An historic look at four basic traditions every Beaver fan should know.

By George Edmonston Jr.
For Mid-Valley Sports

Ok, so you've got the orange T-shirt and OSU cap to match. Or maybe you're color-coordinated from head to toe, complete with orange tennis shoes and socks. And you know the words to the Fight Song and can form the school letters with your arms while you're belting out "watch our team go tearing down the field." Oh yes, and you're hoarse at the end of a game and you keep ticket stubs to prove you were there.

But is this enough to qualify you as a true Beaver fan?

Absolutely!

Oregon State version of a leprechaun during the 2001 Fiesta Bowl Pep Rally.

Still, there is a deeper level of involvement to be enjoyed, one that comes with knowing something about the history of the traditions we all act out at the games. A transformation takes place, an enriching of the experience that adds to the experience itself.

For example, when you've gone beyond knowing the words to your school's alma mater, to an understanding of who wrote the song and why, you've, in the words of cooking guru Emeril Lagasse, kicked things up a notch. Suddenly, your connection to your university becomes a spiritual experience; a pass for a touchdown or a perfect 10 in gymnastics becomes that much sweeter.

As with everything in life, traditions come and go, and OSU has said goodbye to hundreds of them over the years, from mascot Bernice Beaver, the Old Whale Bone and the Noise Parade to the "senior tables" at Wagner's Restaurant. A few, however, have remained resistant to change and the passing fancies of students, alumni and fans. Four of these are so important they define, literally, what it means to be an Oregon Stater. Collectively, they give OSU its special place in the universe.

School Colors: Since 1859, when Oregon State began as a small pioneer academy named Corvallis College, OSU has had two or three "official " school colors, depending on whom you talk to.

Until the spring of 1893, navy blue was the official color of Corvallis College. All this changed on May 2 when a faculty committee appointed by President John Bloss voted to replace blue with "orange." Not long after, "black" was selected by the student body as a background color and the Halloweenesque combination has been used ever since.

A year earlier, the college baseball team had been given black uniforms to wear by local tailor J. H. Harris and so the students' idea for black may have been inspired by this simple act of kindness. Or maybe the inspiration came from 11 miles down the Willamette River, in nearby Albany, where students at Albany College looked at Oregon State's new color scheme as a deliberate rip-off of their own tradition of having used orange and black since 1887. The dispute over who was entitled to what would last for three and a half decades, or until 1928, when both schools decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

Indeed, wearing orange and black is such an established OSU tradition now, it all seems cut-and-dried, beyond discussion or the need for inquiry.

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. There still lingers the question of whether the students' favoring of the color black so many years ago was ever an "official sanctioning" of the color.

If it was, OSU's Athletic Department has yet to get the word.
A recent check of its web site states: "Although Oregon State's athletic teams generally wear orange, black and white-based uniforms, orange is considered the school's official color."

Candy Hayes, OSU's Trademark Administrator says only that black and Pantone 165 orange are the official school colors for licensed products. OSU University Archivist Larry Landis says that as far as he's concerned, orange and black are OSU's "official" school colors.

"My feeling," he explains, "is that if it (black) was adopted, it satisfies as an official color. When faced with two colors, one is going to be dominant and here at OSU, by tradition, that's orange. However, the use of black as a background color has just as long a tradition and this in effect also sanctions it as 'official.' "

Landis also throws another kink into the history of this tradition by citing an article that appeared in the July 1, 1892, Corvallis Gazette, which describes the use of orange and black in the commencement ceremonies that year -- almost a year before orange was formally adopted by the faculty:

"For the commencement exercises the rooms of the college were tastefully decorated with evergreens, flags and the college colors, orange and black," the article said.

"This seems to be pretty strong proof that both colors were being used formally, even before they were formally adopted," Landis says.

Photo of Homer Maris from 1933 July Oregon State Monthly.

OSU's Alma Mater: Since it was first performed at an Oregon Agricultural College student convocation in 1918, it has generally been known by generations of Oregon Staters that William Homer Maris composed OSU's alma mater, "Carry Me Back."

What has been lost to institutional memory is that Homer Maris was a Duck, having received his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon in 1914.

