Go Ducks

Just a little Saturday Evening nonsense. What can it hurt?

I got to thinking during an off moment this week about the mascots of the schools I have attended as a student and a few where I have taught, as well. I was a freshmen at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. We did not play intercollegiate sports at the time, so we really didn't need a mascot. Messiah has recently become the Falcons. That seems harmless enough, from a social standpoint, but a lot of birds and animals get twitchy when there is a falcon in the neighborhood, so I don't want to make them all warm and fuzzy.

I finished my undergraduate work at Wheaton College, in Illinois. We were the Crusaders and proud of it. I still remember when crusade was a word with mostly positive connotations. Dwight Eisenhower's memoir of the war was called Crusade in Europe and I don't remember fuss about it. Now crusade is seen by many, including me, as the Christian equivalent of jihad, so there is no shortage of fuss to be had.

After graduating from Wheaton, I began graduate work at Miami University--a school the sports announcers still call "Miami of Ohio", meaning that it isn't the "real" Miami--and we were, at that time, the Redskins. I am sure the Miami Indian tribe was the Redskins we were supposed to be, but the term either became offensive or was said to be offensive--not, note, the same thing at all--and was changed to the Redhawks. Redhawks is an inoffensive name, certainly, since it doesn't mean anything. It does not even, as a falcon does, make the locals nervous. They gave me a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) at Miami, which was good because I learned to be a student at Miami.

My first college teaching job came next, at Malone College, now Malone University, in Canton, Ohio. It was still a new school when I got there and some of the old stories were still around. My favorite was the school's decision to call the new school "the Rangers." It is a Quaker school and my guess is that they wanted something vigorous enough to be plausible as an athletic mascot but not very aggressive. The way I heard the story, the name had already been proposed for adoption, but some attentive board member stopped the vote. "Wait a minute," he said. "Say it out loud." They did. And they heard, "Malo-o-o-o-o-ne Rangers." Not good. Although they might have been able to get a Tonto from Miami University, while they were still the Redskins. They changed the name, on the spot, to Pioneers and that is what is was when I was there.

Teaching at Malone changed my career aspirations. I liked college teaching a lot and saw immediately that I would need a Ph. D., so I went off to Oregon to get one and became a Duck. Not much mystery about Oregon mascots. It's Oregon. It's wet. The major mascots are the Ducks and the Beavers. I learned today that the Duck mascot is called Puddles. It's cute, but that mascot does a pushup for every point the Ducks score and this year, we scored over 50 points a game. That doesn't mean 50 pushups. You do seven after the first touchdown and fourteen after the second touchdown and so on. It's a lot of pushups and the announcers who came to really like the Ducks this year, also came to like Puddles.

That leaves only Westminster College, where I taught for awhile after Oregon. Westminster was the Titans, which is a little awkward because there is no really good representation of what a titan is. The older titans were the rulers of the earth until Zeus and the other Olympians overthrew them. The younger titans are the offspring of Gaia and her son Uranus, so that isn't quite anything you want to do at halftime either. We didn't take it all that seriously at Westminster. We adopted the USC Trojan--complete with horse and Greek helmet--and said he was a Titan. Those who knew better didn't care all that much.

That's a lot of schools. And a lot of stories. Good for a cool rainy Saturday evening.