This month marks 100 years since Ohio State crowned Maudine Ormsby homecoming queen. Maudine was a prize Holstein. The ag students stuffed the ballot box, producing 12,000 votes from fewer than 10,000 students, still the most efficient thing anyone in Columbus has ever done.
Homecoming used to have standards, the kind that left a generation of college students with memories and, thankfully, no way to upload them. In 1978, Bob Hope was grand marshal because Woody Hayes made him do it, and he dotted the "i" in Script Ohio while he was at it.
In 1995, the late, great Richard Lewis led the parade, the only grand marshal who could find something to worry about in a convertible. In 1996, it was Olympian Butch Reynolds and CBS's Erin Moriarty.
Back then, homecoming was a four-day event. It started Thursday night with float building, when some civil engineering major with a minor in petty theft announced he'd motorized Brutus' head. By 3 a.m. it nodded. Occasionally on purpose.
Friday was the parade down High Street. The "borrowed" motor, powered by a Sears DieHard car battery, always died, ironically, somewhere between 15th and Chittenden. Then, without hesitation, three semi-sober sophomores crawled inside and became the moving parts.
Friday night meant live music at the Newport, or a TGIF party at a fraternity house, depending on how much of Thursday was still in your bloodstream.
Saturday began with the social chairman's version of a continental breakfast: Bernie's Bagels and a trash can full of purple punch known as Harry Buffalos. There was fruit floating in it, because breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Kickoff was 1:30 p.m. In those days, the schools set the schedule, not the networks. And Ohio State tried to schedule Northwestern for homecoming, because nothing says homecoming like beating a team full of future orthopedic surgeons and investment bankers 63-20.
The game ended by dinner, leaving Saturday night for what mattered. Assuming you had a date. To ask a girl to homecoming, you used this thing called a pay phone and actually spoke into it. You needed a quarter and every ounce of courage you had, and her roommate answered anyway.
If you survived that, you went to the university's homecoming dance, or to a fraternity semi-formal in a rented hall reached by rented school bus, where a cover band played Blondie and Third Eye Blind, closed with "Don't Stop Believin'" and, in every decade, "Hang On Sloopy." A disheveled-looking gentleman named Warren walked around taking pictures, which he later sold for $5 apiece.
The landmarks are mostly gone. Long's Bookstore. The Char Bar. Papa Joe's and Crazy Mama's, where your Top-Siders stuck to the floor. Buckeye Donuts survives, bless its cream-filled heart. Bernie's does not. On its corner at 16th and High now sits a Target. A Target. On High Street.
This year it's a late-afternoon kickoff against Maryland, set by television, which means the homecoming dance starts sometime Tuesday.
The Peach Section Gang didn't have a cow queen back in the day. We had something better: no visual evidence. Except Warren's negatives.
Comments or letters to the editor? On this one, let's just keep it to ourselves.