u/davidtoc — reddlx

I discovered yesterday that many Penn students had never heard of the period in Hey Day's history when it became a huge "food fight" for several years, so I figured I would sit down and go through my old photos and write my memories of the event.

I'm not sure exactly what year it began. A column in the DP says it dates back to 2004, but it had definitely started earlier, because I have photos from 2002 and 2003 of students in red shirts covered in white goo. I don't remember it happening at all in the mid 1990s, so I'm guessing it was around 2001 or 2002.

From what I remember, in the very beginning, it was just shaving cream, but in the next few years it turned into a one-sided food fight with other students (especially seniors) bombarding the red-shirted juniors with every gooey, icky food you can imagine. Pancake syrup, eggs, ketchup, mustard, Hershey's syrup, bags of flour, they brought squirt guns (filled with what, i don't know), whipped cream, margarine, shaving cream, lemon juice, soda, salad dressing, BBQ sauce, jello, mayonnaise, fruit juice, sour cream, marshmallow creme, vegetable oil, powdered pancake mix, shampoo--and these are just the things I'm sure of because I have photos of them. Juniors were absolutely covered and soaked with various liquids. By the end of the event each year, Locust walk was caked in muck and the trash generated by empty condiment containers. And it got more intense every year.

In 2006, the Junior class board urged the seniors to behave safely and not put the Hey Day in jeopardy. (https://www.thedp.com/article/2006/04/andrew_kaplan_and_tammy_bockow_future_of_hey_day_rests_on_seniors) The photos I have from that year indicate that seniors did not heed that warning.

The event was getting too wild. There was a rumor that someone was seriously injured during the food fighting in 2006, and at the very least the administration was ( justifiably!) concerned with the escalation of the event over time, and the University threatened to permanently end the Hey Day tradition. (there was some precedent for such concerns. Previous Penn Traditions had ended in tragedy. The popular Bowl Fight tradition, for example, ended in 1916 after the death of a student and serious injury of several others that year. (https://archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/penn-history/traditions/bowl-fight/demise/) Hey Day itself had been a problem back in 1990 when students poured beer over President Hackney and dropped him while carrying him on their shoulders, which also threatened the future of the celebration.

In the fall of 2006, an article in the DP stated, "Last year, officials threatened to significantly alter Hey Day if behavior did not improve. Nevertheless, mustard and ketchup rained down on Locust Walk last April - and the tradition is now in jeopardy." (https://www.thedp.com/article/2006/09/the_word_on_hey_days_future_nothing)

In 2007, Students were asked to sign a pledge of safe behavior before they could get their Hey Day shirts, hats, and canes. Signs were hung around campus encouraging students to "Protect the Tradition" "Keep it clean, keep it dry." "Keep it alive" and "Save Hey Day. You know why." The food fight did continue over the next few years despite the pledge, but nowhere near what it had been in the years preceding. 2007 was definitely a turning point. (Funnily enough, the Hey Day shirt logo that year was a ketchup bottle label that said "Hey Day" instead of "Heinz", a nod to the fact that condiments had played such a big role in the event in recent years)

The "Final Toast" event for seniors, started in 2009, seems to have been created specifically to separate the seniors from the juniors, keeping them behind a fence so they couldn't douse the juniors with food, and the Seniors attending the event had to sign a pledge that they would behave properly or they weren't allowed inside. The DP began an article that announced the event, "This Hey Day, the Class of 2009 will greet the current juniors not with condiments but with a raised glass." The presidents of the junior and senior classes stated "The Final Toast keeps alive the traditions of years past, a time when ketchup was only aimed at hot dogs and flour stayed in fraternity kitchens."

I have plenty of photos that show there was definitely still food fighting in 2009, and I have photos as late as 2012 that still show a student covered in ketchup, but to the best of my knowledge, the food fight aspect of Hey Day is now essentially gone (which is unequivocally a good thing, given that it had gotten out of hand). I thought I'd post some photos (the ones I've included here were taken taken between 2003-2007) for those of you who may not have known of this interesting period of this quintessential Penn tradition's history. (I waited until AFTER Hey Day this year, so as not to give anyone any ideas, but I do think the knowledge is worth preserving, and I'm not aware of anywhere else online that this info is recorded at this level of detail.)

The food fight was one of many aspects of Hey Day that changed over its 100 years (or so) of existence. There's lots more info about Hey Day at https://archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/penn-history/traditions/hey-day/