Just Another One of Those Perfectly Meaningless Little Things That, Nonetheless, As They Accumulated, I Must Say Eventually Just About Drove Me Crazy While at BYU

Are there any tatoos on BYU’s basketball players? No, of course there aren’t any tatoos on BYU’s basketball players.

11 comments for “Just Another One of Those Perfectly Meaningless Little Things That, Nonetheless, As They Accumulated, I Must Say Eventually Just About Drove Me Crazy While at BYU

  1. Russell, to which irritating thing are you responding? To the rumor that BYU removed the tattoos from the pictures of its basketball team (which turns out to be false) or to the rumor that the pictures in question were taken before the person in question acquired more tatoos (which turned out to be true)? There is plenty to get irritated about and it can sometimes drive a person at least to distraction, if not to madness, but I’m not sure that this is one of them.

  2. According to the Trib article cited by Russell, the BYU publishing unit admits they removed tattoos from Araujo’s photos.

    Araujo got another tattoo over the summer, but the story brings up his newest tattoo to show how BYU reacts to students who get tattoos while at BYU (as opposed to those who enroll with them).

  3. Hmm. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Yesterday the newspaper report was different. The Universe said that the photos were from an earlier shoot and that they didn’t remove any tatoos, though they used to do so. Given the choice between believing the Universe and believing the Trib, I’ll opt for the Trib.

  4. Shades of Maeser’s beard! What can I say? I read the Trib article and responded to it. If it’s false (and heaven knows the Trib is often wrong), my apologies for associating the good people at BYU publishing with a flashback to my overwrought youthful hangups.

  5. Speaking of Maeser’s beard, have you ever noticed how his profile is very much like the profile of Lenin? I think it has more to do with the style of the late 19-th and early 20-th century, but the resemblance is striking.

  6. Back in 1987 (my freshman year), I was on the Honors Student Council, and we regularly met over at the Maeser Building. We threw a party one evening, and put out flyers advertising it. We said the party would be held “in building with the statue of Lenin out front.” Everyone knew what we meant.

  7. That’s hilarious, Russell. And I know exactly what you mean about BYU in general, as expressed by your title. There are just so many little things. Lots of people aren’t bothered by them, but others (well, maybe I should just say “I”) don’t know whether BYU is a bunch of pharisees, or if it’s just a great and spacious building, or maybe a great and spacious building filled with pharisees (if that’s possible).

    Good for those who aren’t bothered by them. They usually have a great experience there. I’m just not one of them.

  8. One of my treasured memories from my Freshmen year at BYU was waking up early one October morning to put a pumkin on Brother Maeser’s head. As we were doing so, one of those silly golf carts that they give on campus tours in rolled up. It was being driven by a very severe looking man who was giving a tour to what was obviously a family with a prospective student (boy about 17). The guy driving the cart looked horrified.

    “What are you doing!?” He demanded.

    “We are putting a pumkin on Karl Maeser’s head,” we responded. The man looked like he was about to explode. “We don’t think that Dean Cox will mind,” we said. (Paul Cox was Dean of Honors at the time.)

    The man didn’t know what to say. He sputtered for a minute, threw us a really nasty look, and drove away. The prospective student, however, was grinning. I assume that he was thinking, “Putting pumkins on the heads of statues: cool!”

    We were just doing our small bit for BYU recruiting.

  9. I must confess that half of what I liked about BYU were these sorts of debates. If there were a picture of Brigham Young, Maeser or anyone else without a beard there was an upcry at “revisionism.” If there wasn’t then it was a cry of “hypocrisy.” My favorite moment some of you might recall was when the course catalog left out Timp in a north looking view of campus. The same conspiracies and cries arose, especially in the Student Review.

    We actually had it nearly setup to take over the PA on top of the physics building where they played the National Anthem. We were going to replace it with the Beatles twist and shout. Unfortunately someone squealed and the wiring was incased in pipe the week we were about to do it. The dean at the time told us that it was a good thing as they actually expelled one grad student who chloroformed a cat and put it in organ in the bell tower. (Random music at 3:00 in the morning when the cat awoke)

  10. The cat story was hoary when I was a freshman in 1965. I suspect that it is an LDS urban legend. Too bad you weren’t successful. It would have been nice to have had some real event with which to replace the legend.

  11. Dr. Evanson, who was dean, said he was there when it happened. Of course I suspect he was the one who had the pipes put on the wires, so perhaps he was trying to keep us from doing it. His office, for a while, was beside the senior study room. (Basically a classroom set aside just for doing homework — a great place although they got rid of it when they renovated and the department lost a lot of its charm and intimacy) I suspect he may have heard about the plans through the wall. As a funny aside we took one of those kids books with the buttons you press for sound effects. Amped it up and put a sound detector on it and then attached it to a mannequin. We then put it in the trees on the steps going down the hill. When someone walked under it, the mannequin would scream. Unfortunately the grounds crew found it and confiscated it fairly early into Halloween eve. But we managed to get it back and put it on the wall near the Dean’s wall. He moved his office shortly thereafter. (grin) He was a great guy, btw. He even invited us over to his home to discuss physics and so forth.

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