I don’t remember where the idea came from, but for some time we thought about painting bird footprints around the campus.  We envisioned a bird 15 or 20 feet high that might land, walk around the campus leaving footprints behind, and then fly away.  [I don’t want to mislead you.  We thought of a big bird but not Big Bird.]  Finally Jerry and I got together one afternoon and cut out a bird footprint from a 4 x 8 sheet of fiberboard - three toes pointing forward and one pointing behind.  We had a can of white paint and I got a wide paint brush that we could use to fill in each print quickly.

That night dressed in old clothes we took our stencil, paint, and paintbrush and went to campus.

Around that time the movie by Paddy Chayefsky, Marty, had been playing.  In the film, a group of bored guys get together in the evenings with nothing to do.  In several scenes they ask each other, “What do you want to do?” and another one answers, “I don’t know, Marty, what do you want to do?”  Of course we picked up on some of this dialog and used it in conversation.

Under cover of darkness, we made the bird “land” in the middle of the quad - two footprints side by side.  Then the bird walked across the quad toward the library, left, right, left, right, with about a 3 ½ to four foot stride.  We were delighted with the appearance of the footprints.  The tracks crossed the road and got to the sidewalk in front of the library.  We had turned and started down the sidewalk toward the girls’ dorm when a car turned off of Nebraska Avenue into the main gate and headed our way.  It was obvious the headlights would sweep across us when the car turned the corner and came past the library.  Jerry turned to me and said, deadpan, “What do you want to do, Marty?”  Of course I said, “I don’t know Marty, what do you want to do?”

Then we moved quickly.  We left the stencil on the sidewalk - it would lie flat and probably wouldn’t be noticed from inside the car - and picked up the paint can and paint brush and hid behind some bushes in front of the library until the car went past and we had escaped notice.  Typical of Jerry: good timing, quick insight, and most of all, someone you could count on to come through when it was important.

There were no more cars that night.   After the car went by the bird continued down the sidewalk to the girls’ dorm.  By this time the stencil was breaking across the middle.  We both had to carry it, one on each side, to the next spot, to keep it from splitting in half.  The tracks turned and the bird faced the dorm, feet side by side.  Perhaps the bird was thinking.  In those days there were “parietal hours,” the girls’ dorm was locked at 11 p.m.  Then, as if the bird had flown over the dorm, the tracks “landed” in the road behind the dorm, and walked down the road to Clendenon Hall where they stopped.

Now the denoument to our adventure.  Quite tickled with ourselves, we waited to hear what the reaction had been to the bird tracks: outrage, amusement, certainly puzzlement?  But we heard nothing.  After two days someone told us that since the tracks stopped at Clendenon Hall where the theater auditorium was housed, people thought the tracks must be an advertisement for one of the college plays.  I don't know, Marty, what do you want to do?