Some members of the BHS Class of 85 pose under the bulldog in the gym during 30th reunion in 2015 . Photo courtesy of Milo Smith.

It’s time for the story to be told. Forty years ago this month, the greatest prank in Bowman history (and perhaps in the entire state) was pulled off by the Bowman High School Class of 1985. Of course, as a member of that class, I may be biased.

On February 26, 1985, as the clock wound down on the Dis­trict 32 Boys Basketball Tour­nament championship game, a 57-48 victory for Hettinger over Mott, the large bulldog statue mounted in the south­east corner of the Bowman High School gym began re­lieving itself on the Hettinger Black Devils’ fans.

The prank has rarely been spoken of outside of our class reunions, although I’m sure there are some in the com­munity who’ve heard the story told in local watering holes or around a campfire at Haley Dam.

I talked with two of the pranksters to write this story. I am not, however, going to name them or any of their ac­complices in the telling of this tale. For one, there were some laws broken in the carrying out of the prank and some of the pranksters are now up­standing citizens of the Bow­man community with kids and grandkids they may not want to know of their long-ago skullduggery.

The Prank

Up front, I should admit that memories are fuzzy on some of the details. My two sources remember key points differ­ently, not surprising after forty years. But even by our ten-year reunion, memories were sketchy. In fact, no one could remember exactly who had come up with the idea.

Rich Haptonstall, now a pro­fessor of theatre at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Mont., swore that it was Wade Burke who con­ceived the plan. Burke, an ac­countant in Fargo, did not re­member it being his idea. No one, even just ten years after the fact, could remember for sure.

At one time, I believed it was my idea, tossed out at what our Chemistry teacher and football coach Ron Brentrup called “a meeting of the minds.” Then, I remembered that we had used my idea for our Homecoming float that fall—seniors bob­bing up and down in a huge mug that looked like it was full of root beer, a literal “senior float”—so I’ve dismissed the possibility that the prank was my idea as I obviously lacked the creativity for such a grand scheme.

I was, however, at a “meet­ing of the minds” where we brainstormed on how to make the prank happen. Often in these situations, an idea would die out after some fun banter but in this case, despite the dif­ficulty of the endeavor, plau­sible action items formed on how to make the bulldog take a pee. And the perfect opportu­nity was just a few weeks away, the District 32 Boys Basketball Tournament.

Pulling the prank at one of regular home basketball fans would likely catch some Bow­man fans in the spray, but at districts a visiting team’s fans would be assigned to that sec­tion of the gym.

At this point, my involve­ment ended until the night of the prank. I and other basket­ball players did not participate in the execution of the plan as it was conducted late at night in the days leading up to the tournament. We needed our rest, but the crew that carried out the prank went all in.

For starters, they required more than a hundred feet of clear plastic tubing. They bought out a local hardware store in Bowman, but after re­alizing they still did not have enough, a second length of tubing was purchased, ironi­cally, at a farm supply store in Hettinger.

Then, they needed access to the gym. An underclassman— for reasons we never quite fig­ured out—had obtained a key to the school and let the prank­sters use it.

After midnight on mul­tiple evenings, a small group of pranksters snuck into the gym and meticulously began securing the tubing under the east side bleachers. When they reached the south wall, they used a ladder to run the tubing up to the bottom of the large bulldog statue that had been perched on its pedestal since the gym was constructed in the mid-1970s.

In a genius move, they then covered the tubing that was exposed on its route up the south wall with tape that they painted over with a color that matched the wall. It was nearly undetectable, but that didn’t stop us from worrying that it would be spotted before the plan could be put in motion.

Also a detection concern was the opposite end of the hose which was hidden at the north end of the bleachers where it could be unwound and con­nected to a spigot in the alley outside a seldom-used door near the cafeteria.

To our surprise, despite be­ing installed the week before the tournament, the hosing went undetected.

On the night of the cham­pionship game, it appeared a roadblock would stop the prank from being carried out. A tournament volunteer had been stationed near the northeast corner of the gym to make sure that non-paying fans didn’t sneak in that door. Thankfully, that person moved away from the door toward the end of the game. Also fortu­itous, they never noticed the coil of clear plastic tubing that had detached from its hiding place and was laying on the floor near the door.

As the game ended, a flurry of activity commenced as a garden hose was screwed onto the end of the tubing and the hose was pulled out the alley door of the school and con­nected to a faucet there.

Just as a small group was gathering around ready for the final buzzer to signal them to turn on the water, Bowman Lutheran Church Pastor Rich­ard Kraiger and his wife, Nao­mi, rounded the corner of the gym and started walking down the alley towards them.

Despite what had to be the unusual appearance of several young men standing around in the alley next to a garden hose running through a dark doorway, Pastor Kraiger just offered a “Good evening, gen­tleman” and continued on his way home. Another crisis averted.

At the final buzzer, a vice grips was used to turn on the water. It took what felt like several minutes for the water to squirt out from the opposite end of the hose where it had been taped in the anatomical­ly correct spot on the Bulldog statue.

From my view from the northeast corner of the gym (myself and my senior bas­ketball teammates had posi­tioned ourselves to keep peo­ple from going out the door there), I witnessed a spray of water gush from the bulldog onto the unsuspecting Het­tinger fans, who had stepped out onto the floor to celebrate their victory. As realization dawned on them where the water was coming from, there was a mad dash to get away from the source.

Now, we could have turned on the water and ran for it, but word quickly made its way outside that the prank had worked, but that it had created a potentially dangerous situa­tion as fans ran from the wa­ter. So, the water was turned off, and the spray stopped per­haps 15 seconds after starting.

I asked one of the main culprits this month what he remembers feeling at the mo­ment the prank worked. “It was funny. Just funny,” he said.

School administrators, how­ever, were not laughing.

Come Monday morning, an announcement was made to the entire school calling a number of senior boys to the principal’s office. Surprising­ly, the dragnet captured most of the main collaborators. We never figured out who ratted them out.

Fearing detention or even suspension, Principal Glen Moser instead gave them a stern lecture about the dan­gers of what could have oc­curred during the prank. He asked them to write a letter of apology to the Hettinger com­munity. That was it; there was no other punishment.

“I got the feeling he thought it was funny, but he couldn’t say so,” one of my interview subjects told me of Principal Moser.

So that’s the whole story of the great bulldog peeing prank, as best as can be remembered forty years later. This summer, when the Class of ’85 gathers to celebrate our close bond of forty years, I’m sure stories will be told that contradict the words I’ve written here. But that’s the beauty of high school memories; they endure even if we don’t recall them perfectly.

Milo Smith has been the Se­nior Director of Public Rela­tions at the University of North Dakota Alumni Association & Foundation since 2010. Prior to that, he was a television news journalist at stations in Washington state and in North Dakota. His family moved to Bowman in 1976, and he was the senior class president of the BHS Class of 1985.