Iowa State: Haber and the Fine Record

In the Fall of 1985, I was out at Wallace Hall in the Towers…and I’ve written about that previously. From reading that, you’d probably think I was in the wildest place Iowa State’s residence halls had to offer.

Not hardly.

My friend, Jeff, wound up in Helser Hall on a floor called Haber. Helser was renovated/changed at some point here in the 21st century–and when they did that, the Union Drive Association also changed Haber–it is now female-only.

So…about the old Haber, the Wild West of residence halls in the days before the train arrived bringing civilization with it (also known as the ’21 drinking age’).

So, my friend Jeff was assigned to Haber…and on the first night everyone had moved in, they had a mandatory house meeting. This wasn’t to discuss school policies or rules…nope, this was to assign nicknames–after which, no one was referred to by their regular names–really. I learned about this a couple days later when I asked if anyone had seen Jeff or Evan (another person I knew) and I got nothing but buffalo stares…once I knew their floor names, then I had no problem.

Because Evan had a crew cut and a really receding hairline, he was declared by the seniors to be “Bullhead”. Jeff looked like he was 15 and was a redhead–someone noticed his resemblance to Ron Howard, so he was “Opie” from that point on. The only other name I remember was an assertive guy about 6’2, 240 big into weightlifting and had been a wrestler/football player apparently in HS…and not overly bright. Shockingly, his name was ‘Jocko’.

So then–what exactly did they do of note…:

1. At the end of Spring 87, several Haberites had gone to Missouri and purchased significant quantities of fireworks–a lot of bottle rockets. So on the last weekend before Finals, they decided to launch the rockets down the long length of their ‘L shaped’ hallway. While fun, this did not satisfy them. So–since that year’s RA wasn’t around, they drew a bull’s eye on his door and taped nails/pins/sharp things to the front of the bottle rockets and launched them down the short portion of the corridor and played darts with the RA’s door as a target. Really.

2. The following spring (May, 88), Haber had another RA that had the audacity to follow rules. While he was away one weekend, a couple floor members took the foam fire extinguishers on the south end of Helser Hall and using funnels, discharged them all under the door of the RA’s room.

3. Residence Halls have quiet hours. Foster had 24-hr courtesy hours. Those didn’t exist for normal floors, so Haber was loud. They were supposed to be quiet by 10pm(???) during the week and 1am(??) on weekends. Nope. Jeff mentioned that in their floor budget, they had a fund for paying for noise violations. They budgeted several hundred dollars per year to pay for these.

And the biggie…requiring multiple paragraphs…:

One of the Haber residents was a research assistant in the Chemistry Department (how they found time to do real work–I have no idea…at some level, I suppose I am a bit jealous of their ability to party AND get academic work done). Well, he “acquired” a couple hundred feet of surgical tubing.

NOTE: Foster House highly endorses surgical tubing for fun and games (as president-in-exile I feel I can use present-tense there on the endorsement).

Haber decided to use the tubing like the twine for rope, wrapping three different LONG strands around one another to maximize strength. The total length of the tubes unstretched had to have been 20-30 feet…on this, I don’t know–but….

The next step was to wait for the RA to be gone at class–because everything was going to be HIGHLY illegal at a toss-out-of-housing level. With the RA gone for the afternoon, the next step was to remove the windows from the Haber den. –Haber was on the top floor (4th) of Helser, facing Friley (which was five floors). You know what–let’s get a map in here:

South Helser, South Friley, and a map scale…Haber’s the bottom portion of Helser

So the windows were removed–but because Helser was an older building, the windows were attached to reinforced metal beams that were at least 6″ in width…capable of withstanding quite a bit of stress. The Haberites now took the intertwined surgical tubing and secured one end on the northernmost middle beam and then the other end on the southernmost middle beam. In the middle of the tubing, the miscreants now attached a pouch. They were ready.

They were, but the story isn’t quite there. I should also note that several of those involved had made sure to grab a piece of fruit from the cafeteria for the past couple meals–so they had 12-15 apples and oranges with them. These fruits were now brought to the hallway.

Figured it out? What they’d done is turned the windows/den into a massive slingshot. Oh…wait…it didn’t work yet–because the tubing stretched enough that the den door was in the way…no problem, they removed that, too. NOW they were ready.

Several now pulled back on the tubing slingshot, placed an orange in the pouch, and released the tubing. The orange flew–over Friley Hall, reaching Lake Laverne. (Remember–I left the scale on the map…for JUST this reason). They launched another fruit and another–apparently all reaching Lake Laverne.

Until they didn’t.

It has to be tiring to pull back that much tubing to get that much force–I mean, there’s a reason armies use cannons and explosives rather than hand-cranked ranged weapons, y’know? And since it was afternoon, there were cars driving along Welch Ave/Union Drive–and one of them had an orange bounce off its windshield. I suspect after being startled, the person was rather unhappy. They noticed it hit and the direction it flew off the windshield–so they knew it came from the west–Friley Hall. Now the feces would hit the rotary oscillator.

Except Friley was all intact…at which point the campus police went to Helser. The culprits had time to scram but they couldn’t put the den back together again. The windows and door were off and there was the slingshot still secured to one of the posts. Oops. Left with no choice–the Union Drive Association fined the bejesus out of Haber–removal of windows, removal of the door…about $3,000 if I recall correctly (though only $50/Haberite when you break it down).

And as you’d expect–Haber’s denizens wore it as a badge of honor, setting the record for a fine imposed by the UDA/ISU. Yup…and it’s wild to think what Haber was like before the drinking age transition…

That’s what ultimately killed off bad behavior. With the advent of a 21-drinking age, people moved off campus and the residence halls became dorms with most students moving off campus quickly instead of having on-campus communities of friends.

The thing is–I’m actually sad it all went away. I get the bad behavior and squashing the crap out of it…but it also ended the sense of unity/brotherhood that came from many of the floors/units.

Bittersweet, it seems.

FINAL NOTE: The cover image has the den windows involved…though the Haber sign is now ‘girly’ rather than what Haber had 30-35 years ago.