part0078

I came across that phrase in a newspaper article about the “strange tales” told by toll takers who work on the Maurice J. Tobin Memorial Bridge in Boston. The article described toll takers’ encounters with topless women drivers, cars stuck in reverse, and tolls paid in clothespins or pennies—but no real “gags” in the sense of pranks or jokes played on toll takers by the public. Most of these gags, I have found, are attributed to medical students.

Maybe the Boston toll takers preferred not to talk about such pranks, fearing that more students would try them again. Or maybe the reason was that, as I suspect, most toll-booth tricks exist only as stories, not as actual pranks.

In the best known of them, medical students remove an arm from a cadaver in the anatomy lab, attach a quarter to the hand, and set out on the highway. At the first toll booth, they extend the arm out the window to the toll taker, who finds himself holding the limb as well as the coin as the car drives off.

I described this gag in an article in Whole Earth Review , Fall 1985, asking readers to respond with their own versions.

Some people’s recollections were about as skeletal as my teaser. A California reader, for example, heard only that it happened on a bridge in the Bay Area and that the students responsible were expelled from school.

Other versions, however, contained specifics. A student from the Midwest heard that the prank was perpetrated by students from Washington University in St. Louis while crossing the Eads Bridge (then a toll bridge) to Illinois. The students eventually were prosecuted for transporting body parts across state lines.

A writer from Massachusetts set the event on the Tobin Bridge in Boston (this is where I came in!). He had heard that in the late 1960s, medical students from one of the universities in the area painstakingly set up the prank—slipping the stolen limb into a sleeve and sewing a dollar bill between the index finger and thumb—and then staged it successfully. Traced by fingerprints from the disembodied hand, the cadaver was located in the school’s lab. The anatomy professor and the police matched the hand to the body, then confronted the students with the incriminating evidence. The pranksters supposedly weren’t expelled—but the professor flunked them in anatomy, since they had put a right hand into a left coat sleeve.

A Yale man wrote me saying that he heard the story in his freshman year in the early 1960s, attributed to the Milford toll booth on the Connecticut Thruway. I also heard from a chiropracter in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who remembers hearing the toll-booth story from his junior-high-school science teacher in 1968, then hearing a variation years later when he attended chiropractic school.

But the story is older yet. One writer remembered hearing about it when attending a Naval Supply Corps school in California in 1952.

The most interesting response came from Dr. James S. Miller, a pediatrician in Hemet, California. He recalls an incident from 1939, when his uncle, Dr. Willard Fleming, was dean of the School of Dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Miller says his family often talked of the time when “Uncle Bill,” as acting chancellor of the Medical Center one weekend, was aroused at 3:00 A.M. by a telephone call from the California Highway Patrol, who had detained three students for leaving a hand from a cadaver with a toll taker on the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

Possibly, Dr. Miller suggests, this incident was the source of later medical-student prank stories involving toll booths. He also reports, however, that medical history is scattered through with allusions to “disrespect for the dead” displayed by students or unscrupulous practitioners sometimes removing body parts from cadavers.

Oddly, the wildest toll-booth prank of them all focuses on a toll taker’s arm, not a cadaver’s, and I heard it not in the United States, but in Auckland, New Zealand.

When the Auckland Harbor Bridge was a toll bridge, the attendant had to put his hand through a hole in the booth to collect tolls. Once, allegedly, two students came by in a car, and one of them put the coin into the attendant’s outstretched hand while the second snapped a pair of handcuffs over the attendant’s wrist. There was a rope tied to the handcuffs, and it fed out of the car window as they sped away across the bridge. The attendant tried frantically to untie the rope or to break down the wall of the booth, thinking he would be jerked up to the wall and perhaps even lose his arm when the rope pulled taut. But the rope wasn’t attached to anything in the car, and the students just tossed the end out the window as they roared away into the distance.

I’m not sure why toll takers become the victims of such gags and stories, nor whether medical students have ever done anything so outrageous. But at least these accounts of toll-booth pranks are a road (or a bridge?) to fame in a boring occupation.