Green and yellow diploma in hand, the Newberg, Ore., native moved to Corvallis. Along with his personal belongings, Maris moved his heart, falling in love with both the town and its agricultural college from day one. In addition to teaching and pursuing a graduate degree through OAC's College of Agriculture, the likable Maris spent his spare time composing the song that would bring to him both instant fame and an enduring legacy. Early drafts of the tune were rehearsed at a local barbershop owned by James McCarthy and located on Monroe Street, in a section of the neighborhood known then as College Hill. Doing the honors was a popular male quartet of which Maris was a member.

With the help of Professor W.T. Gaskins, OAC's director of music from 1908-1924, Maris published the song in 1918, also the year he received his master's degree. Dedicated to college librarian "Mother (Ida) Kidder," it was an instant hit on campus and almost instantly adopted as the college's official school song.

After graduation, Maris joined the army and was sent to the Letterman hospital in San Francisco to work as a laboratory assistant. After his discharge, he became a biological assistant with the U. S. Department of Agriculture, later switching to veteran's rehabilitation work with the U.S. Veteran's Bureau, both in Seattle and Washington, D.C. Rising steadily through the ranks, Maris became chief of agricultural rehabilitation for the bureau.

In September,1926, he moved back to Portland and a month later was residing in Oak Harbor, Wash., where he became a farmer. In the fall of 1930, he took an instructor's position at the University of Puget Sound. Returning from an Orpheus Club concert on his bicycle shortly after midnight on the evening of July 23, 1933, Maris was struck by an automobile and killed instantly.

In paying tribute to Maris in the September, 1933, issue of the Oregon State Monthly, editor Merle Lowden wrote: "Though his life was cut short at 43 years, his memory of the campus is immortal, as Oregon State students, alumni and faculty rise on numberless occasions to sing:

"Carry me back, to OSC
Back to her vine clad halls;
Thus fondly ever in my mem'ry
Alma Mater calls."

Photo of Harold Wilkins from the 1957 Summer Issue of the Oregon Stater.

"Hail to Old OSU": Even more so than Homer Maris' alma mater, this is the most popular OSU song in school history. Instantly recognized by Beaver fans as the "OSU Fight Song," this lively little ditty was penned by Harold A. Wilkins of the class of 1907...sometime around 1914.

Heard countless times at countless games during the athletic year, there's not an OSU student, fan or alumnus who does not know at least the opening two lines of Wilkins' song:"OSU our hats are off to you, Beavers, Beavers, fighters through and through...." Though the lyrics have been slightly altered over the years to conform to a changing culture, Wilkins' music has withstood the test of time, and the song remains the rallying cry around which many an Oregon State team has taken the court or field.

But who was Harold Wilkins and whatever became of him?

After graduation, he became a traveling auditor for the Oregon State Industrial Accident Commission. In 1922, he moved to Fresno, Calif., and by September of that same year was living in Hollywood, Calif., where he was employed as a traveling salesman. He would live in the Los Angeles area for the rest of his life.

In 1928, Wilkins took a job with the California Brush Company and by 1930 had worked his way into management. In 1941, Wilkins left brush sales and became an "importer." On June 1, 1957, he returned to campus for his Golden Jubilee Reunion and a photograph of him relaxing in a chair in the Memorial Union found its way to the cover of the summer issue of The Oregon Stater. That evening, after he had enjoyed an informal dinner with his classmates, Wilkins led the 30 returnees as they stood to sing a rendition of his famous composition. The convivial gathering ended with the sorrowful restrains of Auld Lang Syne. In less than two years he would be dead, passing away in Los Angeles on Feb. 17, 1959.

Photo of an early 'Benny', photo from the Oregon Stater photo archive.

Benny Beaver: The earliest reference to the name Benny Beaver can be found in Oregon State College's 1942 Beaver yearbook on page 14, where there is pictured a group of students with a beaver statue mounted on a trailer and named "Benny"

The photo was taken in connection with campus activities surrounding the '41 Homecoming. The 1941 Beaver yearbook, which covered student life for the year 1940, also pictures this same statue, but refers to that beaver likeness as "Bill." So between 1940-41 someone, probably a member of the OSC Rally Squad, came up with the name "Benny."

During World War II, the OSC student newspaper, the Barometer, frequently ran a sports column titled the "Gnawed Log." It was written by "Benny Beaver," the pen name for the paper's sports editor, Dick Jenning.

