The Naked March Madness of 50 years ago, when UNC set a nude— if brief — record
Just after midnight, the Roman candles exploded, the pep band struck up a fanfare, and a crowd of 924 naked students went galloping across the UNC campus sporting plastic crowns, gorilla masks and birthday-suit pride.
The streaking craze had struck North Carolina, on this full-moon night in 1974, the Tar Heels broke the national record for public nudity, all while posing for pictures and waving American flags.
They dashed through the library. They circled the Old Well. One nude romper took to a tree, declaring, “It’s wild from here.”
And the next day, headlines screamed from newspapers around the nation, including this irresistible pun from the Charlotte Observer:
Carolina streakers grab honors as the cheekiest.
Other NC campuses bare all
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Chapel Hill’s brief reign as champions in the buff, and a review of this giddy chapter of collegiate history reveals a competition between campuses that rivaled March Madness.
For a few short weeks, nearly every campus statewide shed its clothes en masse and called the press to report their naked tallies:
▪ Western Carolina University struck first in February, assembling 140 streakers in 35-degree chill.
▪ UNC-Chapel Hill fired back a week later with a nude count somewhere between 150 and 200 streakers, all but one of them male.
▪ Wake Forest University notched 150 streakers, Elon College tallied another 100, then Duke University hit the big numbers with 300, 10 of them “coeds.”
▪ But poor NC State University, though tops in men’s basketball, flopped as nude sprinters, losing to UNC’s second streak of nearly 1,000.
“It’s disappointing to me that this campus can get up to 14,000 rowdy fans for a Carolina game and can’t get up to 100 people for something as important as this,” wrote campus sports editor Jim Pomeranz in a lament printed statewide.
NC legislator seeks to ban streaking
Not surprisingly, the no-clothes fad drew backlash.
At least one state legislator proposed a ban.
Then-SC Sen. Ralph Gasque used streaking as ammunition in his argument to keep Winthrop College all-female.
“We should preserve a place where girls or ladies should go to keep away from a bunch of barbarians,” he said at the time.
And even a few Tar Heel students urged a return to prudence.
“Those who approve and support degeneracy are as pitiable as those who engage in it,” wrote Wright Doyle in a letter to The Daily Tar Heel. “Those who imagine that filth is funny are at the twittering teen-age stage and are hopelessly anachronistic in our ‘liberated’ generation.”
But the vast majority just chuckled, shrugging off the threat of nakedness in true ‘70s mellowness.
A campus psychology professor called streaking “a release mechanism for frustration generated by such problems as the Watergate crisis.” The dean of students praised the fad as “a big display of campus spirit.” And the director of campus security declared, “We’d be damn fools to start grabbing individuals out of a crowd of streakers.”
A record gone in a flash
Even Dr. Mildred T. Keene, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, called streaking “good clean fun reminiscent of swallowing goldfish and panty raids.”
But glory in mass nudity fades as quickly as it flashes across a campus quad.
One day after UNC set the mark, the University of Georgia passed it with more than 1,000 streakers on campus, one of them swooping down on a paraglider.
And as the true March Madness kicks off later this week, we can glance backward at the folly of a more light-hearted generation and tip our hats — keeping the rest of our clothes firmly on.
