J.R. Whittemore, the university’s first student body president and first varsity football captain, hatched the inaugural Stanford yell in 1891. It went: “Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah! Rah! Rah! Stanford! Stanford! Stanford!”
Automobiles were permitted to enter campus via Palm Drive for the first time in 1914.
The Fast Male, believed to be the first all-college motion picture production, was presented on campus on January 9, 1929. Stanford students wrote, directed, filmed and produced the film, in which a freshman undergoes a metamorphosis under the arches of the Quad to become one of the fastest men alive.
As tradition had it in 1936, the first girl to swim in Lake Lag each season would get married within the year.
A group of climbers made the first descent of Hoover Tower by rappel in 1949, taping 4-foot black paper “footprints” to its exterior along the way.
Students enjoyed their first beer kegs at Lagunita Court in 1966, at the ASSU-sponsored summer quarter Lagunita Beer Bust. According to the Daily, attendees emptied seven half-kegs.
As part of a band stunt during the 1975 Big Game, Chris Hutson, ’76, MS ’77, played Stanford’s first “tree queen,”the predecessor of our modern stand-in mascot.
Stanford’s first coed a cappella group, Mixed Company, formed in 1985. The oldest single-sex group, the Mendicants, started in 1963.
In 2003, Irene Guerra became the first EPATT participant to be admitted to Stanford. Guerra had been enrolled in the East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring program since fourth grade.
Also that year, Ricker Dining became the first peanut-sensitive university cafeteria in the nation.
