It was a balmy spring evening, and the boys in Encina were feeling frisky when someone came around asking if we wanted to go on a panty raid at Roble. By the time we reached the women’s dorm, our gang was a couple hundred strong.
The freshman girls egged us on by dangling their unmentionables out the windows. One hospitable resident opened a first-floor window and invited the men to enter. About a dozen of us clambered in. “This is the most exciting night of my life,” a delighted young woman was heard to declare.
For the men, however, the pleasure began to dissipate. Not knowing what the heck to do in there, we walked up and down the halls for a while, then climbed back out and returned to our dorm.
It was an amusing way to kill an evening, I guess. More memorable, though, was the identity of the enterprising youth who planned and led the foray. At the time, no one guessed that this member of the Class of ’48 would rise to chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
—Charles Wagner, ’50
