Forty-eight years after an audacious theft of the Big Game Axe from the Cal campus, two former Stanford medical students have finally identified the culprits. It was them.
Dana Newton and Lee Adams revealed their complicity in May at the 45th reunion for the Medical School Class of ’56, offering all of the pulpy details. After casing the Cal student union during finals week in June 1953, Newton, ’53, MD ’56, and Adams, ’53, MD ’56, broke in one night through a window, sawed through a lock and removed the Axe from its mounting plaque. To demonstrate that they weren’t common vandals, recalls Newton, they left behind a $20 bill to pay for damages.
The theft prompted breathless speculation, indignant Berkeley recriminations and front-page coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Daily Californian. Cal administrators at one point claimed to have fingered a suspect. The Stanford Daily reported that the Axe was hidden at the Fire Truck House. The truth was somewhat less intriguing—it was in Newton’s underwear drawer.
Five months later, Newton and Adams sneaked the Axe, along with a note, into the car of Stanford team captain Norm Manoogian, ’53, MA ’57, on the day of Big Game. “The whereabouts of the Axe over these months will probably never be known because of the remaining risk to ourselves,” the pair wrote. “The success of the whole caper centered in the absolute silence of all parties.”
Manoogian gave the Axe to the Stanford Athletic Department, which returned it to the Cal student body president during the game. The worst part of the whole episode, recalls Manoogian: “Cal won.”
