Here's another one that falls into the folklore category. In the early 1970s there was a dorm resident known as the "Midnight Sponge." If you spilled your yogurt on the floor, if you knocked over a beer on the table, if you slopped lentil soup on a chair, you could call the Midnight Sponge at any time of day or night and he would arrive at the scene of the accident armed with a giant sponge. Some accounts claim he had a bathroom towel he used as a cape. And he would clean up the mess. People recounted his "adventures" for years to come. I think he was gone by the time I was enrolled, so he must have been a very early resident.

This story fascinated me so much that it stuck in my cranium for years. This was weirder than anything I could make up, and he served as the inspiration (i.e., I simply lifted him) for a character I used in my comic book series Bezango WA 985 (shameless plug, you can find my comix for sale at the Danger Room, just ask for the books by Olympia's oldest cartoonist, which isn't really true since I'm sure Tucker Petertil is a bit older than me). Anyway, here's how this Evergreen legend turned into a comic character, (my character had a cape, mask, and a big M on his shirt) I'll quote from issue #2:

"If you spill something, like a glass of orange juice on the kitchen counter, you can call the Midnight Sponge at any time, doesn't matter if it is 2 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon, and he'll show up with a big sponge and clean the mess. We all know his true identity, but we pretend we don't. And when we run across his day-job self, we are always sure to praise the heroic deeds of that mysterious hero and conclude with, 'I wonder who he really is. Where does he go? What dark secret is he protecting?' Then both of us go through a mutual bit of acting, since I'm sure he knows that we know who he really is."

"If you want to know who he really is, I'm afraid you'll just have to move to Bezango."

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