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The Crook

Of Averett’s many defunct traditions of bygone days – May Day, the Daisy Chain Ceremony, Rat Week, etc – the hiding of the Crook is the most enigmatic.  Centered upon a battered old shepherd’s crook (a five-foot hooked stick), the hiding of the Crook was effectively just a six-month scavenger hunt, but the years in which it was an active tradition are nearly impossible to determine.  It was rarely mentioned in materials that wound up in the archives, making it a very difficult tradition to trace.

The basic structure of the game was simple.  At some point early in the fall semester, the Senior class president would ostentatiously show off the Crook to the Junior class – typically by striding confidently, and unannounced, through a chapel service, holding the Crook aloft.  She would then hide it somewhere on campus, tasking the Junior class with finding it.  If the Crook were to be found, the Juniors would reveal their victory with a flourish roughly equal to the original chapel disruption, and then hide it themselves for the Seniors to try to find.  The game would typically end on “Class Day” – a gathering of the entire student body near the end of the academic year – when the team currently in possession of the Crook would bring it forth and present it to the losing team.

The hiding of the Crook was undertaken under a small but slowly increasing list of rules designed to keep the event safe and at least minimally plausible to complete.  (At least two inches of the Crook had to be visible; the hiding team had to tell the seeking team if the Crook was hidden inside or outside; there was to be no rowdy behavior or snatching of the Crook while it was being held by the opposition; etc.)  It also appears that, at least in some years, the team in possession of the Crook was allowed to move it around as often as they wanted – though any movement would inherently involve the risk of being seen.

As one might expect, at times the game would produce some notorious and celebrated results.  The Seniors got the last laugh one year by burying the Crook and watching the Juniors trip over the visible end, thinking it nothing more than an exposed stump or root.  In the 1924-25 school year, Estelle Walker was commended by the Seniors for her bravery in hiding the Crook on the roof (a hiding place that would be against the rules in later years).  On March 25, 1936, the Juniors found the Crook hidden in the furnace room, and revealed the result by sending a telegram – in the name of the Crook itself – to a gathering of the entire student body.

The hiding of the Crook was but one of many casually competitive games binding the campus together in the early part of the 20^th century.  Like the Nemo-Philo competitions, the intramural athletic contests, debate contests, and others, the Crook was simply another way to pit one half of the student body against the other half in friendly rivalry.  As a competition, however, the Crook had the added bonus that it would encourage incoming students to explore every nook and cranny of the building and grounds, gaining knowledge of their new surroundings via a pleasant diversion.

Legend(s) of the Crook

While most archived material is content to simply describe the Crook tradition as “old,” there have been two more-or-less coherent dates offered for its origin – neither of which is backed up by any corroborating sources, and both of which are highly suspect.

A newspaper article from October 26, 1959 (presumably from either the Register or the Bee, as there was no Chanticleer student newspaper on that date) claimed that the game ran from 1900 to 1931.  Although the ‘roughly 1900’ date has been accepted by at least one Averett publication since (Current Magazine Spring 1997), this is a difficult date to cite uncritically.  After all, the other date mentioned (1931) is laughably inaccurate.

Our other option is, if anything, significantly less believable, though it too has crept into subsequent Averett materials at times (specifically the first edition of Dr. Hayes’ A History of Averett College, though it was edited out of the second edition).  On December 4, 1934, an unsigned article in the Chanticleer asserted that “[a]lmost seventy-five years ago the idea of the Crook hunt was conceived in an effort to arouse class spirit.”  Unfortunately, ‘almost 75 years’ before 1934 is 1859 – the founding date of the college.  While it is certainly possible that clever teachers had realized, very early, that new students could gain mastery of their new surroundings by playing a game, the absence of any concrete information beyond a vague assertion about ‘class spirit’ makes this date likewise difficult to accept.

If we restrict ourselves solely to material written by Averett staff and students during the time the tradition was occurring, we cannot date the beginning any earlier than the 1920s.

The earliest known claim is a reminiscence by 1923 graduate Ferol (Riffe) Green, who – despite attending Averett for four years of high school education in addition to her two years of college – claims that she never even heard of the Crook until her Junior year (fall 1921), and concludes: “I really don’t recall that we made much effort to find it” beyond the occasional glance in a broom closet or behind a bookcase.

The earliest known printed claim comes from fall of 1924, when the December issue of the Chanticleer published the “Ballad of the Crook” – a poem or possibly a chant that the Seniors may have recited during the year’s first reveal of the Crook.

