Mystery of stolen “S” solved

Sue Pittman, alumni director at University of Wisconsin-Stout, received a telephone call from Hollywood that solved a 36-year-old campus mystery.

The person on the other line was John Clavin, a 1970 UW-Stout graduate, and he forewarned Pittman about a written confession she soon would receive in the mail. His letter would reveal a long-sought answer to the demise of the original “S” on the Bowman Hall Tower.

Clavin and two other unnamed art students removed the illuminated “S” from the Stout tower one night in 1969 and tossed it from the Hudson Road Bridge into the Red Cedar River as the sun came up the next morning. He described the almost half-century-old “S,” which had hung on the tower since 1922, as being weather beaten, rusty and irregularly illuminated. “We thought of ourselves as Guerilla Artists on a mission to beautify the campus,” Clavin wrote.

Now a postproduction sound engineer for NBC Universal in Hollywood for television shows such as “Law and Order” and feature movies such as “40 Year Old Virgin” and “Just Like Heaven,” Clavin was compelled to come clean about his participation in the college caper after reading an article in the Autumn 2004 edition of the UW-Stout alumni publication Stout Outlook about the new “S.”

He was moved by Hugh Moltzau’s remembrance of seeing the original “S” as a young teenager, and that moment becoming the inspiration for Moltzau to complete a Stout degree in 1936. As a result, after a successful career in industry, Moltzau initiated returning the “S” to the Bowman Tower. Along with members of the classes of ’53, ’54 and ’55, and the support of the Menomonie Historic Preservation Committee, the Brilliant “S” Campaign was established to restore the nostalgic fixture to the Stout landmark.

In concluding his confession, Clavin described watching a live picture of the Stout tower on the Internet--appreciating its history and significance and admiring the beautiful Midwestern sunset behind it. He wrote, “The new ‘S’ looks fabulous, and it gives me closure as much as anybody to see that the ‘S’ was replaced.”

Pittman published Clavin’s tale of removing the campus icon in the current Winter 2006 issue of Stout Outlook.

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