Grads Say Goodby in Strange Ways : Pranks: High school seniors across the county pull public and sometimes illegal farewell stunts that range from the quirky to outrageous.

With pocket combs, bedsheets and a bullet-riddled car, Ventura County’s high school seniors pulled farewell pranks this week that ranged from quirky to outrageous.

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As schools from Ojai to Simi Valley prepared for graduation, certain students --school officials won’t say who--flaunted the spirit of the Class of ’94 in public and sometimes illegal ways.

Moorpark Memorial High School students stripped a ’63 Chevrolet wreck, splattered it with school colors and hoisted it onto the roof.

Camarillo High students sandbagged the teachers’ lounge door. Oxnard High seniors festooned trees with toilet paper.

And Nordhoff High seniors promised new Principal Mike Maez that they would absolutely not pull any pranks, because they liked him.

Then, Maez said, they actually kept the promise.

At Ventura High School, senior class officers Mike Schodorf and Phyra Prum bought $30 worth of combs and handed them out to their classmates.

At graduation on Thursday, every single senior trooped across the stage, graciously accepted a diploma, and then handed baffled Principal Jerry Barshay a comb.

“Our kids don’t pull pranks, they pull a surprise,” said Barshay, who last year received a handful of change from every senior to help pay for a time capsule project that ran short of funding. “It’s a loving tradition.”

Barshay said he gave away most of the 345 combs that had piled up in a box as the ceremony progressed. He still has enough to last him a lifetime, but he admits he did not quite understand why he was given combs.

“He didn’t know why we did it?” Schodorf said in amazement Friday. “We gave it to him because his hair is always perfect. At graduation the wind was blowing like crazy and his hair didn’t move.”

Back in September, Newbury Park High School seniors plastered the numbers ’94 and the paw print symbol of their school’s panther mascot onto more than 70 discarded bedsheets they strung up on a mountainside facing the school, Principal Chuck Eklund said.

With Eklund’s blessing, the massive banner reappeared Thursday night to greet students, parents and teachers arriving at the school Friday for graduation ceremonies.

“I think it’s a real nice expression of the class’ spirit,” Eklund said. The banner took students about three weeks to sew together from bedsheets donated by local motels. “It took a lot of work.”

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A lot of work also went into the car that appeared briefly atop a locker building at Moorpark Memorial High School on Wednesday morning, according to school officials and the students who put it there.

Graduating senior Jared Kira said he and about 15 friends had been dreaming of a way to top the prank they pulled in 1993--putting all the lunchroom tables on the school’s roof.

“We were thinking of making a farm inside the quad with all different kinds of animals--pigs, cows and sheep,” said Kira, 18. “We thought it would be pretty funny, but then we thought it would be tough to get ahold of the animals.”

Instead, they dragged a wrecked 1963 Chevrolet Impala wreck out of a drainage ditch and towed it to a friend’s auto shop, he said.

“We welded out the whole frame and axle, we dropped the whole bottom out of it and we painted it with ‘Class of ‘94,’ ” Kira said. “It probably weighed like 1,500 pounds.”

The seniors then trucked it to the school at about 1 a.m. that morning and muscled it up onto the roof, Kira said. Once there, they set it atop trash barrels they had borrowed from around the school, he said.

Principal Cary Dritz said school officials walked in Wednesday to find the Chevy perched atop the locker building, the message in school colors of green, gold and white reflecting the morning sun.

“It was a pretty neat stunt, and the students didn’t hurt anybody,” he said. “I’d like to say they used their knowledge of physics to put it up there, but I’m pretty sure they used brute force. We had to use a forklift to bring it down.”

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Many senior classes around Ventura County graduated quietly and without incident, as in Thousand Oaks, where school officials sent letters to parents and held student assemblies urging good behavior.

The letters and speeches told “how important it was to keep our act together and what our expectations were in terms of their behavior,” said Keith Wilson, principal of Thousand Oaks High School. “We haven’t had much of a prank problem because our district’s taken a very strong stand on pranks.”

And all the pranks around Ventura County were ultimately harmless, officials said--though some seniors at Oxnard High had to paint over graffiti left on school walls by their classmates, Assistant Principal Peter Ortega said.

“If students damage property, that’s one issue, but a prank--that’s what it is, just a prank,” Ortega said. Like most officials, Ortega good-naturedly shrugged off this year’s stunts as inoffensive fun.

“One year they had tires on the flagpole, down around its base,” he added. “And for the life of me I don’t know how they got those little boogers on there.”