FEATURE
Nowadays, FAU might hold university-approved “streaking” events on campus — for charity, and only if you keep at least a bathing suit on. They did so during Volunteer Week in April 2008.
But in the ’70s, FAU students ran around campus completely naked, for no cause but their own. Some even biked in the buff. And the police didn’t care.
It was 1974 when pantslessness became a pastime in Boca, and “streaking” had only just acquired its modern meaning — according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded usage was in a December 1973 Time article that called it “a growing Los Angeles-area fad,” one that quickly spread across the country.
When that fad reached FAU a few months later — after becoming popular at FSU, UF and USF — The Atlantic Sun published a special edition called the “Sun Streaker.” The cover featured a large photo of five blurry FAU butts giving new meaning to “the Breezeway.”
Inside, along with more photos and some editorials — and even some advertising, strangely enough, for streaking T-shirts — editor-in-chief Barbara Rice narrated an evening where “300 people gathered to watch over a dozen unmasked men and several women dash through the residence areas and breezeways for over three hours.”
What led to such an event? The Sun offered various explanations, including “the almost full moon,” pre-exam anxiety, an article from the Palm Beach Post about streaking, and hand-made posters put up around campus that day asking men to “show that they have balls.”
Probably never before, and almost certainly never since, has the FAU student body mobilized so quickly to adopt and act upon an idea.
One male streaker, who on a $100 dare paraded through all five floors of Dorm 21 — originally a girls’ dorm, later known as Timucua Hall, and now the site of freshman dorm Glades Park Towers — said he “did it for the money and because I was drunk.”
Other men joined suit — birthday suit, I guess — and then, “not to be outshown [sic], three spirited females bounced their way across campus at 1 a.m.”
By this point, campus police had been notified and arrived on the scene, but according to The Sun, they were just there for the free show: “‘I’m just sitting here enjoying it,’ stated one security policeman parked in a campus patrol car.”
Students later streaked past the police department — then located in the Breezeway — and shot off fireworks in celebration.
The following day’s streaking was covered in the next issue of The Sun, and apparently drew a crowd twice as large with as many as 40 streaking students.
Also in that issue of The Sun was a column from Student Body President Chip Fuller, who said “streaking is fine unless it hurts someone or impinges on another person’s rights,” but worried about offending the community and possibly losing scholarships or funding for the university.
“My personal feeling is that anyone who has an irrestible [sic] urge to ride a bicycle through the campus twice in broad daylight in the nude must have a screw loose. I believe in the beauty of the human body, but let’s not make a circus out of it,” said Fuller.
His comments are now ironic, given that his photo, framed on the wall of Student Government presidents in the Student Union, depicts him without a shirt. While every other guy on the wall is wearing a tie, Fuller wears sunglasses and flaunts his hairy chest.
