When something is taken from you, something you need and something you had earned, it can feel like a stupefying blow. How could this happen? How could somebody allow themselves to take what isn’t theirs? Theft, which as a Robin Hood fan I will qualify as undeserved theft, is a cruelty. It is a violation of sacred space, of the commonality of ownership and personhood in which there are boundaries between what is mine and what is yours. When you lie, Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner) tells us, you steal a person’s right to the truth. And when you take a raincoat from the coatroom at Peirce, you steal someone’s right to warmth and to not get pneumonia.
Jack Mullen was just a normal guy living a normal life, walking around wearing flannel and occasionally telling mind blowing stories about how he almost actually cut his arm off, when his life changed. The fire nation attacked and Jack came to the Peirce coat room one day to find his raincoat was missing.
“I’ll admit,” Tyler Guerin, class of 2019, said. “I thought he was joking at first, that he had lost it and was just telling people that it had been stolen.” “I thought the same thing.” Brady Furlich, also a member of the class of 2019, chimed in. “But then I asked Jack about it again and he said that the bag he had left with the coat had been dumped on the floor and clearly gone through.”
Skepticism and the sheltered nature of Kenyon College be damned: a theft had indeed occurred.
I first came into contact with the Bring Back The Jacket campaign when I happened upon Jack in the library while he was creating the first edition of the raincoat poster. I was struck by several things, namely that this was genius, and that Jack was printing all of the posters on recycled paper. As I headed around campus with him leaving the posters on Peirce tables and taping some up with Grecian sculptures on the other side, I had a premonition. This was not going to be just another “I lost my thing and it’s my fault.” This was going to be big.
A couple days later, a new poster cropped up around campus. This one was not just an alert to Jack’s misfortune, but a direct attack on the perpetrator. The headline reads, “What’s your plan? Everyone’s seen the posters.”
“I figure now the whole campus knows that it’s my jacket,” Jack explained to me. “There’s no way this person can wear it now.”
It’s a bold move to go head to head with the thief that has left you penniless and jacketless in the encroaching wet season of Gambier, Ohio, but Jack Mullen has never been one for subtlety. To his dismay, the tactic did not yield results and, many, many posters later, Jack was still missing a coat. One might have given up at this point. One might have thrown in the towel, written raincoat on a premature Christmas list, and started wearing hoodies. One might do those things. However, in my limited experience, the kind of guy who has his raincoat stolen and then refuses to wear any sort of jacket during the extraordinarily rainy days that follow because he “Wants the thief to see that I’m suffering,” is not the kind of guy who gives up.
For phase two, Jack decided to call upon his expertise of being a person who people like and crowdsourced over twenty dollars in order to put in an order for one hundred buttons featuring the now iconic phrase, “Give Back The Jacket.” If you look around campus, you’ll see them on a lucky few backpacks, mine included.
Long and fascinating story short, Jack has not gotten his jacket back. There are some who claim to know the thief but refuse to give them up. It is unclear if all of these efforts will pay off or if justice will be had. Jack, however, has started wearing his other coats and making tentative plans for a benefit concert. What I take from this epic still being written is that finding what you are particularly looking for is not metric of success. Did Jack want his jacket back? Yeah, most definitely. Did he go about it in the funniest and most appealing of ways? Yeah, most definitely. There is importance in that, in the ability to transform something unfortunate and disappointing into a phenomena brightened the days of many a Kenyon student.
Image credits: Lily Alig