Dealing and stealing dorm relics

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Dealing and stealing dorm relics
Residents of Galloway dormitory | The Collegian

In the second week of her freshman year, Isabella Zink found herself taking a man down in a flying tackle. The reason? He was running away from McIntyre Residence with a homecoming banner.

“It wasn’t even ours,” Zink, now a sophomore and residence assistant at McIntyre said. “I just didn’t want to give it back.” 

This was Zink’s welcome to the wild world of dorm relics

Ryan Perkins, senior and head RA of Niedfeldt residence, defined a dorm relic as any object encapsulating a dorm’s identity. 

A relic “is any object that the dorm has collective possession of, that the guys see as theirs,” Perkins said.

“It’s gotta be something cool,” senior and head Galloway RA, Seth Ramm, added. “It can’t be something forced, like, ‘this is going to be a relic.’ No, it’s got to be more like, ‘this was something that got passed down to me, and then I’ll give it to you.’”

In Zink’s case, the banner belonged to Niedfeldt and was given to McIntyre after being stolen by another dorm. The men of Niedfeldt offered “five freshmen husbands and a bag of chips’’ to the women of McIntyre as ransom for the flag, but they turned down the offer because it “was not the way to get into a woman’s heart.” Niedfeldt then called on the aid of a few women from Paul House to infiltrate McIntyre and escape with the flag.

Zink and some of her friends returned to McIntyre just in time to hear someone shout, “She’s got the banner!” The Paul House heist was succeeding. They raced outside through the back door to intercept the runner. In the ensuing confusion, the banner changed hands several times before finally making it back to Niedfeldt.

One recently-failed attempt to enshrine a new relic—a taxidermied goat head named Baahb—is fresh in Ramm’s memory. According to Ramm, Baahb “smelled like cigarettes and looked awfully Satanic” and “wasn’t worth the effort” to be made a relic.

Flags, whether official flags or old banners made for homecoming festivities, are the target of good-natured theft by others. Their locations are often kept secret. 

“Having relics to pass down gives current and future residents a sense of continuity,” senior Rachel Kookogey, head RA of Paul House, said. “Different people will come through the dorm, but it gives you a sense that the time you’ve invested and the community you’ve established there can be continued with the next group of students and RAs. It’s easier to do that when you have concrete things to pass down.”

Some relics, like the boar head in the Niedfeldt lobby or the murals that existed in the Galloway stairwells until the dorm’s 2018 renovation, are immediately recognizable as part of a dorm’s aesthetic.

Other relics are more subtle, like a certain piece of wall décor in Paul House. At first glance, it looks like the copy of the Hillsdale honor code that hangs in every dorm. Upon further inspection, however, the text of the “honor code” has been replaced with “The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise” from “Star Wars.” Its origin is unknown.

Galloway and Whitley residences both collect the autographs of every head RA. 

“The earliest signature and date on there is 1996,” Ramm says. “And then there’s also a couple of names that are worn away that I think are a little bit older.”

Galloway has another kind of relic in common with Niedfeldt: a robe passed down over the years from one RA to another. Galloway reserves theirs for the head RA, who wears it on special occasions, but any RA in Niedfeldt may be designated as the owner of the robe.

“They have to wear it while on duty as a sign of authority,” Perkins said.

Zink said it was hearing the stories about relic fights and being swept up in one herself so early during her freshman year that inspired her to promote a culture of dorm relics when she became an RA at McIntyre, which previously had none.

“I remember last year as a freshman being a little bit jealous that the guys’ dorms had relics that they just would prize for ridiculous reasons,” she said.

When she and her fellow RAs were putting away Christmas decorations, they discovered a small blue octopus made out of yarn. It now hangs proudly behind the RA desk in the front lobby. Along with two banners, it forms the nucleus of a new collection of relics. The decades-old tradition of keeping and stealing relics will live on.