Coffin and Keys: A Secret Society “Solely for the Betterment” of UNR, or something more Unsettling?
Does UNR really need its own ANON group? Faith Evans uncovers the controversial history of Coffin and Keys, and examines their level of success in living up to their mantra: existing “solely for the betterment of the University of Nevada” with additional multimedia reporting by Sydney Oliver, Catherine Schofield, and Lauren Turner.
Masked Men at Mackay on Dead Day
The tune of clinking glass rings out on a bone-chilling December night. Through the dark, students march in small groups, toting backpacks, suitcases, and even the occasional shopping cart. Northern Nevada wind bites at their noses and pulls at their hair, while grass crunches under boots, sneakers squeak against concrete.
Light licks the sea of translucent shells. Jack Daniel’s, Smirnoff, New Amsterdam, and Barefoot bottles sit neatly together, arranged proudly beneath the John Mackay Statue. Some eyes roll as another stray frat boy attempts to scale the statue in hopes of ten seconds of Snapchat fame, or a poorly executed shotgun. A few attendees reek of one too many tequila shots, others are simply there for the nostalgia.
At the University of Nevada, Reno, this is a classic scene: the night of “Dead Day,” mere hours before students will face the first barrage of final exams. Despite the threat of rapidly-approaching tests and project deadlines, they dedicate tonight to a noble sacrifice, gifting the remains of their excessive drinking to a cold stone effigy.
From Public Campus Group to Anonymity and Strange Nicknames
John Mackay’s copper expression sits unmoving as he is dressed with cans and contraband. Even if he did decide to pull a quick smirk, last night’s onlookers probably wouldn’t have caught it under the blue N95 mask draped over his mouth.
The temple of discarded booze containers sitting at his feet lay out a red carpet for a group of special guests: the mystery men of UNR.
These masked participants stand out from the rest, wearing full suits, white newsboy hats, bandanas across their necks, and rubbery full-facial masks (the realistic kind that you’d probably buy at Party City). They appear only for a moment, tossing their propaganda to the sky, then return swiftly to wherever they came from.
These are the men of Coffin and Keys.
Students know them best for these masked Mackay appearances, along with their notoriously crude newsletters preaching their topsy-turvy version of campus news.
What most students don’t know is that Coffin and Keys (C&K) members have not always donned bulbous full-facial masks, adopted strange nicknames, and made student headlines at the Mackay on Dead Day. In fact, their history is evenly split, divided between the 50-odd years that they were a public campus group, and the more recent half-century of anonymity.
Their website claims that members went underground in 1962, but that’s not quite true. Right up until 1972, the Artemisia, UNR’s yearbook, reserved page space to publish their unmasked faces and true names. And, C&K also fails to mention that in 1989, the group made a momentous move toward reestablishing member transparency…a movement that flopped because new cohorts believed that staying anonymous would help them in their mission to spread campus truths.
Above all, C&K decorates their every newsletter, social media post, and website page with the claim that it “[exists] solely for the betterment of the University of Nevada.”
The Reynolds Sandbox is putting that claim under a magnifying glass, with the help of UNR Library Archives, C&K alumni, Artemisia yearbook pages, Greek Life participants, UNRPD, an ex-Homeland Security Chief of Staff, articles from The Nevada Sagebrush, past presidents of the student body government (ASUN), and, perhaps most importantly, those who have suffered from C&K’s actions.
What follows is the history of Coffin and Keys.
Social Elites in Tiny White Hats
If one reputation has stuck with C&K for over a century, it’s undoubtedly their pompous fashion sense. (By the way C&K, 1916 called. It wants its hats back.)
Jokes aside, to say that an air of snobbery has always followed C&K would be an understatement. From the get-go in the 1920s, student onlookers could sense a certain arrogance surrounding the organization, and reserved for C&K that special brand of apprehension that most people save for the popular kid who pretends to be everybody’s friend.
