Battle of IQs : Everything Stacked Against Wimps on Caltech Ditch Day

Beneath the lofty towers of learning, among the fog-gray olive trees at Caltech early Wednesday, the wimps were up and stirring.

One stood outside Ricketts House dorm, flipped a safety shield down over his face and pointed a power drill at an ominously wired metal drum.

“Ready?” he asked grimly.

From the courtyard of Richter Hall came the thrumming of a jackhammer: An MG sports car had been filled with cement, and the wimps had to find out what was buried inside.

It was Ditch Day, when seniors abandon the campus and leave their rooms locked with “stacks,” intricately laid, IQ-challenging treasure hunts of lasers, computers, booby traps and gimmicks that some seniors, like electrical engineering major Scott Karlin, have been anticipating since they set foot here as freshmen.

Underclassmen, dubbed “wimps” for the day, have nine hours to decode, dismantle and decipher the puzzles to get inside the rooms for the bribes--food, drink and sometimes more--which the seniors have laid on, in hopes the wimps will not trash, or “counterstack,” their rooms in revenge.

“We would like them to break in,” senior Charles Flaig said. “We just want it to take as long as possible.”

Ditch Day doesn’t begin to describe this MENSA-goes-to-the-fun-house event. “ ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Animal House’ ” is how Caltech spokesman Dennis Meredith appraised it, a cerebral carnival at the Pasadena school that has produced a score of Nobel Prize winners.

‘They’re Weird

Says Imre Gal, who runs the carpentry shop: “These kids are geniuses. . . but they’re weird, all of them.”

Stacks date back to the 1920s, not long after Caltech began. The old residence houses are honeycombed with their legacy: Holes gape behind mirrors; crawl spaces loom in back of solid-looking cabinets.

From cruder beginnings, when seniors literally stacked bookcases, even railroad ties, to keep out wimps, the stacks have grown as elegant and arcane as the spiral staircase structure of DNA.

“There is a certain element of taste and class in how you plan those things,” said Dean of Students Gary Lorden. “It’s sort of like a good problem on a test. You have respect for a good problem.”

It can be a war of nerves. One year, as seniors ominously mixed tons of cement in one room, the wimps across the hall were building a plasma torch laser, just to be ready.

And it can be just plain war. An impossible stack last year demanded that wimps buy a house (they did), be photographed with a kilogram of gold and chat with a U.S. senator (they didn’t) and put a car atop a second-story building (they did, a BMW, and a Caltech cop added an illegal parking ticket for a cavalier touch. The BMW’s owner is still fighting the ticket).

By 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, the seniors were gone--tradition demands they be tied to trees if found on campus--and wimps were already at work on stacks like Steve Molnar’s “2001,” with its talking HAL 9000 computer.

As one wimp thumbed through a worn copy of “2001,” another messed with the laser interlock in the fake particle-board door, setting off an air raid siren.

“If this continues,” said HAL in a nasty, tinny voice, “I will be forced to initiate a self-destruct sequence.”

“Oh no!” moaned freshman Martin Adler, unwrapping his stack’s first requirement. “I have to talk like Gumby all day!”

Wailed another: “Oh, great, now I have to lead a pro-apartheid demonstration. Who’s gonna help me?”

Change Sign

“Well, get this, “ said junior Rob Luenberger. “I gotta change the Hollywood sign to read ‘Cal Tech 86’!” (He didn’t.)

It took a month for Jung Im and his friends, Matt Penn and Nathan Inada, to set up a six-room maze in their off-campus basement. Wimps had to transcribe music, pick locks and converse with a talking fedora in an Indiana Jones room, braving an attack of chopstick darts for the wrong answer. They made it.

“We’re celebrating now,” said Penn, over the fizz of champagne.

Richard Doherty’s three-man computer video stack asked 100 questions and insisted that wimps open a 40-pound steel and concrete cube Doherty hadn’t been able to crack the year before. They blowtorched that easily, but were stymied by the last two questions. Doherty gave them the answers--in exchange for their nude “streak” down Olive Walk just before 5 p.m.

Tunnel of Food

“Cornucopia” stack was a solid tunnel of food. Wimps must eat their way through, no hands. Last year it was peanut butter and prune sandwiches. This year, junior Biff Yamakazi, who had just solved the Beer Stack down the hall, whipped off his glasses and T-shirt, dropped to his knees and began with the sheet cakes, then moved to the marshmallow-mortared Rice Krispies slabs.

“We’re gonna counterstack this room with everything that’s in here--except we’re gonna digest it a little first,” he said with happy malice. But the tunnel was abandoned when they got to the homemade baklava.

Counterstackers have been known to fill seniors’ rooms with water, to reprogram a computer stack to confound the senior who created it. One notorious year, they walled up the room and painted over it and hung a picture on the new wall.

But first, the wimps have to get inside.

Saxy Workman’s stack was nothing less than creating a new religion. Freshman Josh Kurutz, had to become the crab god, in a lobster bib, with plastic eyes glued on wood stems sprouting from his forehead and red felt crab legs waggling from a headband. By 5 p.m., the crab people had performed the requisite miracle (helping Moses walk across Millikan Pond, thanks to plastic sheeting) and built a golden crab idol.

Official Holiday

Ditch Day is an official school holiday. But many on campus take part, from secretaries who hold clues, to the cooperative physics prof who did as the wimps asked and bottle-fed a graduate student’s baby son. Even the staff know the mystique, and the mess: “You name it,” sighs veteran custodian Linda Plante. “I’ve picked it up.”

There are rules and structure to the madness: There is the “finesse” stack, mind over muscle at one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning. On Wednesday, wimps assembled a V-8 Dodge engine in a hallway as part of an “Indy 500” stack, but they had to pump gas for customers at a local gas station, before the station owner would hand over the missing carburetor.

There is the austere “honor” stack, an unlocked door with questions taped to it, and on a campus where almost everyone has a master key, no wimp with a gram of self-respect would think of taking the easy way in.

Caltech fable records an honor stack “sealed” by one physics question so difficult that even a campus Nobel winner could not answer it.

Takes Time

“Making stacks should be for extra credit,” said senior class president Jim Helgren. “They take more time than I spend on any classes.”

On Wednesday, just before 5 p.m., as a cantaloupe was lobbed from the top of the nine-story library, the “2001” stack was solved. Inside, the wimps found . . . “Cookies?” growled one. “We’re gonna cook this guy.” But time ran out, and Molnar and friends ran in to protect their interests.

As night fell, 20 trash bag balloons still floated outside: They had been inflated as a signal to a senior operating his stack from across the street. As the wimps had begun to fill the plastic bags that morning, one wimp asked, “Do you have hydrogen or helium? Hydrogen? OK, just be careful.”

“Yeah,” warned another. “Remember the Hindenburg?”