- Will you consider this?

What do Gryphons, Gorloks and Gusties have in common, other than beginning with the letter G?

I'm Christine Zak-Edmonds.

Join me as we find out some interesting trivia next.

(bright upbeat music) Have you ever wondered how school nicknames and mascots came about?

Some can be pretty strange, and some seem like they were a perfect fit.

Chris Pio from Galesburg discovered quite a lot of interesting information regarding mascots, nicknames, school colors and he published his findings in this book.

And he joins me now, welcome.

- Thank you Christine.

- Author of Gryphons, Gusties, oh, Gorloks and Gusties.

- Gryphons, Gorloks and Gusties.

- Well, okay, you're from Peoria originally.

- Born and raised.

- And then you went to?

- Monmouth College.

- Proud graduate of the Fighting Scots.

- Yes, ma'am.

- All right, and it's a Division 3 school.

- It is.

- So tell me a little bit about how, your background to begin with.

- I started running late as a high school senior, for Bob LaCroix at Central, and went to Monmouth to continue running and found out a little bit about Division 3 Monmouth is a non-scholarship school as are a lot of schools here, around the area.

And that kind of started my introduction into college athletics.

And I've been involved with college athletics ever since, for 40 years.

As a student athlete and as a coach, as a sports information director, and now an announcer and sport official.

So, it just kind of evolved into a lifelong fascination with athletics and sports.

- Well, so this book, so, Division 3, a lot of people know Division 1 names because of the publicity, all that kind of thing.

But this book, you really, there's over 450, or 400 schools?

- It's 439 active Division 3 schools as of this year.

So, I focused on those but since I started writing it, 11 schools have closed or consolidated for different reasons.

So that makes an even 450.

So it was a nice even number.

So I researched all 450 Division 3, which is the non-scholarship division of the NCAA.

So a lot of people as you said, are more familiar with Division 1, the state universities, the major college programs that you see in sports on TV every weekend.

- Televised.

- And a lot of the reference books that I used in preparing my book was, they were focused on the Division 1 schools, the ones that are more popular, or the ones that had really had quirky nicknames.

Well, I decided since I lived in the Division 3 world for 40 years, I was just going to write my first book on Division 3 schools.

So not only the ones that I was familiar with but some had some I'd never heard of.

And it was really a fascinating journey to find out how names came about, why teams are called what they're called, and how they choose to represent themselves on the field.

- So tell about that.

What is the process, is there a formula that they have?

- No, there's 450 different stories in the book, and that's one of the really neat things about it.

They might have the same nickname, but they didn't get it for the same reason.

Sometimes it's an event in the school's history.

Sometimes it's because of a person, sometimes it's because of the alliteration, like the title of my book.

Sometimes it's because of their location.

So, every school is different, every story is different.

And that was part of the amazing journey as I put together all these pieces of information, and tried to tie the facts in and tell the same basic story, 450 different ways.

- What a challenge?

- Yes.

So, it was just going through a lot of information and just grabbing what I thought were very interesting trivia facts, as you mentioned.

I've always been fascinated with statistics and records and facts and figures.

And so, I started from my focal point point, Monmouth.

- Monmouth, right.

- The schools in the Midwest Conference and here in the Midwest.

A lot of the schools that I competed against as a runner, that I coached against, that I found out about through my sports information work at Monmouth, and then it just expanded that.

And so there were some that I knew quite a bit about, and it came rather naturally.

And there were some that I heard about for the very first time.

Some nicknames as your intro alluded to, some nicknames and mascots aren't related.

And some of them have backstories that you just don't know about.

You think it's a common animal, or it's a common word, but how they reach that it's kind of the fascinating part behind the name.

- Let's start with Monmouth College.

They're the home of the Fighting Scots.

- The Fighting Scots.

- And there's an interesting story involved with them.

- In 1927 Monmouth, didn't have a sports nickname up to that point.

They'd been just been known by some generic terms, by their colors, crimson white.

In 1927, the students voted to adopt bulldogs, as their mascot, but a recent graduate Harold Herman, who worked in the PR office at the time, decided that wasn't very representative of a school with a very rich Scot Presbyterian heritage.

And so he coined the term, Fighting Scots, put it in all the newspaper stories and all the game reports.

And eventually it caught on and bulldogs became a thing of the past, and then we've been Fighting Scots ever since.

- And the students were okay with that?

- 'Cause of the religious connection.

- Affiliation, connection.

- And a lot of Division 3 schools, where you're talking about schools that are a 150, 200, 250 years old.

And so they, a lot of them have their origins with church affiliated organizations, with different denominations and different faiths.

Monmouth it's the Scot Presbyterian.

So those are Lutheran or Norwegian or Scandinavian.

So it all kind of goes back to the founding immigrants, the founding settlers of the schools.

And so oftentimes that that comes up in their nicknames, and they've kept them for that long.

- Well, how do they arrive at colors, or, again, is there a formula for that?

- No, and I didn't go much into colors.