It didn’t help that C&K has always been quick to make zealous mission statements. In an Oct. 27, 1916, signed letter to the president, requesting to become a secret organization, they promised that their members would “raise the standard of scholarship, athletics, and manhood” on campus, and underclassmen would vie for the “honor of wearing [their] emblem.”
In fact, they presented themselves as something that more closely resembled an elite honors society than a secret organization. They were known for wearing pins that carried the C&K crest and donning Popeye-esque white berets.
Their fashion choices (which might seem pretentious today) weren’t entirely uncommon at the time. But that didn’t stop the Artemisia yearbook from poking fun at them. In the late 1920s, they printed a series of scathing pages, one of which read,
Coffin and Keys were founded in order to give its members a chance to wear ill-fitting white caps once a year while they watch their new candidates disrupt the tranquility and quietude of the library.
Once every year the members hold a secret meeting for the purpose of congratulating themselves on their self-imposed popularity.
Hence, we can dispel one C&K myth right here and now: though members claim to represent student voices, their success with that is limited. Since C&K’s formation, UNR students sensed that tangy aftertaste of arrogance, no matter what meal C&K presented them with.
This may sound like a harsh assessment, coming out of the gate swinging. In actuality, the majority of C&K yearbook pages simply cut-and-paste a generic paragraph, describing C&K members as a select group of campus leaders. Pages like the one featured above are a novelty.
However, there’s one important factor that debunks the argument that C&K is simply a misunderstood, wholly-beneficial group of anonymous do-gooders: their campus activities have always been cloaked in secrecy. Students at the time had little to no evidence of their “good deeds,” but a mountain of evidence revealing their inflated senses of self.
A Series of Public Initiations: “The Runnings”
One day a year, throughout the early to mid-1900s, C&K ditched their spotless white hats in favor of loincloths, sombreros, boots with spurs, and more.
Eager initiates lined up for what can only be described as the ultimate LARP-ing event — Live Action Role Playing, an uncannily accurate descriptor provided to the Sandbox by a Reddit user, a platform where we were seeking out current intel on the group. Stripped partially nude (scandalous back in the day; we would now consider their outfits similar to swim-trunk-level coverage), new members would stage a “battle” somewhere on campus, often with rafts on Manzanita Lake.
A mock bullfight, Helen of Troy scene reenactments, and live performances of the Prince Valiant comic strips were among their more innocent runnings. Less tactful runnings featured members participating in an “Arabian war” in 1928 and dressed as “a band of wild Comanche Indians” in 1929.
Their first ever rush event to make the yearbook in 1925 yielded a single sentence, hidden within the spring semester summary:
The campus was startled by the appearance of a mock Ku Klux Klan, burning-cross, regalia, and similar accouterments for initiating Coffin and Keys neophytes.
“Tactless” might be too soft a sentiment to describe that particular running. It set a poor tone for C&K’s future campus rushes.
Though they don’t hold runnings now (or, if they do, they’re not public), C&K opts to make their presence known through “odd pranks,” as UNR police directors have described it.
In a 2015 article in the Reno Gazette-Journal, a reporter depicted past UNR Police Chief Adam Garcia as offhandedly mentioning that C&K once hung a fake casket from a tree somewhere on campus.
This September, in an interview with the Sandbox, Lieutenant Josh Reynolds described C&K as more of a nuisance group. He mentioned that the UNR Police Department occasionally gets calls when C&K decides to make public appearances to pass out flyers on campus or give flowers to sorority women on bid days.
Two Blips that Could have Changed Everything
In the 1943–44 school year, C&K abruptly dropped from the yearbook. And, for the first time in UNR’s history, a woman, Helen Batjer, became student body president.
The two don’t necessarily reflect a cause-and-effect relationship. However, they may be correlated, as UNR was likely experiencing a slow leak in its male population in the years leading up to this blip. More and more men were being enlisted to fight during WWII.
This moment in UNR’s history presents a brief opportunity for reflection.
