The Tale of Toomer’s Tiger Paw

A great display of school spirit—that’s how Frank Parsons ’90 tried to describe it as morning dawned on Sunday, Aug. 19, 1989. The Auburn Police Department, however, kept using this other term—criminal mischief.

Apparently even the chairman of Auburn’s SGA Spirit Committee still needed things like, you know, permission to paint a giant tiger paw in the middle of the road.

But was it really all that different from their annual midnight painting party on the interstate? Each year, the Spirit Committee broke out the brushes to freshen up the trail of tiger paws that used to dot the Exit 51 on-ramp to College Street.

Sure, they technically had to get a fancy letter of permission from Montgomery every year. And promise to stick to a strictly specified route, a route that definitely did not include Toomer’s Corner.

But, as they finished up—much earlier that year, and somehow with at least five gallons of leftover paint—Parsons’ crew began to wonder: Why shouldn’t it?

“As the night went on, there was talk about trying to do something with more of a splash,” Parsons remembered. “Something to get more attention.”

It worked.

They scouted the corner of Magnolia Avenue and College Street. Downtown was dead. Zero traffic for a solid 20 minutes. They hopped out of their pickups and went full speed.

Kevin Boyett, an architecture major who knew how to draw, handled the outline—a large, circular-ish pad with four smaller circles for toes, 20 x 20 feet. They fanned the masterpiece dry with the Domino’s Pizza boxes left over from dinner.

“When the sun rose the next day, people started driving through Toomer’s Corner and they loved it… It was like, ‘why haven’t we had a tiger paw there before?’”

The first car rolled by as they were packing up. It was a Ford Crown Victoria.

Parsons stepped up and tried to look in charge, like how a Spirit Committee Chairman just trying to do his job should look. War Eagle, what seems to be the problem, officer?

When the police officer explained exactly what the problem was, Parsons “umm”ed and “well”ed, rummaging around his truck for paperwork that wasn’t there. The officer wasn’t impressed.

It wasn’t a formal arrest, but the next few hours down at the station weren’t fun.

Parents were called. Lawyers were called. Thank goodness for red tape.

It turned out that both the City of Auburn and the State of Alabama staked a claim to the Spirit Committee’s canvas. And a funny thing happened as Auburn Police Chief Ed Downing began checking city engineers and the Highway Department to see if they wanted to file charges.

“When the sun rose the next day, people started driving through Toomer’s Corner and they loved it,” Parsons said. “It was like, ‘why haven’t we had a tiger paw there before?’”

Initially livid university administrators eventually agreed. The Highway Department eventually agreed. Auburn mayor Jan Dempsey ’87 shrugged her shoulders—Hey, War Eagle.

A new tradition was born.

For the next 25 years, come summer, the Auburn SGA added fresh coats of paint to the tiger’s paw. That came to an end in 2015, when the crime scene was immortalized with new brick pavers included in the renovated Toomer’s Corner intersection.

By Jeremy Henderson ’04