginning to think the cow prank was a myth,” King said. “I remember hearing about it with some awe as a freshman – it was said to be the work of some ’01-ers, I think. It would have been brilliant if it were ever accomplished.”

As King concluded, the cow prank’s validity remains questionable. First of all, a quick Google search shows that other U.S. schools have identical bovine legends. Second of all, cows may or may not be able to walk down stairs. According to “Sideways Stories From Wayside School,” by Louis Sachar, they can’t; but according to YouTube (“Cow walks down stairs”), they can.

At some point, goats may have been present on campus as well. One class allegedly brought three goats into the school and numbered them 1, 2, and 4. Administrators and students ran around frantically looking for goat number 3, which did not exist.

Miranda said he never saw farm animals in the building, but he saw quite a few bugs. In 2001, a senior guy bought hundreds of crickets from a pet store and set them free inside the school. He probably hoped the crickets would chirp, hop into backpacks, and maybe make a few girls scream, but…

“They ran to a dark place and kept quiet,” Miranda said. “That prank flopped.”

Later that school year, in a fit of Bulldog righteousness, the same guy TP’d Roosevelt. He got suspended, and Miranda had to write him a character letter so that he could walk at graduation.

In the years that followed, students abandoned toilet paper for more sophisticated materials, like bricks. A girl built a brick wall – complete with mortar – blocking one of the Alder doors from the outside. Another time, two students went around and changed all of the classroom numbers to “2003.”

Miranda said he appreciates the creativity behind unusual pranks, but he doesn’t look back on all of them fondly. He remembers a year when the seniors greased one of the ramps leading to Alder and then pulled the fire alarm. Unsuspecting students and faculty were slipping as they tried to exit the building.

“Some folks lack the sort of cerebral development to know the difference between harmless fun and…dangerous…acts,” he said.

The greased-ramp prank wouldn’t work at the new Garfield; the ramps down to Alder are carpeted now.

Garfield teacher Carol Burton has a certain fondness for pranks that fill the air.

“Eytan [Nicholson, ’05] set up a smoke bomb in the green bathroom across the hall from the orchestra room,” she said, laughing. “It filled the senior hall with orange smoke.”

Another time, a senior brought a fog machine to Burton’s choir class. She was conducting when the fog started to fill the room, so she didn’t notice that it was floating around her knees. She couldn’t figure out why her entire choir was laughing.

Benson-Goldberg remembers seeing three seniors streaking around the Garfield campus his freshman year.

“I don’t really remember many pranks as much as I do generally weird s*** happening,” he said.

King also witnessed her fair share of weird s***.

“As an underclassman, I remember days when we’d all emerge from sixth period to find that the seniors had scattered chicken feet or squid bits all over the radiators and hallways,” she said. “The feet were gross; the squid stank; pandemonium usually ensued.”

King fondly recalled her junior year, when the juniors painted the smokestack with their year before the seniors could get their act together.

“My favorite ’03 prank moment by far,” she said. “Oh, the shame of having your senior year dominated by someone else’s school spirit…”

The smokestack was torn down in the remodel, and the new Garfield doesn’t have a smokestack equivalent.

“That was what made my friends and me saddest about the new building – that they took down that huge smokestack and denied y’all the pleasure of tagging it with your year,” King said.

The smokestack tradition might still live on. Last year, ’08 built a makeshift smokestack, painted it, and put it outside the entrance of Garfield-at-Lincoln. ’09 could come up with a similar solution.

Whatever they decide to do, they better decide to do it quickly. The juniors are already making plans for next year, and they won’t be afraid to put those plans into action early if ’09 continues to slack off.

The seniors haven’t spent thousands of hours in classrooms for nothing. It’s time for them to put their hard-earned secondary school education to work and come up with a decent prank. The rest of the school can’t wait to witness what will be remembered as the first prank in the new doghouse.