From 1917 and up until 1944, 86% of ASUN presidents had been members of C&K. In the spring semesters, if students voted a non-C&K member to office, the president-elect was often a new C&K initiate by the next fall semester (at the start of his presidency). That exact scenario happened 13 times over the course of 27 years.
C&K actively dominated the political sphere at UNR. Whether students liked it or not, they really did insist on being the organization to represent student voices.
Those numbers are daunting: not just a majority, but a consistent supermajority of ASUN presidents were members of C&K while C&K was public. Imagine if that number holds up today — no, imagine if even a fraction of that number holds up today.
UNR had a second female president after Batjer: Leonore Hill. Then, the university went 25 more years with all-male presidents. Still, eighty-one percent of them were members of C&K.
But this first blip does beg the question, what if students had continued to elect diverse ASUN presidents? Would C&K have been forced to recruit women and more minority members?
That’s a question that hounds them to this day. In 2015, the Nevada Sagebrush published an editorial, pointing out that women now outnumber men at UNR, and minority student populations on campus continue to grow. Editorializers at the student newspaper posed (and answered) the question,
How then can your group with your clear bias against students who are women and ethnic minorities promote the common good for a student body that has changed drastically since your inception? Quite simply, it can’t.
This question is especially pressing today. Students have no way of knowing the C&K makeup, besides the certainty that all members are still men. The C&K website member’s page boasts on the top line, “WE ARE THE MEN OF COFFIN AND KEYS.”
The second blip could have changed that, if not through representation, then at least transparency.
In the fall of 1989, 12 members signed their names on C&K’s original mission statement, and added their own paragraph, recommitting the group to its role as a “discussion forum” for the betterment of the university. Later that spring, they also put their names on a newsletter — a brief script following a donut-loving UNRPD officer who decides to investigate “crimes against students.”
The Sandbox reached out to several members who put their names to that letter, and one responded: Bryan Allison, the C&K president at the time. He said that he was willing to speak to the Sandbox on-the-record because he’d already “cheesed off a bunch of the alums” in 1989, when he decided to take the group public.
“We decided to make a move toward more openness in 1989 because we felt it would give us more credibility,” Allison said, in an email correspondence with the Sandbox.
“That worked for a while, but new members decided to take things back underground because they felt that would be more effective.”
And so, at the whims of new cohorts, C&K went back into hiding and entered the digital age in darkness.
Coffinandkeys.com: a New Beast is Born
It was announced modestly in a 1996 newsletter, just a half-sentence pasted to the bottom of the page: “Watch for the C&K website coming soon…”
And so started their digital paper trail. Coffinandkeys.com, coffinandkeys.squarespace.com, and coffinandkeysnv.com are all current and retired platforms that C&K has used for the last 24 years. For the most part, all iterations of the site have been built to display their library of newsletters, promote events, host message boards, and document members’ code names.
They even created a MySpace page in 2005, registering the account under the name Paul Quinlan. The account features a few photos from various events the group attended, and surprisingly even with the sparse nature of the account, they held over 400 connections. Under the same alias, C&K also created a YouTube account (that currently looks unused). It’s sole video, the “Coffin and Keys Harlem Shake” posted in 2013, boasts six likes, over 4,000 views, and a shout out to the UNR cheer team in its description.
More well known to current UNR students is their Instagram page, and secondarily, their Twitter (@nvcoffinandkeys). This is where the majority of their self-promotion happens today. The pages bear their newsletters and a smattering of class pictures.
On Dec. 9, they published their “Fall 2020 Dead Day Edition.” Highlights from the newsletter included a message about UNR President Sandoval, an extensive piece about the football team, and a Q&A section.
Wearing Masks Way Before it was Cool
Hence, to be frank, their online presence almost makes C&K look tame. At best, they’re breaking minor campus news stories, and at worst they’re making crass sex jokes. Some would point to potential cyber-bullying; however, for the most part (especially this year), they reserve their meaner critiques for public figures.
