Since 1921, Caltech seniors have partaken in the tradition of Ditch Day. Abandoning classes and homework, they vanish, virtually without warning, from campus. The date of Ditch Day is a closely kept secret.
Furniture is glued to ceilings, moved into courtyards, suspended from trees.
The seniors, hoping to frustrate such 'modifications', began, in the 1930s, to fortify their rooms, stacking cement blocks or other heavy items in the doorways of their rooms before leaving campus. Available at the Caltech Bookstore. Fundamentals of Room Stacking Nothing can give the collegiate home handyman quite the thrill that he gets when he returns to his room at four o'clock in the morning after a formal, only to find that his room is no longer there. Many years of such friendly interchanges at Caltech have resulted in a great accumulation of ingenious ideas and a great number of skillful executors. A few of the fundamental principles will be very useful to the reader, and we include along with the basics a few new and untried possibilities which so far we have been too chicken to try ourselves for fear of mass retaliation I. Stacking Proper Room stacking in the narrow sense involves a rearrangement of the contents of the room so as to make entry impossible.