(Note to readers: This article first appeared in the March 1999 printed version of Electric Consumer.)As an Indiana statewide publication, the
Electric Consumer takes no sides when it comes to high school hoops and Hoosier hysteria this time of year.
But, as the publication of the electric cooperative community, we can’t help but feel a little partial to some schools with nicknames and mascots that strike a spark in the cockles of our heart.
We’re talking about team nicknames with logos that look as if they might have been peeled off the side of some electric co-op line truck somewhere.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many.
“It’s not a very commonly used icon,” said John Edgerly, a West Lafayette resident who’s become an expert on high school nicknames as a collector of booster buttons. “It’s surprising it’s not used more often.”
We’re surprised, too. After all, electricity offers all the qualities a team would want to emulate, doesn’t it?
Electricity is energetic. It vibrates and pulsates. It’s powerful and precise. It’s reliable and clean. Electricity has been at the heart of some of our country’s most ambitious and bold engineering achievements: the Hoover Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam and rural electrification!
Electricity is electrifying!Yet, of the 384 schools belonging to the Indiana High School Athletic Association, only a handful of nicknames are even remotely related to electricity.
One of the problems with electrical nicknames, Roger Schermerhorn noted, is coming up with a mascot. “What do you do with a lightning bolt?”
As principal at
West Noble High School near Ligonier, he has seen the troubles. West Noble, served electrically by Noble REMC, is known as “The Chargers.” The school’s logo is a lightning bolt cutting through a circle.
He said the school once had a person dressed up in a foam rubber lightning bolt. But zowie! To us, that get-up sounds too much like Reddy Kilowatt, the shocking mascot once used by the investor-owned electric utilities. (Reddy was the arch nemesis of lovable safety-minded Willie Wiredhand, the electric plug who still plugs electric co-ops.)
Carroll High School in Fort Wayne is also known as “The Chargers.” That school’s logo is a C with a lighting bolt slashing through it.
Three of the six schools nicknamed “Chargers” in the state use the thundering horse sense of “Charger,” not the thunder from the sky sense.
The
North Montgomery High School's Chargin’ Chargers are kind of a hybrid. The school, served electrically by Tipmont REMC, uses a knight mounted on a charging stallion for its logo. But the knight brandishes a bolt of lightning instead of a sword.
The
Elkhart Central High School Blue Blazers sport perhaps the state’s most unique mascot, a little character named
“Mr. B” who blazes across the sky on a lightning bolt.
According to the school, Mr. B was created during the 1953-54 basketball season. Elkhart fans were so impressed with the Muncie Bearcat mascot, they wanted one, too. So, the head of the school’s art department, the late Howard James, was asked to create a mascot.
According to legend, James wasn’t too excited about the project, so, “he designed the ugliest thing he could think of.” The crazed-looking character with the corkscrew nose was unveiled during pregame warm-ups for the 1954 sectional.
The mascot must have been considered lucky, though; Elkhart Central advanced to the state tournament that year only to lose to none other than those inspirational Bearcats from Muncie. (Muncie, of course, then lost the championship to tiny Milan, but that’s a whole other story.) Mr. B’s been around since.
Another school with an electrifying name is
Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis. Its teams are known as “The Flashes” and use a lightning bolt logo. It’s logical to assume the flashes might have taken their name in deference to Benjamin Franklin and his kite-flying experiment.
Both
Clay City and
Eminence high schools use an unlikely mascot, an eel. Even more unlikely is that both schools play in the same seven-team Tri-Rivers conference. Though not officially called the “Electric Eels,” Edgerly said, “Everybody thinks ‘eel,’ and automatically thinks ‘electric eel.’”
He noted The News in Clay City uses the running head, “Clay City Eel-ectrifying Sports News,” when it runs results. Eminence, in Morgan County, he said, uses a salt water eel that has been depicted with electric bolts coming off it.
Edgerly said a lot of the colorful names around the state disappeared with consolidations and were replaced with ho-hum, homogenized names.
One of those teams grounded by consolidation was the “Lightning 5” of Warren High School. Chuck Wohlford, a retired teacher and coach from the area, recalled they wore lightning flashes on their warm-ups with a big number five in the middle. He said he believes they received their moniker in the 1920s from a Marion sports writer who dubbed them “because they were so quick.”
The Lightning 5 blitzed the basketball circuits around northeastern Indiana until 1967 when the Huntington County schools consolidated.
Another school, an elementary that was phased out amid consolidations in the 1980s, had — we’re convinced — the best mascot of all time. The school, we’re sorry to say, wasn’t in Indiana, though. It was along the southern edge of Missouri. Carroll County REMC member Roy Patrick discovered the school when he lived in the area in the early 1980s and shared its history with us. When the school, Ridgeview, was closing down, he bought one set of the team’s basketball warm-ups and shorts at an auction.
The warm-ups, bright red with white and blue trim, had “Ridgeview” stitched across the back. Patrick said the school patrons were so proud of the school’s all-electric status that beneath the school’s name, “All Electric School” was stitched as well. But the real kicker was the patch on the sleeve. It featured none other than electric co-op mascot Willie Wiredhand. It was the same kind of patch many electric co-ops put on the uniforms of linemen!
The entire school system must have appreciated electricity because the
West Plains High School that Ridgeview fed into was called (and still is called) “The Zizzers.” Patrick said, “As outsiders, we always kind of chuckled about that. The term ‘Zizzers’ was new to us.” The school’s logo was a bolt of electricity.
That kind of loyalty to the electric company, where consumers would adopt the co-op’s mascot as their own, might be harder to find in these more sophisticated days. But Patrick said he could see and understand where those Missouri folks were coming from. At age 63, he still remembers when the poles first went up when he was a first grader in White County. “It was a big, big deal,” he said.
So is Hoosier hysteria. And though no team wears Willie on its uniforms today, electric co-ops take pride just in knowing they’ll be in the background — keeping the lights on in many of those high school gyms where so many games are played and memories are made.
(Note to readers: We found one high school from Granite Falls, Minn., that used Reddy Kilowatt for its mascot. The school became part of a consolidation and no longer exists, but here's a link to a Web site that pays homage to Reddy that has some photos of the school's memorabilia: http://www.reddykilowatt.org/2008/12/30/the-granite-falls-high-school-kilowatts/comment-page-1/#comment-5571.)