What has more people worried is their modern public presence.
C&K could claim they started the mask trend — it seems to be quite the rage these days — as they donned face coverings pre-COVID-19.
Throughout the Sandbox’s research process, bringing up the name “Coffin and Keys” with students invoked one of three reactions: indifference, fear, or excitement. While some individuals brushed the name drop off as a simple joke, or even a sham, others would become wide-eyed and hesitant.
There was one common denominator: all students shared a reluctance to speak out against the group.
The Sandbox reached out to over 20 different fraternities and sororities. All either denied to share a statement regarding C&K or did not respond. With their mostly silly antics and Tom and Jerry style games, why are so many people afraid of the group?
According to a UNR Greek Life member, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, it’s a mix of appreciation and apprehension that gags Greek Life organizations. Fraternities and Sororities in particular are constantly checking over their shoulders to avoid becoming the butt of C&K’s next newsletter joke.
But at the same time, they lean on C&K to call out bad-behavior within Greek Life. The Sandbox’s source said that they’re able to fulfill their job because of their broad net they have over school and campus happenings.
“I do think there are some things we’re better off not knowing about in the moment and then being told about later,” the source said.
Distrust and Dark Episodes
Others disagree vehemently with the positive perception of the anonymous group. “I don’t think they need that extra layer [of anonymity] unless they’re up to no good,” said Hope Loudon, a counseling graduate student at UNR.
In 2015, when Loudon was an undergraduate, she encountered masked members of C&K in a dark parking lot near the Knowledge Center. She thought that she was about to be assaulted.
The self-taught journalist said that the group shows a lack of empathy and uses their privilege and anonymity to get away with stunts that other institutions wouldn’t accept.
Loudon used the newsletter which was found under the doors of many student dorm rooms on campus last September, as an example. She said she imagined how unsafe students felt when unknown people were able to get into secure dorms and invade their home during a pandemic.
“I would hope that they would change in positive directions to establish an image that is exclusively respectable, charitable, and ethical,” Loudon said.
Though her experiences with C&K may be unique, Loudon’s skepticism is not. In December of 2000, UNR President Joseph Crowley himself wrote an open letter to C&K. One line read,
Simply put, these days, if an organization is to be understood to have the courage of its convictions, it needs to express those convictions in a public manner.
An especially challenging aspect of C&K’s anonymity is that their roster is constantly changing from one class to the next. Whatever C&K action prompted President Crowley to issue his open letter might not have been an issue in the 90s, and might not be an issue today.
There are some examples of their more mild-mannered actions within their middle 1990s newsletters, while they kept their typical ‘Adam Sandler’ style jokes and masked shenanigans, better intentions were visible in the older newsletters.
What’s so wrong with tailgating? Why is it that the University’s administration continues to put limitations on the students and organizations who are supporting the school?
Another notable instance of empathy by the otherwise ruthless group was in their semester “Report Card” in which the group left the campus escort number and encouraged the use of the University’s amenities.
“Nevada Students ( C ) For not using this service enough. Sexual Assault is not a laughing matter! Please use this service. 742–6808”
Both of these instances break significantly from their reputation for lewd humor and violent criticism. The 1990s newsletters portray actual concern for students rather than just the typical roasts of “A.N.U.S erections” candidates.
Hence, it’s difficult to present them as a single, unified organization when the direction of their actions and newsletters change at the drop of a white hat, as new upperclassmen fill seats in the organization.
Training Wheels for Greater Things?
But what happens after C&K members graduate and vacate their seats?
Almost more intimidating than C&K’s undergraduate scheming is their alumni list. Among a surprising list of businessmen, lawyers, journalists, and doctors, and public figures, an intimidatingly powerful network emerges.
