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Tatar Warrior LbNA #58388 (ARCHIVED)

Owner:Prince Igor
Plant date:Jun 21, 2011
Location:
City:Detroit
County:Wayne
State:Michigan
Boxes:1
Found by: Freedom C&J
Last found:Aug 10, 2012
Status:FFFFFFm
Last edited:Nov 25, 2015
Tatar Warrior

I have attended, graduated and taught at various colleges and universities in my career. To commemorate them, I have decided to make a letterbox for each of the schools. If a college has more than one campus, each campus will get a letterbox (provided I was at that campus for some classes). There are 10 schools/campuses in this series, with one of them being a mystery university.

Wayne State University is where I received my graduate degree. I also taught here both as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and as an Adjunct Instructor. Good times.

From 1927 to 1999, WSU was nicknamed the Tatars, an ethnic group from Central Asia. The nickname was then changed to Warrior because it was felt that most people didn’t know who or what a Tatar is, or else associated it with dental plaque. Around the same time, Marquette University changed its nickname from Warrior to Golden Eagles because they thought Warrior was disrespectful to Native Americans. Maybe we should have traded. Meanwhile, back at Wayne, it seems a horse was at first used to portray a Warrior (I have a sweatshirt as proof), but it seems a stylized W is now the official logo. I guess a stylized W coming at you is scarier in a more surrealistic way then a sword-wielding Tatar on horseback. Or dental plaque.

Start at Old Main and walk west on Warren Ave to 2nd Ave. Cross Warren Ave at 2nd Ave and enter the campus. The Life Science building should by on your right and Biological Science building on your left. I did all my research on the top floor of the Life Science building. Start walking north into campus along what WSU calls a Mall. You will come to a house on your right that has the address 5104. I had an office on the second floor, right corner room. Keep walking. You will come to a building on your left in which the top floors resemble a computer punch card. Keep walking until you reach the end of the computer punch card building but stop before you reach the next building on the left that has a Gothic architecture. On your right will be a walkway (aka mall) which is guarded by a small sculpture called “Sentinel 2”. A short distance down this walkway/mall are two bench areas, a small one on the left and a larger one on the right. Go into the one on the right (it has more benches). At the back of this bench area, there is a large square concrete block that used to have a plaque or statue on it (so it seems). Sit on this block and reach straight back into the bushes and at the base of this block is the letterbox.