Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
To figure out the answer, I sent an e-mail off to a recent Psi Phi (formerly known as SWIL) alum, and the power of that network quickly put me in touch with Jennie Jacobson ’83, who remembered the following:
“The first year they just put up some signs around campus, advertising the pterodactyl hunt. I was with a group who encountered the hunters on the night of the hunt… they asked us if we’d seen a
pterodactyl, and if so which way it had gone. We pointed in several random directions. They chose one and took off after the pterodactyl. The next morning a paper mache pterodactyl was mounted in Dupont (the science library) indicating the hunt had been successful.”
“The second and third years were also not run by SWIL. I participated the second year. It was an organized dungeons and dragons type fight in the Crum meadow with armor of plastic garbage bags and swords made of rolled up newspaper. Unfortunately I lost my glasses during a melee and spent
most of the rest of the night and all the next morning looking for them. Some kind soul found them, and left them at the greeters table in the dining hall for me…”
So when did the Hunt start to look more like the Hunt as we know it today? One big question here is when it started being run by SWIL (the group currently known as Psi Phi).
According to Sherry Levi and the big website of SWIL history, SWIL first ran the Pterodactyl Hunt in 1983, when “nobody seemed interested in running the Pterodactyl Hunt even though a modest amount of funding was available for it. At that point, one of the issues in SWIL was, how do we have a higher profile on campus… the Pterodactyl Hunt seemed the appropriate sort of event for a SWIL service project–so I volunteered to organize it that year with support from the group…. The next year, as Oktoberfest approached, people began to say, ‘Are we going to organize the [Hunt] again this year?’ and there were eager volunteers once they found out what a Pterodactyl Hunt was… and if a group does something twice in 2 years at college, it’s a tradition.”
It’s twenty-five years later now, and the Hunt isn’t just a tradition but an institution, practically on the order of an academic department. While it’s certainly changed since SWIL took it over–a quick glance at The Book of the ‘Dactyl gives you a sense of how the rules and the monsters have changed (a third pterodactyl only in 2003?)–it’s always had some wacky monster fun going for it.