It’s easy to be swept up in the Duke-North Carolina rivalry when attending the schools, especially in the week leading up to a head-to-head matchup.
Those emotions were seemingly just as strong in the 1940s as they are today, which resulted in a few pranks between the two schools before football games.
Before the 1942 game Nov. 14 of that year, Duke students pulled a prank by stealing the Tar Heel mascot. That mascot, named Rameses, was and still is a sheep, so it was not an easy task.
The students brought the mascot to a "hideout" and planned to return it before the game. Except they lost the ram.
They were all engineers and organized an event to plan how to return the ram, and while everyone was meeting in the same spot, no one was watching the ram, which was stolen by someone else.
To make matters worse for them, it turned out they stole the wrong ram. North Carolina had multiple rams, and the students stole an "experimental ram of the UNC medical school."
That didn’t stop North Carolina from retaliating, with Tar Heel students painting the Washington Duke statue on West campus baby blue a few years later.
The pranks led to the tradition of the Victory Bell in an attempt to make the rivalry more diplomatic. As is still the tradition today, the winner of the Duke-North Carolina football contest gets to keep the bell.
That backfired, too. Students started stealing the Victory Bell, like in 1951 and 1952, when North Carolina students stole it after Duke wins.
And even before the “ramnappers” came around, the schools had messed with each others’ bonfires in pep rallies before the game. Those pep rallies included, among other things, “a snake dance,” according to The Chronicle from Nov. 13, 1942.
Many more questions than answers remain from the early days of this rivalry.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.