Card Stunt King
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Bothwell as OAC yell king, 1924. |
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As OSU hits the road this week to take on the nationally-ranked Cal Bears, one is reminded of Lindley Bothwell. For the record, Bothwell, a Southern California native who graduated from Oregon Agricultural College in 1926, gets the credit for creating the first animated card stunts in college football history.
Card stunts were first developed in 1908 by students at Cal. The way it worked was that in a special section of the stadium, upwards of a thousand rooters, similarly dressed and on a given signal, would use oversized cards to form letters and images, the effect of which was to both strike terror in the hearts of visitors and provide a quick morale boost to the home crowd.
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For sure, the word "animated" is essential to our understanding of Bothwell’s contribution to these once-popular stadium antics. Bored with the mere flashing of cards to produce static pictures, Oregon State’s intrepid transplant added movement to the process. Card images now came to life, as in the example of the first time the technique was successfully demonstrated in a game.
The year was 1924 at OAC’s Bell Field. The opponent was Oregon. On Bothwell’s signal, the cards held by his helpers were flipped to form a Beaver. Below the Beaver’s tail was a lemon-yellow "O." Suddenly, in a sequence of four more panels, the tail was slowly brought down to smash the dreaded symbol of OAC’s archrival. Contemporary accounts indicate the crowd went wild.
Word of Bothwell’s invention quickly spread up and down the West Coast. In 1925, for example, University of Southern California’s yell king Burdette Henry had his rooters form a Trojan horse, followed by a sequence of frames in which the horse blinked and wagged his tail.
After graduating and returning home, Bothwell became one of the wealthiest citrus growers in America. He used his fortune to, among other things, amass one of the largest antique car collections in the world.
