Many alumni know about the Wayne State tradition of making paper airplanes and tossing them upward into the tiles of the Student Center Building’s old ceiling. The long-prevailing notion is that the tradition started in 1969 with Wayne State engineering students. The tradition was so popular that in 2005, Detroit News columnist Neal Rubin devoted an entire column to it.

In that article, former Student Center director Michael Bowen told Rubin about the day when a few art students turned the ceiling into a canvas. “They did an abstract painting with airplanes,” Bowen said at the time. “You could see different movements and swatches of color.”

In its heyday, thousands of colorful paper planes dotted the ceiling. That number dwindled in recent years and finally zeroed out in 2014, when the renovation of the Student Center put an end to the tradition. But the planes will be remembered, says Student Center Director Andrea Gerber.

 “We know that the planes are important to some people and we want to honor that,” Gerber says. She and her colleagues learned via social media that there was a groundswell of support for saving the paper airplanes when the Student Center’s renovations were announced.

“So, we removed some of the full ceiling panels and left the planes intact,” she says.

And they saved them — all of them. More than 1,000 paper airplanes are now stored in boxes in the lower level of the newly renovated Student Center. Perhaps not as many as were once lodged there, but a hefty number nonetheless.

While storing them, Gerber and her crew looked at a few of the airplanes. They were constructed of a variety of materials: old calendar pages, flyers for student activities, event announcements and study guides — many of the materials dated back to the 1960s.

“A lot seemed to be old ads for Apple computers,” Gerber says with a chuckle. “The planes that stuck best had tacks taped into the nose with masking tape. And there was apparently a special launching technique to ensure success.”

But even tacks won’t help paper airplanes stick to the new ceiling. Those old acoustic tiles are gone, replaced with a sturdier — and paper plane-proof — material.

“At the beginning, the alumni association worked to make the paper airplanes available to alumni, but there didn’t seem to be much interest. We had people who wanted to know if we were going to preserve the tradition in some way,” Gerber says. “So we decided to create a display that would incorporate the written history of the paper airplanes in the Student Center ceiling along with some of the planes.”

Gerber worked closely with the Student Center construction team to communicate the vision. Drawings were made that featured a large display case holding an intact ceiling tile studded with preserved planes that would occupy a place of honor in the Student Center.

The display, unfortunately, was more than the budget would allow. But Gerber remains undeterred. “It’ll happen someday when we can find the budget for building the display. Until then, we’ve got the planes in storage and we’ll keep them there,” she says.

So, the good news for fans of the Student Center paper airplanes is that the planes’ final flight isn’t cancelled — just delayed.