The Acrobatic Professor

A professor promises his class that he will not give a surprise quiz in the course until “the day you see me come into the classroom through the transom.” Then one day, after the class has arrived, their professor comes climbing through the transom with a gleeful grin on his face and a stack of quizzes clutched in one hand. It turns out that he had earlier worked as a circus acrobat. Variations on the story describe the quiz-toting professor entering through a second-story window or climbing out of a grand piano.

This story is told about a surprising number of American professors who are often named and given their correct academic specialties in these accounts, although none of these stories has yet been positively verified. Best known of the group was Guy Y. “Guy Wire” Williams (1881–1968), a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma (from 1906 until his death), who was described in one source as “a skilled gymnast and acrobat.” However, even Williams’s biographical sources do not specifically include the transom trick.