Weary Wil is currently living life in a box.

Hobo Day festivities on Nov. 4 will include the unveiling and dedication of the long-time Hobo Day school symbol — only this time as a statue.

The unveiling will include the landscape garden plaza around the statue on The Union’s north side. Until then, Wil

The statue of Weary Wil, currently on lock down inside a wooden crate, will be unveiled on Nov. 4 during Hobo Week. (Photo by Emma DeJong)

spends his days in a 10 foot pine box.

The cheerful hobo by choice, Wil is a cherished tradition for many alumni and current students. It is a memory the Alumni Board has been committed to commemorating for years and was integral in making the statue come to life.

“Our Alum Board has worked tirelessly to make this new plaza a possibility, and also the Hobo Gallery from last year a reality,” said Union Director Jennifer Novotny.

Wil is cast in the likeness of SDSU graduate  and former state senator David Blagen. Novotny noted there are more than a few hidden surprises included in Wil’s attire students will have to search for.

Crews have been installing the eight-and-a-half-foot tall statue and preparing the grounds for the ceremony. One crew finished putting the finishing touches on the plaza for the upcoming unveiling. Another crew is responsible for the landscaping around the statue, expected for completion by the end of the week.

The news about the statue is unbeknownst to some students.

“I’ve heard a lot of people talking about it. They said they were building a statue of Wil by the Union, but no one I’ve talked to has seen it yet,” said student Brent Kramer.

According to Novotny, Weary Wil and the Hobo Gallery of the Student Union are part of an Alumni Board and Administration collaboration to include school tradition themed art on campus.

She added a hint of mystery to the campus beautification process.

“We’re hoping to give Wil a companion sculpture in the near future,” Novotny said.

His name is George. He is good-spirited, even friendly. If you wave, he might wave back. He likes playing organ music and tampering with the electricity.

And he’s dead.

Legend says that in 1919, George was working as a janitor in SDSU’s Doner Auditorium. He fell to his death from an alcove above the stage, where the organ was.

Two years after George’s death, the organ was dismantled and taken to its final resting place in the music department. Some say the organ was scrapped because it didn’t work properly anymore. Others say it was because a ghostly apparition was playing it from time to time.

Ray Peterson, a retired professor who spent 40 years teaching theater at SDSU, says he never met George face to face, but still believes in him.

Peterson was a full-time technical director for three years and heard many strange noises when he was working alone on the old stage.

“I don’t know how many times I stopped what I was doing,” to listen to odd banging noises, he says. “I kept telling myself it was just ventilation and some air problems.”

Theater major Jessie Storovich says George is both a loved and feared figure in SDSU’s theater program. She also has a personal experience with odd happenings in the auditorium.

To prepare for an upcoming show, she had to clean out the theater. Storovich tried entering through the back, where there is the easiest access to the theater lights, but the door was locked. This forced her to enter through the front of the auditorium, where she had to walk down the aisle, walk the main stage and navigate her way backstage to find the lights.

“I got about half way down the aisle and all of a sudden … every single light in there started blinking on and off and just going crazy and there were all these, like, pounding noises,” she said.

“I didn’t know if it was a trick or if there was some really scary hobo sleeping in Doner or if it was a ghost, but I was not staying in there and I was not going any further down the aisle.”

This, combined with over-active imaginations, is just what skeptics like Theater Professor John “J.D.” Ackman says perpetuate ghost stories.

“I don’t happen to believe there is a ghost in Doner,” Ackman says, “And I have spent an awful lot of time in there, often at night and often alone.”

Another strange fact: There is no record in the U.S. Social Security Death Index of a man by the name of George dying in Brookings in 1919.

Hobos ran rampant in the Volstorff Ballroom on Halloween night during Bum Olympics.

Members of the Delta Chi and Sigma Epsilon race across the floor of the Volstorff Ball Room during the Blanket Challenge of the Bum Olympics. The Bum Olympics is just one of many events during Hobo Week. (Photo by Kathy Kroeger)

The reason? Spirit points.

The annual event featured nine teams of 10 people from residence halls and student organizations all competing against each other to gain the most spirit points for bragging rights.

“Throughout Hobo Week people can earn spirit points and Bum Olympics is just one way of doing that,” said Grand Pooba Briana Troske. “The winner of the most spirit points will be announced at Saturday’s football game at half time and win bragging rights until next year.”

