When Gregg Hopkins and Bill Whiting, both ’62, “borrowed” an unidentified bust from atop a card catalog cabinet in the Main Library (now the Bing Wing) in 1961 and displayed it at the Sigma Chi house, it should have been a scandal. Or at least noticed. But upon graduation, nobody had come looking for the bronze head, so Hopkins kept the heavy statue with him, mostly in his garden . . . for 40 years. At their 40th class reunion in 2002, the fraternity brothers confessed their sins and returned the statue—by then identified as English professor Ewald Flügel—to the Farm. The incident was taken with good humor by classmates and the University. Hopkins, a patron of the arts and recent Flügel supporter (he contributed $15,000 to Stanford to preserve the scholar’s work and additional money to restore the statue), died of cancer December 19. Read his obituary.
Courtesy Stanford Alumni Association
