“You read the instruction, you put the card in front of your face, and you don’t know what’s going on.” “The good thing about the card stunt is you’re like a robot,” Loshin said. Eventually, someone near the field noticed. The UCLA students kept cycling through their routine. Other times, they were gleefully simple: “HA,” or just: “HI” in USC colors. For most variations, the cards spelled out “SC.” In a corner of the section was a cardinal and gold rectangle, stamped like a tattoo. When UCLA began its card stunts, the other side of the stadium erupted. The group finished, then hurried back to the USC side to wait and watch. “He turned to me and said, ‘Look man, I go to USC dental school. “I said, ‘We’re really going to kick those Trojans’ aren’t we today?’ ” Karabian said. Nervous, Karabian tried to sweet talk him.

They found a spot in the upper part of the student section seven rows tall by nine seats wide and swapped out the UCLA cards for their own. When the day of the game came, seven Squires wearing UCLA colors and with the placards smuggled under their shirts showed up early. “It was like a CIA-type thing,” Marienhoff said. So even though he was not a member of the Squires, he became part of the team, sworn to secrecy. The Squires also needed someone with access to a printer. Spies infiltrated the UCLA planning committee to get the specs for the placards and to purloin one of the master instruction cards. The plan required some specialized skills and, as Sports Illustrated wrote, “modest amounts of petty theft, espionage, impersonation and forgery.” The Squires had dreamed up the card prank a month before. They were intercepted by USC students, who shaved their heads and one eyebrow each. Earlier that week, two UCLA students sneaked onto USC’s campus, likely intent on trickery. It was more an excuse to wake up the UCLA players who were staying at the hotel, according to the Daily Trojan newspaper. In 1957, on the eve of the card prank, USC students held a late-night rally at the Sheraton Townhouse hotel - except it was not a rally, really. The action was part of an escalation of hostilities that began with USC’s stealing of the UCLA victory bell in 1941, and culminated in a high (or low) point: A group of UCLA students, in 1958, renting a helicopter, hovering over USC’s campus and air-dropping several hundred pounds of manure. But at a time when inter-school pranks are at an ebb, lacking the creativity or flair of past generations, their story presents a question: Why prank at all? It seems a strange, trifling matter for the school to record for posterity. Two more, Dave Visel and Jerry Van Wert, recorded a video interview with the school, a copy of which was provided to The Times by Claude Zachary, an archivist and manuscript librarian at USC. Three of them - Karabian, Steve Marienhoff and Mike Loshin - recently spoke on the record about the prank for the first time.

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