In the late 20th century, Bob’s Big Boy restaurants were synonymous with no-fuss American dining—a good place to get a huge cheeseburger and a frosty shake. They were just as famous for their statues of the company mascot, a cherubic boy with a brown pompadour and red-and-white checkered overalls, which stood out front to welcome customers.
Naturally, the burger chain was popular with teenagers. Maybe a little too popular.
For a few years in the 1970s, usually in late May or early June—the point when senioritis reaches its peak—the statue from the Bob’s Big Boy that once stood at Columbia Pike and Walter Reed Drive in Arlington had a habit of disappearing in the night. The next morning, students and staff would show up to the old Wakefield High School building to find the beaming figure standing atop the flat roof over the front entrance, welcoming everyone to class.
One series of grainy photos from 1977 begins with about 10 kids, smiling and cheeky, posing for a group shot with the pilfered statue in front of the high school. The next shot is down to business: Three boys stand on the roof holding ropes; others on the ground prepare the fiberglass mascot for hoisting. Then, in the final shot, the deed is done.
Not to be outpranked, in 1983 students at what was then Washington-Lee High School (now Washington-Liberty) stole the Hamburglar statues from a nearby McDonald’s and placed at least one on school property. Four years later, the Class of 1987 ran the McDonald’s flag up the W-L flagpole.
To some, this brand of mischief feels quaint compared to today’s high-security high school environments. “Imagine the fallout,” were this to happen today, one commenter recently wrote in a local history forum about senior pranks.
Debi Spano, a 1974 Yorktown High School graduate who now lives in Inwood, West Virginia, recalls the day that the “Y” mysteriously disappeared from the signage on her school building’s facade. Not long afterward, a large “W” appeared in her brother’s room. When their mother asked him about it, he admitted that he and a few unnamed accomplices had pinched it from W-L.
“We all kind of laughed,” Spano says, “and Mum, while still laughing, said, ‘You know you have to give it back.’ My brother answered, ‘I will when they give us our Y back.’ ”