Streaking, Streaking Everywhere

Clad only in surgical masks, two men dashed through a packed amphitheater where Harvard students were taking a first-year anatomy exam. Watching from his front porch, the president of Virginia's elegant Sweet Briar College gallantly applauded as 50 of his coeds sprinted by adorned only in their class years, lipsticked on in an approximate license-plate position. On busy U.S. Route 1, traffic was brought to a cheerful standstill by 533 University of Maryland students chain-dancing au naturel. With astonishing swiftness, streaking, the art of the point-to-point dash in the buff, has burgeoned into an unabashed, pandemic American fad.

No campus seemed immune to the epidermis epidemic. At the University of Missouri, 35 men dressed only in sneakers, socks and hats streaked through "Greek Town," the fraternity-housing area. Near by, 15 coeds responded by running naked outside their dormitory, and 25 other unclothed girls preened at the windows -- all to the tune of the Missouri fight song played by a trumpeter in the crowd of 1,500 gaping spectators. In Columbia, S.C., dozens of nude males and females ran and rode bi cycles round the University of South Carolina student center. In New York City, some 40 Columbia University males cavorted in the buff. Stopping at nearby Barnard College dormitories, the Columbia youths tried to drum up some female support but were joined by only one bare coed. They did better the next night out.

At Stanford University, a fraternity man entertaining a coed in his room responded to a knock at the door and was confronted by seven nude males, each carrying a golf bag. "May we play through?" asked one. In Knoxville, Term., vowing that they would not be "outstripped by any state," scores of University of Tennessee students raced nude down Cumberland Avenue, even taking to the roofs to sit atop a second-story billboard and astride an ornamental bull.

Free Beer. One creative exploit led to another in a can-you-topless-this spirit of competition. At the University of South Carolina, a streaker entered the campus library and asked to check out The Naked Ape. Responding to a Knoxville tavern owner's offer of a free supply of beer to the first coed who would pick it up in the nude, a shapely lass wearing only her makeup darted into the bar and with an armload of beer rushed out again to a waiting car. Two students staged a relay across a bridge in Portland, Me. At Princeton University, Charles Bell, a candidate for vice president of the class of'76, demonstrated his political flexibility by taking up streaking. His campaign slogan: VOTE THE STREAKER-- IF ELECTED, HE WILL RUN. At the University of Georgia and the University of Illinois, students carried streaking to new heights by jumping from planes wearing only parachutes.

Adult reaction to the unclad fad has generally been mild and good humored. "We'd like to leave it alone," said a Northwestern University official. "After all, it's springtime." At the University of Georgia, officials decided that the school's policy toward streaking would be "noninterference." In Maine, the Portland Press Herald chided streakers for wearing shoes during one of the mildest Maine winters on record. "We are not opposed to streaking provided it is correctly undertaken and executed with some grace," the paper editorialized. "If you streak, have the common decency to do it in your bare feet."

Others were less amused. Staid Yale placed on probation four students who streaked. In South Carolina, State Representative John Miles suggested that streakers be sentenced to 90 days in jail and expelled from public schools. "They ought to have respect for other people," he said. Streaker Mark Bruno, at Tennessee Tech University, was fined $50 and sentenced to five weekends in the city jail. Other streaking arrests occurred in Memphis, Knoxville, Orono, Me., and Athens, Ga. As streaking spread, inevitably there were tragedies.A motorcycle streaker in Oklahoma died in a collision; one on foot was killed trying to cross the Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike.

Ritually, psychologists were invoked to analyze the spring madness. "It's fundamentally a ploy to get attention," says Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University. "College students are irreverent toward social values. This is an attack on dominant social values." Arthur Yehle, a psychology professor at Memphis State University, has a simple explanation. "It's spring, the weather is warm, it's something to do." Another psychologist, Dorothy Hochreich of the University of Connecticut, calls streaking "a form of escapism that doesn't seem sexual in nature. Students are working harder in school, and this is letting off steam."

Students generally agree. "With the pressures of spring finals," said a University of Tennessee coed, "it's a good chance to do an impromptu belly dance or striptease. Once you're in the swing of things, you forget that you are nude."

Equal Time. As the phenomenon gathered velocity, so did the age and range of participants. Emulating their elders, high school and even junior high school students took to their heels in ever greater numbers. In Chicago, three boys with perfect timing streaked their high school as the student body rose for the morning national anthem. An adult male streaker whipped up and down the aisles of a Pan American jumbo jet en route from London to New York. Senior Citizen Virgil Cleves, 67, was arrested in Lima, Ohio, for a bare stroll in the public square with equally bare Wanda Gray, 46. He was asking equal time for "snailing," he said, since he was too old to streak. In London's House of Commons, the danger of this latest U.S. aberration's infecting other countries was excoriated, but the warning was too late. First a dozen Americans streaked the Eiffel Tower in Paris, then streakers blossomed in two places in West Germany, and a naked blonde girl dashed 50 yards through the quiet English resort of Bournemouth.

No end seems in sight. Student organizers at several universities were rounding up participants for an assault on the largest streaking record (see box). At Stanford University, preparations were being made for the longest streak, an 18-mile jaunt between Palo Alto and San Jose. At the University of Pennsylvania, students staged an undressed rehearsal for a fanciful "streak for impeachment" around the White House. Even President Nixon got into the spirit of things: when Reporter Sarah McClendon commented that his hair was graying at the temples, Nixon quipped, "They call that streaking."

It was all too much for members of the Seminole Health Club, a nudist colony in Davie, Fla. "We can't understand what the fuss is all about," said one. "Why don't they go nude all the time?" In protest, the members staged a "Gnikaerts" ("streaking" spelled backward) and raced round town fully clothed.

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