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Adult reaction to the unclad fad has generally been mild and good humored. "We'd like to leave it alone," said a Northwestern University official. "After all, it's springtime." At the University of Georgia, officials decided that the school's policy toward streaking would be "noninterference." In Maine, the Portland Press Herald chided streakers for wearing shoes during one of the mildest Maine winters on record. "We are not opposed to streaking provided it is correctly undertaken and executed with some grace," the paper editorialized. "If you streak, have the common decency to do it in your bare feet."
Others were less amused. Staid Yale placed on probation four students who streaked. In South Carolina, State Representative John Miles suggested that streakers be sentenced to 90 days in jail and expelled from public schools. "They ought to have respect for other people," he said. Streaker Mark Bruno, at Tennessee Tech University, was fined $50 and sentenced to five weekends in the city jail. Other streaking arrests occurred in Memphis, Knoxville, Orono, Me., and Athens, Ga. As streaking spread, inevitably there were tragedies.A motorcycle streaker in Oklahoma died in a collision; one on foot was killed trying to cross the Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike.
Ritually, psychologists were invoked to analyze the spring madness. "It's fundamentally a ploy to get attention," says Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University. "College students are irreverent toward social values. This is an attack on dominant social values." Arthur Yehle, a psychology professor at Memphis State University, has a simple explanation. "It's spring, the weather is warm, it's something to do." Another psychologist, Dorothy Hochreich of the University of Connecticut, calls streaking "a form of escapism that doesn't seem sexual in nature. Students are working harder in school, and this is letting off steam."
Students generally agree. "With the pressures of spring finals," said a University of Tennessee coed, "it's a good chance to do an impromptu belly dance or striptease. Once you're in the swing of things, you forget that you are nude."
Equal Time. As the phenomenon gathered velocity, so did the age and range of participants. Emulating their elders, high school and even junior high school students took to their heels in ever greater numbers. In Chicago, three boys with perfect timing streaked their high school as the student body rose for the morning national anthem. An adult male streaker whipped up and down the aisles of a Pan American jumbo jet en route from London to New York. Senior Citizen Virgil Cleves, 67, was arrested in Lima, Ohio, for a bare stroll in the public square with equally bare Wanda Gray, 46. He was asking equal time for "snailing," he said, since he was too old to streak. In London's House of Commons, the danger of this latest U.S. aberration's infecting other countries was excoriated, but the warning was too late. First a dozen Americans streaked the Eiffel Tower in Paris, then streakers blossomed in two places in West Germany, and a naked blonde girl dashed 50 yards through the quiet English resort of Bournemouth.