Now that the lakes have finally frozen over, longtime Madison residents may gaze (if their eyes don’t tear up too badly) over the bleak landscape of Lake Mendota and reminisce about that fateful February 28 years ago when the Statue of Liberty came to town.
Of course it wasn’t the real statue (which is still firmly planted in Upper New York Bay) but an elaborate prank that came at a time when the city was still feeling the effects of anti-war riots and a fatal bombing nearly a decade earlier.
Leading the march toward levity – literally – was a scruffy UW-Madison student named Leon Varjian. The New Jersey native organized boom- box parades and toga parties on State Street and was one of the architects of the Statue of Liberty ruse, which has been named one of the top college pranks of all time.
Varjian, who already held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from other universities in mathematics, came to the city in the fall of 1977 with the goal of studying in “the graduate school of fun.”