The Bum Olympics was one of the events kicking off Hobo Week. It’s designed to test the athletic abilities of participants in a silly way and to have a lot of laughs, said University Program Council President Thomas Brinker.

“To sum it up, Bum Olympics is several really fast-paced relay events that test obscure and silly skills,” said Brinker.

It was close competition throughout the event. Delta Chi took home first place with 50 points overall; Sigma Phi Epsilon took second with 35 points; and the Newman Center took third with 20 points.

One of the relay events was the Dizzy Lizzy, an event where participants placed their head on a bat and spun around 10 times before they chugged a juice pouch and ran back to tag the next team member. However, the sequence most teams followed was turn around five times, fall over, get back up and spin the other five, fall over, and so on.

Sigma Phi Epsilon took home first place in this portion of the Olympics.

“The [Dizzy Lizzy] was awesome,” said Tyler Aldren of Sigma Phi Epsilon. “We take the Bum Olympics very seriously and I love how competitive it is.”

The Blanket Challenge was another portion of the Bum Olympics where participants wrapped one team member in a blanket and ran them down and back the VBR two times.

Delta Chi took a hard stumble in the first half of the relay, which sent them back to second place and allowing the Newman Center “Catholic Jacks” to win first.

Delta Chi fought back in the next event and went on to win the Tunnel Race, where team members raced down the VBR by crawling under legs and forming a human chain.

“You could dive through the first few legs but then the rest of the way was a challenge,” said Quade Klepper of Delta Chi about the Tunnel Challenge.

Although Troske said all the events are fun, she said one of the funniest portions of Bum Olympics is watching participants do Digging for Worms.

“Participants [had] to get worms out of a bucket of Jell-O using only their face,” said Troske. “It’s a funny and messy sight.”

Although all the events are silly, winning was no laughing matter when it came to participants.

“Participants always get really into it – especially those dressed up as hobos,” said Brinker. “Things got really competitive and loud. It [was] a fun time.”

By Carl Hesler

The hobo way of life has existed for more than a century, and according to hobo expert Linda Hughes, it shows no signs of stopping.

“With the way the economy is, we foresee this lifestyle to grow,” she said.

The standard definition of a hobo is “one who travels and works.” A tramp is one who travels but never works, and a bum never travels or works.

“‘Bum’ is a very big insult to hobos,” Hughes warned. “If you ride the rails for the first time, you have to be welcomed into the hobo community. You have to prove yourself.”

In a typical day, then, a hobo will ride trains to find work, Hughes said.

“They know all the trains,” said Hughes. “They know when they come and where they’re headed. They catch the right train and ride it to where they want to go. When they get to the town they want, they find some work to do — be it for a sandwich or a couple of cents.”

According to Hughes, hobo men usually work on farms, where they harvest wheat or beets. In the winter, many of them go to the southern United States to work in shipyards. Usually hobo women work part- or full-time jobs. Some of them even own homes and live normal lives. What sets hobos apart from everyone else, however, is their desire to live free in an obvious way.

“Steam Train Maury Graham, one of the great hobos, said that ‘Once you get that wanderlust in your heart, you have to go,’” Hughes explained. “But a hobo is a man before he is a hobo — don’t ever forget that. Hobos are exactly like the rest of us, except they have to be on the move all the time.”

While hobos value freedom and travel, they also feel a special bond with each other. Once a year, they gather by the hundreds in Britt, Iowa for the National Hobo Convention.

“It’s a town celebration,” said Hughes. “There’s a flea market, ‘Mulligan Stew,’ hobo games, a memorial service, a huge parade, and a car and truck show to end it on Sunday.”

The convention starts on a Thursday with an official fire lighting in Britt’s Hobo Jungle – a big campground where hobos spend the weekend. The Hobo King and Queen from the previous year give speeches and other hobos sing and read poetry. On Friday, hobos remember their forebears in a memorial service at the Hobo Cemetery in Britt. One of the previous Hobo Queens, Connecticut Shorty, conducts a tour of the cemetery.

On Saturday, Britt hosts a 5K/10K run and a parade, and hobos vote for the new king and queen. The weekend ends with a car show on Main Street and a craft show in the park.

The ties connecting Brookings and Brit, aside the first two letters of the names, are more than the celebration of the hobo tradition or reveling in freedom. Hughes said two past Hobo Queens — Adventurer Jan in 1975 and LuAnn Uhden in ’76 — had been SDSU students, at least according to rumor.

