STEADY AS A ROCK
A MOUNTAIN’S FAMOUS LETTER HAS SURVIVED EXPLOSIONS AND VANDALS TO SHOWCASE SUN DEVIL PRIDE
By Bill Goodykoontz

To the casual observer, it may be just a big gold letter on the side of a glorified hill.

To Arizona State University students and alumni, A Mountain is much more.

“A Mountain is a pretty big deal to me; it’s the beacon of the university,” Meghan Feller, a 19-year-old ASU sophomore, said. “There’s nothing more cool than looking to the north and seeing that big gold A on the mountain.”

It hasn’t always been gold. It hasn’t always been an A, for that matter. The history of the letter involves some other less likely representatives of the alphabet, a lot of manual labor and a memorable explosion (is there any other kind?) that had the unintended Nietzscheian effect of making the A stronger.

The class of 1918 at Tempe Normal School – ASU’s original incarnation – built the first letter, an N (for Normal, naturally). That lasted till 1925, when the school changed its name to Tempe State Teachers College. Clearly an N was no longer called for, but it wasn’t abandoned completely; part of the letter was used to make a T.

The school became Arizona State Teachers College in 1928, but didn’t change the letter to an A until 1938. And it wasn’t the familiar concrete, 60-foot letter.

“The A was built initially with rocks laid in place, loose, just to establish a shape,” said Dale Clarkson, president of the class of 1956. “Over the years it was covered with whitewash.”

Student-applied whitewash, mind you.

“It was quite a job to carry the whitewash mix up from the canal to the location” of the A, Clarkson said. “Over the years, the freshman class usually was privileged – or coerced – into forming a line of several hundred students who passed buckets of whitewash up from the bottom of the hill to the A each year. It was quite a tradition, and a lot of fun.”

If your definition of fun includes hauling whitewash during the first week of school in the brutal heat, absolutely.

On Sept. 16, 1952 at 2:08 a.m., that idea of fun came to an end when someone dynamited – dynamited! – the A, destroying it. Naturally, Sun Devils looked south to Tucson for the culprits; it’s simply an accepted part of the legend that the University of Arizona students blew it up. Whatever the case, the A was no more.

Clarkson was elected president of the student body in 1955. The Blue Key honor society had been raising money to rebuild a proper A for a few years. So before the fall semester started, Clarkson and a friend spent two or three weeks carrying reinforced steel up the side of the butte to build a form. Then a contractor used compressed air to pump concrete up through 1,000 feet of hose to build the A that remains today.

“It hasn’t been dynamited since,” Clarkson notes.

It’s not clear when the color changed from white to gold, but gold has been the preferred color for years. On occasion another school will sneak in and paint the A with its colors. It’s quickly painted over by members of the Student Alumni Association, which maintains the A.

Interestingly, the land the A is on belongs not to the university but to the city of Tempe. It’s illegal to leave the trail to paint the A, but ASU and the city of Tempe have an agreement that allows the Student Alumni Association to maintain the A and its golden face paint.

Feller, the 19-year-old sophomore, is one of the students entrusted with that duty, and she takes it seriously.

“The tradition runs so deep that it’s hard to dismiss, and that just makes it all that much more fun to be a part of,” she said. “What it all comes down to is we all just love ASU.“The A stands for so much more than tradition. It encompasses what it means to be a Sun Devil, and I will gladly climb that mountain every day if it means the A will stay gold.”