“No. I’m not going to help kidnap someone.”

Vicki Hicks, a first-year OU law student in 1979, remembers saying this before it all started. Her focus was her studies. So when a couple of classmates approached Hicks with an idea that sounded both idiotic and criminal, she turned it down flat.

 That was before she found her baby blue Monte Carlo plastered with engineering stickers.

“I was incensed.” 

Hicks was in.

The heist meant impersonating Norman Transcript reporters and luring an OU student wearing a crown and cape into a car for a bogus photo shoot. When she slid into the backseat, Hicks and her classmates sprang the trap.

“We said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve just been kidnapped.’ ” 

The victim was the OU Engineering Queen, and she would be late to the Engineering Week banquet this year—minus a cape and crown.

Welcome to the century-old rivalry between the OU colleges of engineering and law. 

Unlike Bedlam or the Red River Rivalry, this feud was fought with green spray paint, dyed-green possums and truckloads of fresh manure. Scores weren’t measured by points, but by gumption, laughs and broken windows. 

But it began with a cannon.

In 1912, the story goes, tipsy engineering students stole a Civil War–era cannon called “Old Trusty” from a Norman park, then brought it out on March 17 to honor their patron saint and reputed engineer St. Patrick. The blasts kept law students up all night. When windows were shattered in Monnet Hall, then home of the OU law school, a rivalry was born. 

After several years of skirmishes and seizures, OU President Stratton D. Brooks raided the engineering laboratory and found Old Trusty under the floor of the shop. He had the cannon dumped in the Canadian River. So the engineers built Old Trusty II. 

The rivalry still ran wild through the mid 1970s, when John Fagan arrived to campus after earning his Ph.D. at, of all places, the University of Texas. The future David Ross Boyd professor emeritus would go on to a 38-year career in OU’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering—and even create an electric car that would inspire the earliest Tesla prototype.

“I had never seen an intra-collegiate rivalry like this,” Fagan says. 

He expected to ease quietly into his new career. Instead, Fagan was plunged into a rivalry not of his own making.

He became faculty sponsor for the Engineers Club—and the once-anonymous, masked society of engineering students called the Loyal Knights of Old Trusty, or LKOT. Founded in 1917, LKOT sponsored most engineering student activities. They also guarded the cannon and fueled much of the rivalry’s mythology.

“Largely my job was to clean up after they got their tushes in a crack,” Fagan dryly notes. “And try to make sure nobody got hurt and OU property remained intact.”

Sometimes that meant quietly covering an engineering student's tracks on the fly, such as when he and his administrative assistant transported nearly 100 dyed-green mice (and a few equally green rats) that engineering students had set free in the law library. Fagan encountered them at the Norman animal shelter, where the rodent captures were being held pending investigation.

“We loaded all the mice in the back of my truck, which left police with no evidence that a crime had been perpetrated.”

Other times he could only wait it out, like when one “a bit crazy” engineering student flooded the law school’s water main with green food dye. 

“Every toilet and sink ran green for three days.” 

Today, an OU Law staffer who prefers not to be named keeps track of the official rivalry folders—“half newspaper articles and half police reports,” she notes. She says she’ll regularly be looking for something serious and instead bursts out laughing. 

“Like when the law students somehow got in the engineering building elevator and rigged it where it wouldn’t stop on the floor for the lounge,” she says. “Remember these are law students, not engineers.”

In retribution, 50 green parakeets found their way into the law school via an open window. A large truckload of manure appeared later, blocking entry to the building, Fagan says. 

Over the years, wins and losses seemed to balance out. A let-loose possum here, some laxative-spiked banquet punch there. Or engineering students dangling by rope to daringly paint the law school’s owl—representing Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom—a bright, St. Patrick green.

And, of course, multiple Engineering Queen kidnappings over the decades.

Kidnap co-conspirator Vicki Hicks has since become a veteran political strategist and now-retired USDA appointee in Washington, D.C. But she still remembers, with a flicker of pride, how the budding lawyers of the 1979 abduction built up a legal defense in real time. They even asked the queen if she was willing to participate. 

“She said yes,” Hicks says. “So one element of the crime of kidnapping was gone.”

They drove the queen to the home of Patience Latting, mayor of Oklahoma City from 1971 to 1983. Latting—herself once “kidnapped” in this rivalry—readily received them. Later, the queen was returned to the engineering banquet. The crown and cape were delivered to the home of then-OU President William S. Banowsky.

During yet another Engineering Week banquet, Fagan recalls getting a phone call.

“They knew I was the sponsor of the Loyal Knights,” he adds. “It was a simple prisoner exchange.” 

The engineering queen for the professor. 

Fagan was escorted to legendary Campus Corner diner The Town Tavern, where several “formidable looking” law students waited. He was not allowed to return to the banquet.

Though traditions like the Engineering Queen, LKOT and the firing of Old Trusty still thrive, he says student capers had thankfully mellowed by the 1990s as campus culture shifted and tolerance for pranks narrowed. 

“It got the blood flowing sometimes,” Fagan remembers of the rivalry. “But I’d go home at night thinking, ‘Well, we made it through another one—and I didn’t get fired.’ ” 

Robert Reid is a writer and video producer based in Oregon.

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