The lovable Benny Beaver cartoon icon, the grinning buck-toothed beaver head with the OSU beanie, was the creation of Arthur Evans, a graphic artist for Angeles Pacific (Fullerton, Calif.) submitted to OSU and approved for use around 1951.

Evans drew many college cartoon character mascots for car window decals and adopted the practice of often using the same cartoon for each school that had the same mascot. An example of this was Cal Tech, which had the very same "Benny" but with different letters on the beanie. Angeles Pacific is still producing OSU merchandise as a licensee. "Lovable" Benny, much to the chagrin of many alumni and fans at the time, was replaced by an "angry" beaver or "athletic" beaver likeness in 2001 and it is this beaver icon that is now employed by the OSU athletic department to represent sports at the school.

OSU's first Benny Beaver student mascot was George Kenneth Austin, an Oregon State alumnus of the class of 1953.

Growing up in the northern Willamette Valley near St. Paul, Austin had delighted as a boy watching rodeo clowns perform at the town's annual Fourth of July Rodeo. After failing at an attempt to become Oregon State's Yell King for the 1952 football season, Austin was approached by the guy who beat him out, Bill Sundstrom, who then asked him if he might want to join the rally squad as a school mascot, that is, dressing up as a beaver for the games.

In those days, student mascots were rare in college football in the West, although Cal had Oskie the Bear and Stanford had its "Indian." Why not a beaver for OSC? Austin, who today, along with wife Joan, owns A-dec, one of the world's largest and best-known manufacturers of dental equipment in Newberg, Ore., took the idea and developed it into one of OSU's most cherished traditions: student volunteers spicing up athletic events as Benny Beaver.

In a recent interview, Austin remembered this about creating Benny:

"I was told to 'liven things up. I immediately came back with...'well, what if I act like a rodeo clown?' I had gone to the St. Paul Rodeo for years and had always been intrigued by the clowns. I then said I could do something like the clowns did. I might carry some props around, maybe something like a plumber's friend. I could shake it at the referees or throw it at something. I also (thought) I might carry a 38 revolver with me and could 'shoot' the referee if I didn't like him. So I got permission to carry a real 38 revolver into the stadium loaded with blanks. The most fun I had with the plumber's friend was that I could go into a marching band and go up to the bass drummer when he was standing there not doing anything and beat on his drum. This would make the band mad and the crowd would laugh. I was going to make the crowd laugh if I could...and cheer.

"So I took off for Portland to a costume place and told them I wanted a beaver head. We took a paper mache head and put fur on it and buck teeth and a little beaver bonnet and fixed it so that it would sit on my shoulders and so that I could run around in it and so that I could see. Then I wore a pair of shoulder pads I got from the football trainer and a jersey and football pants and a pair of football shoes for cleats. By the third game, I was a 'fixture.' The crowd expected me to be there. There are stories in the Barometer and one photo shows me sitting on the goal post. My idea was that if the team can't stop 'um, I can stop 'um. I'll knock the ball down or distract them by being on the goal post. This was not something I came up with but something I heard from others that Oskie did. I would imagine now that if a mascot climbed the goal posts, his team would have to forfeit the game or something. In those days, we got away with it but as the ball came closer to the end zone, the referee would come down and tell me to get off. And I could hear him yelling at me that if I didn't come down it was going to be a 15-yard penalty. So I would come scooting down. I'm not sure when it was proposed that my mascot name was going to be 'Benny' but it must have been right from the beginning because the first photos in the yearbook show me as 'Benny.' Did anyone on campus know it was me? Joan did, and my fraternity brothers, and the team. I dressed in the locker room and became part of the team. They supported me and I ran out the tunnel with them. They would yell: 'Have a good game Benny!' However, I don't think anyone on the team actually knew my name was Ken Austin. They only knew me by my face.

"At the time, I was not aware that anyone had done a mascot routine before 1952, so I just assumed I was the first in school history to dress as Benny. I had no idea back then that what I did would lead to such a big school tradition."

Over the years, it has been often reported that Austin was the first person to dress as a beaver for an Oregon State football game. This honor actually goes to OSU alumnus Doug Chambers of Salem, who dressed in a homemade beaver suit for a halftime skit during a game with the University of Portland Pilots. It was a one-time performance for Chambers and his character didn't have a name.

George Edmonston Jr. is editor of the Oregon Stater and Eclips.