Class Warfare

Gary Hofmeyer (foreground), now a pastor in St. Petersburg, Fla., says he was cheating when this photo of the sophomore tug-of-war team was taken in 1969. “I was in the river and still pulling when I was supposed to stop. We cheated and we still lost!”

Across sloughs, ditches, fences and alfalfa fields they ran, young men and women leaving a trail of chalk and paper—and sometimes blood—behind them on a dark October night. They were the seniors of Northwestern Classical Academy, and they were looking to prove their supremacy over the junior class.

During the 1920s and ’30s, the annual fox-and-goose chase pitted the seniors—geese—against their younger counterparts—foxes. With a 30-minute head start, the geese would take off on an adventure, hoping the foxes couldn’t find their path and capture them. At the end—either when the seniors were found, the juniors gave up, or the lost foxes were corralled near midnight—the students gathered at Zwemer Hall for refreshments.

A generation earlier, competition between the seniors and juniors revolved around an attempt to hoist their class flags on the Northwestern flagpole. A 1906 newspaper reported on a back-and-forth five-day “scrap” that resulted in several ruined flags, bruises but no serious injuries, and the senior class flag ultimately waving proudly in triumph.

During the 1960s and 1970s, men from the freshman and sophomore classes battled in the annual rope pull over the Floyd River as part of May Day festivities. Gary Hofmeyer ’71 remembers practicing pulling technique and digging holes to stand in, yet still losing badly to the freshmen in 1969.

Women took part in class competition of a different sort in the same era, as the freshmen and sophomores sang and performed skits in the Stegenga Festival. In 1967, the winning sophomores’ theme was a trip around the world, while the freshmen presented a “Berkeley girls” protest march.

A story in that year’s De Klompen declared that more school spirit was generated at the event than at many athletic contests.

“What the presentations lack in professional touches is made up for by the enthusiasm of the girls,” it said.