Over the next two years, there was a surprising flurry of interest, with six photos and one drawing in the Pendulum yearbooks, and at least three more Chanticleer articles.  By 1928, The Crook even got a one-paragraph entry in the Student Handbook – pride of place that it would retain for nearly two decades.

The sudden spike in archival data in the 1920s is curious and should give us pause.  In fact, currently all known photos of the Crook come from the 1925 and ’26 yearbooks; an odd situation for a game supposedly ancient.  In addition, the verse "The Ballad of the Crook" (see image carousel below) contains a rhyme of "Averett" and "crave it"; as the school was not called Averett until 1917, the poem (at least in its known version) cannot be older than that date.  While it is possible that an old game may have undergone a revival at this point – as Averett was increasingly tradition-conscious in those years (creating May Day in Spring 1926) – it is just as likely that the game was created in the  late 1910s or early 1920s.  The fact that a lengthy Chanticleer article in January 1925 doesn’t even refer to the Crook as a tradition could, in fact, be read as compelling evidence that its age was simply a myth that has since become taken as fact.

Fading Away

Though it isn’t especially surprising that a tradition would slowly disappear, rather than be overtly ended, pinpointing the ‘when’ and ‘why’ of the end of the Crook tradition is almost as difficult as finding its origin.  The best we can do is gesture somewhat vaguely towards the mid-1940s.

Although the Crook had never had a particularly robust presence in the yearbooks, the last known mention is the Pendulum of 1939, when the senior class history mentions their experience of the Crook as Juniors, but makes no mention of their own hiding of the Crook the following year.

The Chanticleer – where reporting on the Crook had long been spotty – features its final reference to it as an active game in April 1942.  In that issue, the Seniors printed a small cartoon that asked “What about the Crook, Juniors?” – seeming to imply a level of disinterest in the game akin to that felt by Ferol Riffe twenty years earlier.

Unhelpfully, the final mention in the Student Handbook comes from a 1940s issue which was printed without a date.  Regardless of the year in which it was printed, this publication constitutes the final official mention of the Crook as an active game, as it definitely post-dates all other references.

At some point, the Crook was put away, never to return.  It eventually found its way into the University's vault, where it was forgotten for decades.

Despite the difficulty in pinpointing a final year, it is not particularly onerous to see why the Crook would’ve struggled to maintain momentum at mid-century.  The game was facing seismic changes in both the structure and behavior of the student body.

By the mid-1940s, Averett was admitting male veterans as day students.  While the presence of men wouldn’t inherently preclude continuing the Crook tradition, their matriculation points to two important issues.  First, there was an ever-increasing quantity of day-students at this point; these students would have had minimal interest in an on-campus game, played primarily in the evening, by resident students.  Secondly, there had been a significant increase in the size of the student body in general, of which men were but a small part.  The 1925 yearbook depicts only 18 seniors.  By 1945, the number was 84.  Even assuming a worst case scenario on picture day in 1925, this represents a sizeable increase in participants in twenty years.  It’s not entirely surprising that a larger student body had less interest in a game based around a single item and small ‘hunting parties.’

Unsurprisingly, this growing population was clearly developing traditions that were more inclusive and appealing for larger groups.  By the start of the 1930s, ‘Peanut Week’ had developed – a tradition designed to play down the size of the student body by giving each Junior their own ‘big sister,’ who would shower them with small tokens of appreciation for a week.  By 1939, longstanding hazing traditions also codified into ‘Rat Week,’ when the Juniors were all compelled to live by whatever non-threateningly tyrannical rules the Seniors (either en masse or individually) came up with.  More competitive behavior was increasingly steered into intramural athletics, which had also grown significantly since the 1920s.

All these changes likely only heightened an innate problem with the Crook tradition that has already been mentioned in passing twice in this essay: it was so ridiculously difficult as to discourage effort.  One particular Chanticleer article (admittedly, no more reliable than any other) asserted that the Juniors had only found the Crook “about five times” total in all the years the game had been played.  My own research data, comprising a 22-year stretch from fall 1921 to spring 1943, has turned up only four plausible years in which the Crook might have been found – and one of those was invalidated on a technicality.  (See the chart below.)  This level of futility is hardly surprising when one realizes that 'between the mattress and springs of a senior's bed' was considered a perfectly acceptable hiding place as long as the door to the room wasn't  locked.

Ferol Riffe’s implication that it was a pretty uninspiring game, all the way back in 1921-22, feels like a very reasonable response.  A relentlessly ballooning student body would have only made the Crook feel even more distant.  Frankly, it’s somewhat surprising that the game managed to hang on as a campus tradition all the way until World War II, when the most common result was six months of utter failure.

KNOWN CROOK YEARS and RESULTS