Wally Mudd (aka Wally Wart), personifies the bumps, or "warts," as Mudders affectionately call them, that are the gravity-defying cinder blocks added as trim on most of the buildings on campus.

These bumps, the hallmark of HMC's architecture, were characteristic of the work of the famous architect Edward Durell Stone who, along with his colleague, Los Angeles architect Earl Heitschmidt, planned the campus and designed all the buildings constructed during the first 20 years.

There have been three generations of warts. The earliest warts were integral to the blocks and were part of the casting. A later series of warts were simply glued to standard molded blocks-a simple, but dangerous, design for HMC "wart climbers" who persist in this foolhardy sport.

The third generation of warts consist of two parts: the wart itself, which is seen, and a face shell with a 2-gauge horseshoe-shaped, galvanized steel rod that serves as a cast anchor that attaches the wart to the main blocks of concrete. These are poured at the same time as the larger block, then sandblasted for aesthetic purposes.

The current iteration of Wally, who personifies these decorative appendages, was created in 1992 by Sally Rich Arroyo in the Office of College Relations and freelance illustrator Will Suckow a Sacramento resident.