This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience like listening, belonging, or secret keeping, and bringing stories that deepen our understanding of our shared humanity. My name is Arun, and in this series we're looking at the theme of breaking the rules. This series on breaking the rules is all about the stories that bend boundaries. They're the moments where you dare to ask What happens if I don't follow the script?
We will explore the rebellious art of graffiti, investigate a mysterious plaque, sneak onto Stanford's rooftops and get an inside look on life in prison. These stories reveal what can happen when we color outside the lines and redefine the limits on how we can change. In today's episode, we're invited into a story straight out of film noir when my friends will Henry and I stumbled upon a mysterious plaque and do detective work to uncover the clues to a mystery no one has ever solved.
Here's Will and Henry and me with that story. It was a dark and storm unit at Stanford, a campus that knows how to keep its secrets. We were walking around main quad at Stanford, just casually moving within the lanes of the beautiful sandstone arches when all of a sudden we stumbled upon a giant treasure chest. No, I'm just kidding. We came to the math corner, a place we'd walked through hundreds of times.
And that's when we saw it poking out of the dirt beneath one of the oak trees was an old weathered plaque. It was about the size of a briefcase and there was an inscription with the words, right? K Sexton Memorial Park, right under it said June, 1977. It also looked like there was some Latin oromo. There are plaques all over the place on Sanford's campus. But this one seemed different. For one thing, it wasn't clear what the plaque was commemorating. We didn't know Latin.
So like any good detectives, we looked to Google Translate. But what we found only made us more confused or Nanda Enum as dignity Tomo translates to the dignity of a house is to be adorned. But the plaque wasn't anywhere near a house, and it certainly wasn't adorned. So we set out to Green Library to see if we could find a record of the plaque. Yet in all of those pages, there's not one mention of Wright Case Sexton, let alone his Memorial Park. Stanford documents its history.
Well, if you were to print it out, the Stanford archives would be over 30,000 feet long. So a plaque with a strange inscription and a name that was nowhere to be found in the Stanford archives wasn't just odd. It was exceptional. We ventured to the deep web, even the third page of Google, and we found one online clue, a flicker post with only 260 views, one that was posted in 2012. The guy who posted the photo was a Stanford PhD back in the eighties. His name was Thain Beck. Was he our guy?
Our DB Cooper? We tracked down Thain's email and asked if he knew anything about the plaque, and we got an email back. But the message we got back wasn't from Thayne, it was from Thain's wife Gloria. Hi, Henry. I'm Gloria Ga Gatlin, thain's wife. He is not right. Kay Sexton. Nor is he the installer of the plaque. There's more to the story other than who installed it, namely why they did, but they no longer remembers the details.
Gloria said Tha couldn't talk to us, but she could, and she confirmed our suspicions that there was something off about the plaque. Everything that I know about the plaque has come from my husband, Thae. I had known about the plaque and I had seen it, and I knew that it was not a real official Stanford plaque, which explained why we couldn't find it in the Stanford archives. Gloria was a code term student at Stanford back in the eighties.
Her husband Thayne was getting his PhD in computer science around the same time. I knew that somebody from one of the grad schools had put it in. Gloria said it wasn't Thayne. She was sure he would've told her if it had been, but she remembered one student in particular who she suspected was connected to the plaque. Harlan Sexton, who was getting his PhD in math at the same time, thain's undergrad degree, was in mathematics. I suspect that he may have known Harlan.
The name Sexton was on the plaque, but Harlan wasn't, which got us thinking was the name on the plaque, right? K Sexton. Not one name, but three. We asked Gloria about this and she said she didn't know anything about the W right K part of Wright K Sexton. Either way, Harlan Sexton seemed like the logical place to start, but Gloria didn't know him personally. I didn't know anything about him. I suppose I could have Googled him though. I don't think Google existed back then.
So we did what Gloria couldn't back then. After sifting through several false leads, dozens of alumni resources, city council filings, and even signing up for a free trial on LinkedIn premium, we finally found him or Nanda Enum Omo. That's Harlan Sexton. Remember the Latin on the plaque? Harlan knows what it means because he wrote it in, which means roughly speaking a man's. Dignity is enhanced by his home or a man of dignity should live in a fine home, something like that.
Harlan said that he and his fellow grad student friends pulled a quote from Cicero as a private joke. It was an homage to all the countless hours they spent working. They were pulling so many late nights that it didn't make sense to go home to an apartment. So they started sleeping in their math offices and after a while they weren't just sleeping there, they were living in their offices. They said a lot of grad students did back then to save money and maximize their research time.
