Campus Keepsake
Fifty years ago, a graduating U of A senior climbed Old Main in the middle of the night and took a piece of campus home. He recently brought it back.
Image courtesy Special Collections, the University of Arizona
Richard had something to get off his chest — or out of his attic, as it were.
“I can’t remember whose office I called first,” he says. “But a young lady answered the phone. I told her who I was, what class I graduated from. I told her, ‘I have something I want to return to the university, but I don’t know who to give it to.’”
“What is it?” the woman asked.
If you look up some pictures of Old Main prior to 1972, he told her, you’ll notice a decorative metal spire on the south tower — a finial, they call it.
The woman clicked around for a minute. There it was: a metal spire about two feet tall, with some ornamental looping near the top. Then Richard told her to look at a picture of Old Main from after 1973. “It’s not there,” the woman said.
“That’s because I have it,” he said.
Chris Richards
It’s 1973. Richard has been walking past Old Main for years now, looking at that little spire.
“I called it a lightning rod,” he says. One Sunday he was out throwing a Frisbee by the Old Main fountain with some friends. “You know, before I leave here, I’m going to steal that thing,” he told them. What thing? they asked. Richard pointed to the roof.
“I worked as a phone operator in the dorms,” he says, “so I volunteered to hang around after commencement and help clean out the rooms and get things ready for summer.” One night he put on some dark clothing, threw a few tools in his army surplus backpack and walked over to Old Main. There was a big mesquite on the east side. Richard started to climb.
One of the branches curved up over the lower roofline covering the sidewalk. Richard made it from the branch to the roof, then walked over to the roof of the south tower and straddled a vent, putting him just about at eye level with the finial. He was able to loosen two of the bolts using his tools, but didn’t want to risk shimmying around to the other side of the vent to get the third and fourth. The wood the finial was bolted to was rotted enough that he was able to jerk the finial loose with his hands.
Image courtesy Special Collections, the University of Arizona.
A set of headlights came around the bend. Richard pressed himself against the vent until they passed. Finial in hand, he walked back across the roof to the mesquite. Two students were sitting on a bench down below. They looked up. Richard pressed his finger to his lips. “The ‘be-quiet’ symbol,” he says. Then he dropped the finial from the mesquite branch into a bed of roses along the wall. It stuck in the ground.
A night watchman came out from under the Old Main stairs, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and started chatting with the students on the bench. A whole cigarette’s worth of conversation, with Richard up there in the tree. Eventually, the watchman left, and Richard shimmied down.
“You didn’t see me,” he told the kids on the bench. “I was not here.”
Richard got back to his dorm room and woke his roommate up. His roommate stared at him in disbelief, this ambassador from another world, a dream perhaps.
“I got it,” Richard said. “You got what?”
Richard turned on the lights. “Oh my God,” his roommate said. Then he went back to sleep. Richard rolled the finial up in a quilt and left campus the next day.
Fifty years passed. Richard hitchhiked across America, got married, went to graduate school, started a family, lived his life. The finial came with him. “I never really showed it to anybody,” he says. “Then I made the decision. I said, ‘You know, I’m coming up on my 50th reunion in 2023. I think I’ll take it back to campus.’”
“We receive materials from alumni all the time,” says Erika Castaño, digital initiatives archivist and University of Arizona history curator for Special Collections at the University of Arizona Libraries. Scrapbooks, pictures, diplomas — things like that. “Mostly we get a lot of yearbooks,” she says. Richard’s memento was different.
They arranged to meet at the library loading dock on the Friday of Homecoming weekend. “It was wrapped in a moving blanket,” Castaño says. They brought it in through the back, unwrapped it, basked in the fading glow of history, the hundred-plus years of dirt.
“I didn’t realize how big the piece was,” Castaño says. “I think that’s what drove us to take this item. It was, you know, a piece of Old Main, the emblem for our university, the heart of campus. It’s been there since the beginning. It became this larger moment than just an old piece of a building.”
Chris Richards
“I’m a native Arizonan, and the history of Arizona was important to me,” Richard says. “I’d visited both the U of A and Arizona State University, and I just felt a draw to the U of A, and a big part of that draw was beautiful Old Main. Just imagining what it was like to see that edifice rising up from the desert floor to ultimately become the university that it is; to walk down the Mall and feel something permanent here, something important in the life and history of our state; to turn around and look back at Old Main sitting there so prominently displayed — it just makes me feel good all over.”
“Remember, there was a lot of turmoil at the time. ROTC was housed in [Old Main]. There were protests against the war in Vietnam and the Nixon administration. There’d been a fire in one of the Old Main stairwells, I remember.
“It was something I’d fallen in love with. And then to see that lone finial out there on the south end of the building all by itself and think, ‘You know, I’d love to have that thing,’” he says, starting to laugh. “‘I could just climb up there, get on that little wall ...’.”❖