A Sandbox reporter looked into the members named in the Artemesia yearbook to see what they accomplished in their lifetimes. Just a sampling of the names include
Frank Fahrenkopf, chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1983–89
Earl Wooster, the first superintendent of the Washoe County School District
Procter Ralph Hug Jr., a US court of Appeals judge
Glenn “Jake” Lawlor, a historic UNR athlete and coach, and the Lawlor Events Center namesake
Leonard “Len” Savage, who ran Nevada’s oldest contracting business
Harold Coffin, an AP humor columnist
And that’s the real concern that outsiders should face when they write off an undergraduate member of a secret society as just some frat guy. The men he graduates with, and the men who walked before him, create an alarming pool of authoritative names.
The Long Standing Power of Secret Societies
This trend extends far beyond C&K. It’s one of hundreds of secret societies that nest within the United States. From campus groups, ancient witches, bustling businessmen, and the occasional group of conspiracy theorists, these societies have held a mark upon thousands of individuals throughout history.
One of the first recorded recollections of a secret society dates back to the Middle East in 1092: The Order of Assassins, a military group led by Hasan Sabbah which converted people to a branch of Shia Islam. Sabbah’s word alone commanded his loyal followers to tumble in a chasm to their brutal death. This act, as grim as it was, is still regarded as a pinnacle moment in the birth of hidden societies, and the centuries of secret congregations that followed.
In modern US history, most well-known are the Freemasons. This fraternal brotherhood started in London, England in 1717 and quickly spread to other European countries, eventually making its way to the US in 1733. Bearing their signature compass shaped symbol and their lodge number, Freemason lodges are frequent and easy to find with a simple Google search.
Freemasons also claim a formidable membership list, including past Declaration of Independence signers and US Presidents George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Harry Truman are all recorded members of the brotherhood joined by other famous figures such as, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. and Winston Churchill.
And secret societies even have the potential to form other secret societies, creating a strange twisted chain.
Claimed to be an imitation of the Freemasons, The Independent Order of Odd Fellows is another widely popular secret society. With the establishment of their first lodge in roughly 1745, the Odd Fellows began their reign in Manchester, England. In 1918, the group found its way to the United States. Unlike the Freemasons and C&K, the IOOF has been fully co-ed since 2001. The mission of the IOOF is to “visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan,” according to odd-fellows.org.
Notable IOOF members include President Ulysses S. Grant and both Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt.
The Assassins, Freemasons, and IOOF have all established themselves as symbols of power, regardless of the history and background of each individual group. Although they are all regarded as secret societies, each take a unique approach to anonymity.
And C&K parallels that journey of global scale experience reinventions, splinters, and schisms. Like the Freemasons and the IOOF, a second group, The Five, emerged from the shadows of C&K’s power and served as an all female reinvention. For a handful of years, they acted as UNR’s female counterparts to C&K’s lofty mission statements.
And, like the Assassins, Freemasons, and IOOF, C&K has established themselves as symbols of power at UNR.
Final Thoughts
Last night, C&K’s appearance at the Mackay might be described as a shadow of what it once was. They posted a short Instagram Story to announce their arrival, came early, left early, and (as of yet) have shared no other photos from the evening.
Their newsletter, while certainly still off-color, provided more constructive criticism than witty slander.
To be blunt, both the newsletter and the appearance beg the question, what is C&K doing this year that is even worth protecting their anonymity?
Bryan Allison, the aforementioned former C&K president in 1989, shared some advice for current and future members. “I would encourage them to remember the core mission and act responsibly,” he said.
Allison explained that, in 1989, they took the public eye to establish a better sense of integrity, as the group’s ultimate purpose is to touch upon campus wide issues. While the shift back to being anonymous took place after Allison had left his position among the brothers, he guessed that the future boys in white (hats) felt safer under the blanket of secrecy.
“Being anonymous means you aren’t accountable to other organizations or critics. But it’s very easy to forget the purpose of the organization, which is to work for the betterment of the campus. If you’re a campus leader, use anonymity wisely, not as a shield to make irresponsible or hurtful comments,” Allison said.
And there’s the great irony of C&K: the second they remember their true purpose, the need for anonymity disappears.
