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Piece of History: The Legend of Percy Heavythinker
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Cedar Rapids has plenty of colorful characters in its history, but one of the most enduring at McKinley never actually existed. His name? Percy Heavythinker.
The story begins in 1923, when McKinley Junior High (now STEAM Academy) art teacher Grant Wood (yes, that Grant Wood) was in charge of drawing profile silhouettes of every student for the school annual, the McKinley Mirror. When he ran out of real students to fill a row, Wood simply invented one. Thus was born “Percy Hevvythinker, Our Honor Man,” a model student who supposedly aced his classes, never skipped a day, and never once ran in the halls. Mischievous classmates, the yearbook explained, would do better to imitate him than to stick pins in his chair.
This might have been a bit of temporary fun, but Percy didn’t stay a one-time joke. By 1925, he had become the school’s ideal student: “Perfect Percy,” the first to enroll at McKinley and the embodiment of every virtue. Wood, rarely content with just ink and paper, took things a step further. He sculpted a rubber mask of Percy, based on his own face, and each year a student was chosen to wear it in the school’s group photo. Percy even showed up in the yearbook staff roster as the official student critic and adviser.
So while Percy Heavythinker never walked the halls, his legend did. In fact, the mask is still on display at McKinley today, so thanks to Grant Wood’s mischievous imagination, Percy attends the same school a century later.
Tara Templeman is curator at The History Center. Comments: curator@historycenter.org
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