Daily Bulletin

The Great Water Tower Caper

Vera Leavoy, then a staff member working in the office of the Waterloo College Associate Faculties on Albert Street, clearly remembers the morning of June 3, 1958. "Someone looked out the window and said, 'Look at the tower!' So we all rushed to the window to see. Then we all rushed to the taps to see if it was beer!"

The Record took another photograph of a young man holding up a hose and scratching his head in puzzlement, with the Lester Street water tower in the background. Painted in enormous but well-formed letters across the curve of the 500,000-gallon tank, 125 feet above the ground, was the word BEER.

Forty years later, the prank is still being recalled as one of the lighter moments in the history of the University of Waterloo. This is the true story, as Mike Matthews, BASc '63 (Mechanical), remembers it.

There were three of them: Mike from Toronto, Bill Stephen from Weston, and George Thompson -- known as Sandy because of his red hair -- from Hamilton. They'd started at Waterloo in October 1957 and by next June they were feeling frustrated.

The University of Waterloo did not yet exist, and would not until a year later. Waterloo College Associate Faculties, as UW was known then, had no reputation at all."When we went home," Mike says, "people would ask, 'What's this silly thing about you working in a factory every other semester?'" Many people had the idea that this new college was really just a glorified trade school. Mike, Bill, and Sandy took classes in a couple of tin-roofed temporary buildings in the Waterloo College parking lot at Albert and Dearborn (now University). Small wonder they felt the need to draw some attention to their unknown college.

They decided not to drink at all

But how? "We started batting around something we could do. I do not know how the idea of putting BEER on the water tower came up." All of them were living within a few blocks of the college, and the municipal water tower stood to the north-west, on Lester Street. Mike speculates that the daily sight of this landmark may have already planted the idea in someone's mind that: "Boy, it would be great to put beer in that thing." That evening, as glasses were raised, the idea surfaced.

The planning began. "We decided from the very beginning, this would be something that had to be fun, hopefully startling, but not injurious in any way to anybody, mentally or physically, and something that didn't damage property." Sensibly, they decided not to drink at all before climbing the tower. "We were stupid, but we weren't dumb."

Next day they gathered supplies: brushes, ropes, thinner, and a gallon of a new paint called Rustoleum in a dark red, the only colour available.

Bill Stephen volunteered for the most dangerous job, probably because he'd worked as a painter, Mike recalls. "We decided we were going to tie under his arms, and then kind of a jock-strap-type thing around his midsection. . . . I remember Bill expressing some interest as to whether I really knew what to do with the ropes, and we assured him that I did. I had spent the summer before working as a deck hand on one of the lake tankers."

At about 2:30 a.m. on June 3, they walked up Lester Street carrying their supplies, flashlights, and a kerosene lantern which "I think we purloined off a construction site." The town was dark and quiet. They scaled a fence around the tower and climbed the spiral stairs around the central support pillar.

At the top of the stairs they found a locked trap door opening down from the base of the tank. They broke the lock -- the only real damage they did, Mike says -- and climbed a ladder up a tube inside the tank. At the top of the tube they emerged onto a circular railed platform above the water. For a few eerie moments they stood watching the coal-black liquid gleaming in the moving lights.

Then came another climb up a straight ladder to the ceiling, where a trap door opened outward. They climbed out, but stayed close to the ladder. All around them, the huge curved surface of the tank "just sort of disappeared" downward.

Now to suit up Bill. "We got him tied up and tested all the knots, and out he went. Sandy had one rope which was around Bill's shoulders and I had the rope that was around his crotch . . . We had it tied to the ladder and we left some slack in it, so if he lost his footing, or if we lost him, he would be caught hanging in mid air. . . . Nothing would happen to him except for scaring him to death."

They practised letting him down a few times, getting the hang of manoeuvring him across the surface. It was tricky, because they couldn't actually see Bill once they had lowered him beyond the curve of the tank.

"He took his paint and his brush, and I don't think it took him more than 15 minutes. He had sneakers on, so he kind of walked on the surface of the tank, even when he was on the side. And he would say, 'Up on the shoulders . . . down on the crotch. . . . Down on the crotch, up on the shoulders. . . .' The ropes moved along, and he did a very neat, nice job considering it was the middle of the night, and he was hanging by ropes."

The job done, they climbed down again, closing trap doors behind them. "Then we just went home and hit the sack. I don't think any of us slept very well. I guess we planned to meet in the morning and look at it. And it was then that we realized -- 'My God, you can hardly see it, because it's up on the top curve there.'"

Officers giggled the whole time

When the airplane failed to appear, they came down again, only to find a crowd of spectators and several police cars waiting. The officers who arrested them "were giggling the whole time. Nobody took it seriously." However, the charge of public mischief was no laughing matter. Luckily, by the time Bill and Mike had their day in Waterloo Magistrates' Court, on June 18, public mischief had been changed to the less serious charge of trespass. (Sandy Thompson, who did not return to the water tower for the photo session, was not arrested, and his friends avoided mentioning his name. This gave rise to the belief that only two students were involved.)

During the trial, Mike offered as defense the suggestion that they had been trying to show the people of Waterloo how vulnerable their water supply was. It didn't wash. "The judge just looked at me like I was nuts and told me to be quiet."

Magistrate Kirkpatrick spoke severely to the two culprits. "You could have been injured or you could have fallen in the water and drowned," he said. "I'd hate to think of how Waterloo's water supply would be contaminated then. We'd mourn your loss, but we would also suffer the loss of our water supply."

Mike and Bill received suspended sentences and were told to keep the peace. They also had to pay the cost of repainting the BEER section of the tower: about $100. It was a lot of money in those days -- "Tuition might have been about $125."

What happened next is among Mike's warmest memories. As he recalls it, Vera Leavoy decided that when the students came to turn in their chemistry equipment to get their deposits back, she would ask them if they'd like to contribute to the Tower Fund. "I think the deposits were $3," Mike says. "And about everybody did."

It didn't end there. The Record photo of the young man with the hose (who was not one of the three culprits) appeared in newspapers across Canada, bringing the new college its first taste of national publicity. "People were calling from all over the country when they saw this picture come across the wires.... Waterloo College Associate Faculties was now on the map!"

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
| Yesterday's Bulletin
Copyright © 1999 University of Waterloo