“It is talked about every year at [Britt’s] Hobo Day,” she said. “We always want some SDSU students to come out for the Convention.”

The primary goal of the placenta project is to develop standard protocols for collecting, processing, preserving and analyzing placentas so scientists can obtain useful data from these tissues now and in the future. Currently, there is great variability in what happens to the placenta following birth. Improper processing can severely limit the amount of information scientists can acquire from the placental tissue.

Researchers believe what happens in the womb may provide clues as to how a child will fare later in life, and the placenta is a valuable window into what takes place before birth. This type of information may serve to develop predictive tools that will help determine if children are at risk for a variety of health problems. With this knowledge, health care professionals may be able to intervene earlier to optimize children’s growth and development.

The placenta project team will collect more than 600 placentas from mothers enrolled in the NCS at 11 different sites across the country. The University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., will serve as the central resource for collecting all placentas that will be analyzed throughout this project.

Investigators will develop methods to assess features of the placenta such as size, shape and thickness, and other attributes that may yield information about how and when disease develops. Genetic material will be extracted from the placenta. And, researchers will also look for environmental contaminants that may help determine which toxins are associated with negative effects on the developing baby.

In addition to SDSU and URMC, researchers from Mt. Sinai Medical School, Columbia University, the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Iowa, Wisconsin College of Medicine, the University of Utah, the University of North Carolina, Brown University, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University and Placental Analytics, LLC of Larchmont, N.Y., are involved in the project.

A 1963 civil engineering graduate from SDSU, Weiss has been a faculty member at SDSU for eight years, currently serving as a technical service provider with the Local Technical Assistance Program in the Engineering Resource Center.
The transportation hall of Honor recognizes people who have made a lasting, valuable and unique contribution to the state’s air, highway or rail transportation. SDLTAP is one of the nation’s most successful programs to help build the professional capacity and capability of local road and street departments.

“I am surprised, honored and humbled by this recognition,” said Weiss. After 46 years of engineering experience, Weiss said he learned that building trust comes from being firm and decisive as well as considering the opinion of others. He is only the second faculty member at SDSU to hold the South Dakota Transportation Hall of Honor distinction.

We are excited the school year has finally begun, and we’re ready to provide you with critical and dependable news and entertainment.

When you open up the paper throughout this year, plan to read everything from game coverage to play reviews to political debates. Some topics to look forward to this semester include:

• An in-depth look at religion on campus

• Regular coverage of SDSU’s budget situation

• Up-to-date information about campus expansion

•    Feature writing on new SDSU faculty members

•    A look at the health of SDSU students

As the prominent news provider for the university, we commit to keeping you informed about decisions authorities make and how those decisions will affect students.

This is not an easy time for SDSU. We are making up for a $3.825 million budget cut announced last spring that’s impacting the university today.

Through these tough times, though, we commit to keeping you in-the-know. We will provide you news and entertainment with our weekly print product, as well as exclusive online coverage, video and – for the first time ever – podcasts.

Thanks for reading, watching and listening.

For their annual training, 108 soldiers in the 424th Engineer Company of Rutland, Vt. are helping out the SDSU campus by building the Ranger Challenge course for the ROTC program. Soldiers from four states, including New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts, are at the university working on the project.

The new obstacle course is expected to be around 1,500 feet in length and about 200 feet wide. The course is going to be ecologically friendly by not moving any of the trees or natural surroundings for the 11 obstacles being built within the course. Much of the course will include height obstacles to help the cadets prepare to jump out of airplanes. The cost to build the obstacle course is coming from the annual reserve training budget. Gene and JoAnn Goodale provided resources for the project. Gene Goodale being retired military, donated all of the equipment for the Reserve to use.

“One of the biggest obstacles is overcoming adverse weather conditions,” 1st Lt. Matthew Huff said.

Rain and wind added an extra challenge to the project.

This course will help train the cadets of the SDSU ROTC program for military service, such as officer training or the Army Airborne School. “It will enhance the confidence of our future leaders,” said Lt. Col. Kory Knight of SDSU’s ROTC program.

Not only will the cadets of ROTC get training, but also the Reserve. With this annual training the soldiers learn a variety of skills.

“It’s good experience for them to work as a team,” Knight said.

After eight days of working on the course, the National Reserve team traveled to Rapid City, S.D., to train with that area’s National Guard team in extended combat training exercises.