Back when I was an engineering student in the early ’60s there was a huge mountain of coal that filled the area between the mechanical and electrical engineering buildings that we had to walk around to get to class. These days, there is a courtyard in that area, and my son refuses to believe that the university would have had a coal mountain there. Please tell me the when and why of that distinctive pile of carbon.

There certainly was an enormous pile of coal in the Engineering quad during the mid-1950s. The coal was stored there for steam plants that provided the campus with power, but it marred the otherwise lovely view of Henry Mall. It was such an eyesore, in fact, that in 1955 it became the mission of an undergraduate named John G. Bollinger ’57, PhD’61 who would later become dean of engineering to have the coal pile evicted. Bollinger collected hundreds of signatures from fellow students and delivered them to then-Dean Kurt W. Wendt before summer break of that year. By the next semster, the coal pile was gone, and in its place today is a pedestrian mall with the artistic Maquina sculpture and fountain.