The Latin that had puzzled us so much was their own private joke. A man of dignity should live in a fine home. The joke was, of course, that we had no home and we didn't have much dignity, so it seemed appropriate. Harlan also confirmed our theory about the names on the plaque. That Wright k Sexton wasn't one name, but three.
They were the names of two of the other students who had helped dream up The idea of the plaque, the class, the class I was in was quite small and I was the first one of them to arrive by weeks. Chris Wright had also come early. That's Wright with a w. The same spelling as on the plaque. They have these, uh, PhD qualifying exams that you have to take.
He seemed to be the least frantic of the, uh, graduate students, and we got to be friends almost immediately while I continued talking with Harlan, will and Henry began looking for a trail to Chris Wright. Harlan had lost touch with him, so they went back to the library. We went through every math, PhD thesis and dissertation that was published between 1970 and 1985, and luckily for us, it was a math dissertation. There weren't that many.
The plaque said 77. Sexton graduated in 81, so it was probably gonna be in that range. We did a good old Command F and a name came up on a fateful night. The stars aligned and a man who goes by the name Christopher Wright. Warmly responded to our cold email. Hi Henry. I know the complete story of the Wright case, Sexton Memorial Park. Harland Sexton and I created it, but it's a longer story than I want to commit to email at the moment.
So we met Chris Wright in an abandoned warehouse with broken windows. Just kidding. We talked with him over video chat. The story he told us was this. He and Harlan got to be friends, just like Harlan told us. He has a lot of good memories from those years. They played foosball and raced chairs in the hallways once they got in trouble for rewiring elevators. But being a math PhD student at Stanford was hard.
They were working a lot and with so many long nights and merciless deadlines, they often felt like their whole lives were in their offices. But all that work was mostly invisible to the outside world. Harlan recalls a conversation he and Chris had. He was sitting out in this grassy area behind the math building, enjoying the evening and talking. And he mentioned the idea of having a plaque. I said to him, wouldn't it be nice if we had something that would memorialize our time here?
That's Chris Wright. And I said, well, that, that sounds great, but I would like to be involved in that if I could put my name on it too. And thus, the idea of the w right case, Sexton Memorial Park was born, it just became a thing that we were going to do. We wanted to commemorate the fact that we. We were living in our offices and we had been for months.
At that point, when I first heard this story, it just seemed like a prank, but the more I thought about my own experience at Stanford, the more it made sense to me. Stanford's campus is beautiful. Lots of sandstone, arches, outdoor spaces, and a row of palm trees that stretches for nearly a mile. There's a tangible sense of grander. You get the sense that many great minds have come here before you, but it's also a place where it's easy to feel invisible.
I often think about how Stanford is leaving its mark on me, but when I leave, I'll be quickly forgotten. No, I have us took ourselves seriously enough to think that Stanford, Otis a memorial. You know, it's more like a memento of times passed when people could actually live in their office. 'cause we certainly weren't the only people. Chris told Will and Henry something similar. I thought it would be just fun to have since, as I said, it was our own.
And uh, it seemed a shame to come and go and not. Have something left behind. It was pretty obscure. How would anybody know? Especially after our names were lost, which wouldn't have taken very long. So they created a name, a name out of our names to put on the plaque, and then hope that people wouldn't really notice it, or if they did, would assume that it had always been there. There's still one missing name on the plaque.
You know Wright k Sexton, Christopher Wright, Harlan Sexton, and there's a K. Did Harlan tell you about the K He, he told, he told me there was a Mr. K He didn't want, he, he, Dr. K, of course Dr. K. Dr. K was another friend of theirs who lived with them in their offices. And while he had the same impulse to create something that would last beyond them, he wanted to remain anonymous, known only to Chris Wright and Harlan Sexton, who wouldn't break his cover.
He told me that, uh, the Dr. K, that Dr. K likes to bring his kids by it and tell them it's a lesson to lay low. Is that right? I think that's unlikely. I'm surprised he said that. I mean, Dr. K doesn't live anywhere near there. But in any event, what I recall was that Dr. K, as he will be known, I guess, felt like he was going to stay in math research community and didn't want his last name so visible as part of this prank. So he asked to be initialized and we did. Mm-hmm.
