The Lost History of Drake
Deep in the records room of Cowles Library, our investigators discovered several documents that forever changed our knowledge of Drake’s past.
Drake University, the ivory institution placed in the middle of the most corn-infested capital city in America, is struggling with memory loss, much like Ronald Reagan after his presidency. There is mass confusion surrounding traditions attached to our campus. These traditions hold a very special place in the Drake community but, as our research unearthed, are based entirely on lies.
If you’re anyone at Drake besides the slimy freshman punks who walk around with the attitude of Cold Stone Steve Austin and an I.Q. that rivals that of a Des Moines police officer, you know about Kissing Rock. The popular legend on campus is that if a couple shares a kiss while sitting on the rock they will stay together forever. However, one of the records we found described the original story of the Kissing Rock:
When two individuals share a kiss at the Kissing Rock, they are to be wed in 3–5 business weeks, or else they are both to be doomed to the Sugma Plague.
Despite our research team doing the bare minimum to keep their position, DUiN has not been able to find any records of the so-called Sugma Plague, but beware with whom you do the tongue tango in front of Old Main: you might end up with something more than a half-chub and a date to Applebees.
Street Painting is another one of the famed traditions of Drake University that dates back to the 1980s, and a highlight of the event is an inevitably messy paint fight. Most believe the first paint fight was shenanigans started by a bunch of pranksters. The truth is much darker. According to a tale told by high-order Sodexo staff, the original paint fight was started by a Serbian student by the name of Shavrilo Trincip who was studying accounting. In 1996, then-president Michael Ferrari was surveying street painting activities when suddenly two paint splatters were hurled from Trincip, ruining his suit. Trincip was motivated by the administration threatening to buy out his favorite bar, The Manhole, in order to expand the Fine Art Center. This sparked a major fight between the business and fine arts schools, resulting in the street being colored red (with paint, of course).
After suffering heavy casualties, the business school enlisted the help of the journalism school to take down the armada of art majors. After nearly the entire campus was drenched in paint, the administration stepped in and dropped a paint bomb the size of the new bulldog statue, which would come to be called Small Lad, over the entire campus. This bomb coated the entire campus in the beige that continues to haunt building interiors to this day. Small Lad marked an end to the paint war to end all paint wars. Since that fateful day, the occasional paint skirmish has broken out across campus, but none have neared the magnitude of the original paint war, and the event has been corralled into a singular event in the spring in recent years.
