Kaylee Liu
Features Editor
On Feb. 2, 2021, it was a biting 29 degrees Fahrenheit with winds blowing at 29 miles per hour at 6 p.m. Winding the clock back to the first of the month tells us that it had snowed throughout the night, fresh flakes piling up on the salted pavements into piles of powdery snow. The weather conditions were perfect for carrying out one of Wooster’s most hallowed traditions, filling the Arch.
Historical records tell us that the tradition of cramming as much snow as humanly possible into Kauke Hall’s arch — known officially as Delmar Archway — began more than half a century ago. The story, relayed to me by aging faculty, goes something like this: a long, long time ago, in a faraway age known as the “Swinging Sixties,” classes were all held in Kauke Hall. The students weren’t very fond of the idea of going to class in the middle of a biting Ohio winter. Logically, they realized that Kauke Hall had two main points of entry — the double wooden doors within the Arch. So a plan started to form. Perhaps if the doors were sealed by snow and the building impossible to penetrate, classes would be cancelled! After all, one can’t go to class without a classroom (this was before the age of Microsoft Teams). While the exact year the tradition started has been lost to time, it must have occurred between 1963 and 1967 since Delmar Archway was only completed in 1962, and there is a photograph of the Arch being filled in 1967. The new arch in its grandiosity was a natural point of interest for students, and I’d be willing to wager that the first snow-filling occurred by 1965. As the central architectural feature of the most revered building in the school, it’s just begging to be pranked. Apparently, not long after Kauke Hall’s rededication in ’62, a student drunkenly drove his Volkswagen through the Arch. The exhaust pipes of this hardy German car took out parallel divots in the steps of the Arch, and those divots were still there in 2003. I invite all readers of this article to check if those divots are still there today.
But back to Feb. 2. Despite the importance and universal awareness of the tradition amongst the student body, the filling of the Arch isn’t an annual event. It tends to just happen by itself, through sudden inspiration after a heavy snowfall, or the concerted efforts of a few determined pranksters who infect the student body with their enthusiasm. Erin Robichaud ’21 was acutely aware of this and decided to take charge of the Arch-filling instead of merely relying on chance. When I spoke with Robichaud — who seemed polite, soft-spoken and not particularly mischievous — she told me that she’d decided to organize the event in order to close her college chapter the way it began. She fondly recalled filling the Arch with hundreds of other students as a first-year, and wanted to have the experience one last time before she graduated in the spring. Filling a two-story stone arch in the middle of winter isn’t light work, and so Robichaud posted on the Wooster Memes Facebook page (otherwise known as “WooMemes for Independent Teens SCREAMING Together”) seeking like-minded students on the first of February. She got in contact with Andrew Seifert ’23, who had offered to set up a group chat to construct a proper plan for filling the Arch in the same Facebook page. Coincidentally, Seifert had arrived at the idea of filling the Arch the same time as Robichaud did, though for completely different reasons. As a lifelong resident of Northeast Ohio, Seifert was familiar with local weather conditions, and he knew that it only snowed enough to fill the Arch a few times a year. Knowing that he had to act quickly, he decided to reach out to other students to give the student body a chance to partake in one of the College’s unique traditions.
A few people responded to Seifert’s offer, and a ragtag team of Arch-fillers was put together by the end of the night. Initially, the team wanted to fill the Arch on Monday night while they were riding high on the excitement and adrenaline of everything coming together. There’s always an element of frantic impatience when you’re planning something really great. One always wants to get it done as soon as possible and to ride the high of success. On the other hand, Fiona Schieve ’23 pointed out that if they waited till Tuesday, they would benefit from overnight snowfall and would have the opportunity to do a little more advertising. As Seifert, her boyfriend, sweetly put it, “She’s pretty smart.” Other concerns for the team were primarily about social distancing. Filling the Arch requires not only teamwork, but sufficient numbers. Robichaud devised a plan that involved only allowing two pods of five people within the Arch at one time to avoid overcrowding. Different pods would rotate between tasks like gathering and transporting snow before finally piling it into the arch, ensuring that everyone had something to do while simultaneously keeping pods a safe distance away from each other.
On Tuesday, the campus woke up to a perfect blanket of white snow. Weather reports indicate that a generous helping of roughly five inches of snow had fallen the previous night. Arch-filling started in the evening around 6 p.m., substantially earlier than the traditional time (the earliest Arch-fillings were conducted frantically from midnight to morning with students attempting to cloak their capers in darkness). When students arrived at the Arch, they were surprised to find that the Arch doors had been boarded up to prevent snow from leaking into Kauke Hall and that blue recycling bins had been set out, presumably for carrying snow. Somehow, the administration had followed the plan to fill the Arch and had given the students their blessing in the form of blue bins. While there were initially only a few students who showed up to fill the Arch, there was a healthy crowd laughing and playing in the snow by eight. Filling the Arch ended up taking six and a half hours. This year’s snow bank was constructed rather steeply, which meant that getting snow up the side of the bank and onto the top was a challenge. Climbing up the snow bank was impossible, so students tried lobbing snowballs at the top of the bank and hoping they would stick. By the end of it, there was an assembly line of people passing snow up the bank in the Arch, with students structured in multiple rows trying to hold each other up. It was an equally brilliant and absurd team effort. As the clock ticked towards one in the morning, there were fewer and fewer stragglers helping — even the cameraman left — but the team managed to accomplish their goal. Looking at the photographs of the completed Arch, one can see clear footprints in the snow bank nested between jagged blocks of snow. The snow bank is disturbingly steep and oddly slanted, and certain cuts in the sides of the bank seem to indicate that a few people might have fallen during its construction. But the Arch is clearly filled, and that’s all that matters — even if it didn’t get classes cancelled. The last year Arch-filling successfully cancelled classes was in 2007, when a snowstorm that night demanded that all northeast colleges take a snow day. Students were spotted gleefully sledding across campus the next day.
Reflecting on her experience filling the Arch, Robichaud remarked that the best part of the experience was being able to rekindle the sense of community the campus has been deprived of for the past year. In her own words, “It was great to see everyone out of their rooms and having fun together in a COVID-safe manner. The pandemic has disrupted a lot in everyone’s lives, but it won’t shake our school’s time-honored traditions.” Seifert echoed a similar sentiment, but added the pointlessness of the tradition was what made it so much fun. Even though everyone knew that classes wouldn’t be cancelled regardless of how well the Arch was filled, being a part of such a silly and distinctly collegiate tradition (one can almost hear elderly derision about its senselessness) was what made it worthwhile. There’s a joy to being young and free enough to do things for no reason at all. To top it all off, he added that “there’s just something about all these students getting together and finding creative ways to continue a tradition that connects all current and former Wooster students. As they say, it’s independent minds working together.”