And he did stay in academics, so I guess if he cares, that's it. Worked out the way he wanted. I think we're past the statute of limitations, I suppose. Well, it's never too late to have your, uh, reputations besmirched, but I, I don't know if this would even be besmirched. This would be like, like, wow. They knew their plaque would only survive if it couldn't be traced back to them. A brand new plaque would immediately be noticed.
So they had to create something that looked like it had already been there for a while. They chose a date a few years before they'd arrived at Sanford, 1977, so it would seem like the plaque had predated them. Here's Harlan again. Mr. K put the thing on his balcony, Berkeley, so that it would age so that by the time I put it in, it looked like it had been outside for a year, which it had.
I think what impressed me most about the plaque is how dedicated they were and just how long they had to wait to complete their plan. Chris shares more. Yeah, but it was quite a long time between the various steps of having the idea of doing that and where would it go. We ended up putting it in the dirt. Next in the tree planter, next to the mat department, but to ensure its, um, lack of mobility, Harlan dug about a three foot hole there and filled it with concrete, which we sunk rods into.
The more we learned about the plaque, the more incredible it seemed that it had remained there all these years. How well known do you think the, the story of this was, if at all, after? Because it, it was put after you graduated, right? I. I, I don't know how many people know about it. I think it's one of those things that was sort of a rumor that some people found out about and others didn't. The same rumor we'd heard from Gloria that it started us on this case over 50 years later.
People still talk about it, but it turns out that the people, Chris Wright, Dr. K and Harlan Sexton cared most about seeing the plaque were people they hadn't even been able to imagine back when they installed it. I used to bring my kids there with me, and then once every year or two it was, it was a thing to do with Dad. We would do it every year. I'd never been into plaques, although I was strangely moved when my daughter went to Stanford. Some 20 years later.
I was on the campus with her being a freshman. And it was strangely, um. Moving to see the right case. Sexton Memorial Park was still there. I have a picture of a couple years worth of those students being sh shown the plaque by my daughter, which brings us back to where we started with Gloria. There's just something so thin about it that he shared it with the kids and you know, this stuck in their memories like they thought it was cool. And so they've probably told friends, right?
Check out what my dad told me, right? There was one more piece of this mystery that felt unsolved. We never would've learned the true story about the black if we hadn't found that picture. Gloria's husband, Thayne took of it that first time we reached out to her. She said Thayne couldn't talk to us. But she didn't say why. It seemed a little mysterious though.
We didn't wanna pry, but when we reached out to her to share an early draft of this podcast episode, the last puzzle piece fell into place, but it wasn't what we expected. Thain plan back couldn't talk to us because he has Alzheimer's. He's living in memory care in general. I think that diseases like. Alzheimer's and the myriad of reasons why people are in memory care should not be hidden and should not be something we don't talk about.
But still, it was hard for her to talk about moving Thayne to memory care has been its own kind of grief. She didn't know if Thayne would remember anything about the plaque, but when she played our episode for him. It seemed to ignite something in him when I played the original podcast for him. I mean, he, he got a kick out of the cover photo of him being displayed next to DB Cooper.
He really laughed at that, and then he listened to the podcast and at the very end when it was dedicated to him, he, he just smiled. Thayne may not have remembered this plaque exactly, but the story of it still moved him. The Wright k Sexton Memorial Park plaque is a memento of times passed, but its legacy has become far more than that. I think there are probably several, maybe many Stanford connected families out there who this plaque is part of the stories that their families tell.
I'm really happy that. It's still there. So many people have passed through Stanford's stone, arches, and courtyards. The student experience is carefully curated. It can be easy to feel insignificant among all the great minds that have come before and after, but the plaque is a monument to something different. I hope Henry's right that we're past the statute of limitations for removing it. It reminds students like me that legacy can look a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to be impressive.
The choices I'm making while I'm here might outlast me, and who knows? Maybe 50 years from now, some Stanford student will listen to this podcast and find their way to the small inconspicuous plaque in the math corner. This episode is dedicated to Thayne Beck. Christopher Wright runs a nonprofit organization called Early family math.com. You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project.
This was statute of Limitations produced by Arun Chetry, Wil Brier, and Henry Siegel. With support from Laura Joyce Davis. Don Jay Frazier, Megan Kalfus, Melissa Dural, and Jonah Willand for their generous financial support. We'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the program and Writing and Rhetoric. The office for the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden.
You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcast workshops, live events, and [email protected]. You can find this in every episode of State of the Human, on our website, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Arun, and thank you for listening. Anyway, I hope there remains some mystery around it so that the powers that be at the university let it remain. Let it remain.