In 1972, DeLine returned to the laundry room in Holden Hall to discover something quite shocking.

Some one had stolen his pants.

“I was stupid. I put my laundry in the dryer, went back up to my floor, came down later and it was gone,” DeLine said. “I remember they took a pair of blue jeans I had with a patch on the back. We put patches on our pants back then.”

While few current students have taken the search for their missing articles to the extent DeLine did, stolen laundry is an issue that still presents itself occasionally on campus.

Anthropology freshman Madeline Hilton had a similar experience when her laundry was taken from North Case Hall on Feb 5.

“I went to get it from the dryer after class and it was gone,” she said. ”(It was) not even in the lost and found piles … I was convinced I just misplaced them.”

Hilton said she has filed a police report but her laundry has yet to surface.

Even years later, no amount of patching could cover the hole left by the theft of DeLine’s laundry. DeLine kept his eyes open for any potential perpetrators to no avail.

A couple of weeks later, DeLine went to see a movie playing in Wilson Hall when he saw a pair of jeans that looked familiar.

Too familiar.

“I thought, ‘that girl has my pants on!’” DeLine said.

At the time he was so certain this girl had swiped his jeans, he confronted her.

DeLine said he could prove “without a shadow of a doubt” that the pants belonged to him — if the girl would only lift her shirt so he could point out the patch on the back pocket and prove, once and for all, they were his.

“But there was no patch,” DeLine said. “I just wanted to crawl in a hole, it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.”

One common mistake that students make is leaving their laundry unattended.

Residence Education and Housing Services advises against it.

“There have been five reported incidents of laundry going missing or being stolen since August 2013,” said Ashley Chaney, assistant director of communication for REHS.

“There are no patterns to the locations, dates, or how the items go missing except that in all cases the items were left unattended for a period of time,” Chaney said.

While laundry theft is rare, Chaney said that students who do experience it should report it to a Resident Assistant.