Crook finders. Courtesy of Falcon Photo Library. By Carter James, Editor in chief
On Oct. 9, a group of Montevallo students found the crook, a large walking stick made of wood, that has been hidden and found for the university’s Founder’s Day since 1926.
Junior, Taylor Frick, was the main student that found the Crook amongst a group of 13 friends. Frick said this was “spontaneous” for her.
“I work at the Merry Moon on main street. And Marion [Brown, the Crook hider] comes in there sometimes and I just made a one-off joke about, ‘Oh, you got to tell me where the Crook is.’ And she was like, ‘no you got to really look for it.’”
The crook finding team consisted of two groups led by Frick. Jordyn Kelley, Rylee Keasler, Carissa Moore and Calliope Moore were the initial group the morning before finding the cane. The night before’s group consisted of Audrey Paige Robinson, Jackson Holsomback, Andrew Wilson, Piper Holley and Taylor McClendon.
The morning Frick found the Crook, both groups of people, including Nathan Weaver and D’Mar Tarront-Milton, were present.
Frick and her team found the crook in one of the bushes under the archway of Bowers Colonnade. The group started a day prior to Founder’s Day around noon and were out looking until 1 a.m. the next morning, searching near the same bushes.
“It’s kind of like we were losing steam because we had looked in the same place so much that fresh sleep to come back the next day and actually really find it,” said Frick. They did not give up their search, though. “We’re going to wake up, be here at nine in the morning for when they drop the hint at 9:30,” said Frick. “We were pretty committed to it at that point.”
The moment Frick discovered the crook could be described as a stroke of luck One of her roommates was standing by a huge broken off tree branch. Frick took the branch and “started whacking the bushes” until she struck the crook.
“I was genuinely shocked because I had convinced myself that it wasn’t in the bushes and that I was going crazy,” says Frick about the moment she found the crook. “I was like, ‘no way.’ And everyone turned around to look at me and I stuck my hand in the bush and actually pulled it out and everyone started screaming, because we had just been looking for so long.”
Frick and her team search for the Crook was no easy feat. Something that could be attributed to a greater struggle amongst the student body. “I honestly feel like it was just a team effort on the part of the whole school.” said Frick. “Because I think at that point, everyone had figured out the clues were leading us to that specific location. It’s just nobody could like physically find it.”
Carter James is the editor in chief of the Alabamian. He is a senior Mass Communication major with a concentration in broadcast production and minor in digital filmmaking. He is an avid cinephile, the occasional gamer and Batman fanatic in his spare time.