Sometimes it became part of the story, there are some schools that still use color shade as their nickname.

Or that are associated with a specific color, but I didn't dive into why schools chose a particular color combination.

Sometimes they've changed, some of them have stayed the same for almost 200 years, but I didn't go into that much.

There was enough information with nicknames and mascots.

- Elsewhere, right.

- Colors, that might be another book.

- And a difference between a nickname and a mascot.

- In my mind there is, and again, that was part of my, I guess, background and my sports information influence.

I've always separated the two.

The nickname is what the school, the team chooses to call its athletic teams.

The mascot is what you choose to represent that name.

So it can be a costume, it can be a person, it can be an image or a picture.

So, I separated those, I made that point early on in the book in the introduction that a lot of people confuse the two, they think that the nickname is the mascot and those two are interchangeable when really they're not.

For some schools, that's the truth, that's the case.

But for others, the nickname and the mascot are completely unrelated.

- Another interesting trivial fact.

- Yes.

- Well, so Knox College, that they were-- - Knox College, it used to be the Siwash.

- Something before.

which was a name that was presented to them by one of their alums back in the 1890s.

He was a writer.

It was just a fictional term that he made up, (Christine chuckles) but it ended up being associated with native Americans, it was a derogatory term.

- Oh.

- And so Knox chose to switch, and they chose the Prairie Fire.

And they've been the Prairie Fire for a couple of decades now.

So, that was one example of-- - Yeah, I wondered if it was a tribe or something.

- No, it was like it was a fictional name.

- Okay, interesting.

- Native American nicknames, a lot of those have gone by the wayside because of the NCAA crackdown in 2005.

The NCAA put a ban on native American images.

So a lot of schools that were Braves, Indians, Red men, things of that sort, Warriors, that used images of Indian people.

They've since changed because of the cultural sensitivity to that group of people.

And that even continues to this day with some other schools.

- They're still evolving.

- They're still changing and they're still under scrutiny or under pressure to change their names to get away from a violent part of history or some connotation, some connection to something that people see as negative or abusive.

- Right.

You've done schools east, west, coast, you know.

From up here to down there and all around.

- All around.

- Did you talk to any of the sports information directors also about some of these things?

- I didn't talk to them in person, but a lot of communication back and forth by email or by text messages.

There are 70 colored pictures in the book.

I tried to pick a good cross section to represent the diversity of the Division 3 group.

So, I had to ask permission to use those images.

I requested some information from sports information directors, from athletic directors, from marketing communication, PR people, to kind of fill in the blanks.

Things that the story wasn't completely told, and so I had to approach some of them, and they were very, very generous, and willing to share their story.

Because again, I'm from the Midwest.

That's my roots, I know a lot of the stories from here in the middle part of the country, but the schools out east with a little bit deeper history.

- Right.

- Some newer schools or some that changed for different reasons.

I had to reach out for other people to fill in the blanks and they were very, very nice to do that.

- Well, and then it turns out as we were arranging this interview, I sent you a text and I said, "Oh, by the way, I know a Tufts Jumbo."

And you said, you knew at Tufts Jumbo too.

So, we know the same person.

- Exactly, it's the daughter of a friend of ours.

- (laughs) Yes.

- Who was an athlete of mid era at Monmouth.

He was a track and field athlete with me at Monmouth.

His daughter is a volleyball player at Tufts, and she is a Jumbo.

And that's one that I've picked out as kind of a neat example because the backstory is really very fascinating.

Jumbo was the name of the prized circus elephant of PT Barnum.

- Correct.

- Of Barnum and Bailey circus fame.

Barnum was an original trustee of Tufts University out in Medford, Massachusetts, and Jumbo was killed in a railway accident in 1885.

So Barnum donated the skin of the elephant.

They stuffed it, it was on display at the university.

And even though it was destroyed by a fire in 1975, the spirit of Jumbo lives on.

And the students, the administration, they decided that's how they were gonna honor Barnum and his elephant.

So, Tufts Jumbos there's the nickname, and their mascot is a costume elephant.

And they've got a huge statue of an elephant on the college campus.

So that's one really unique example.

Jumbo, ironically was never in the English language until that elephant came along.

- Ah!

- So, it was a source of-- - Another quirky trivia.

- It was the only mascot to produce a new dictionary entry.

- Wow, wow!

- So it's just one of those fascinating backstories.

So there was a school in-- - Right, what so what other kind of fun things have you found out?

- There's a school in Maine, Bowdoin College.

They are the Polar Bears, one of two schools in the country that use the polar bear as their nickname.

And the reason for their choice was that one of their alums, Robert Perry, discovered the North Pole in 1903.

And four years later, they honored his expedition and his discovery of the Pole by choosing the polar bear as their mascot.

And one of the other gentlemen on the original expedition was also a Bowdoin graduate.

He shot a polar bear in Greenland in 1915, shipped the carcass back to the school.

They stuffed it, and it's still on display on campus.

The Bowdoin Polar Bears.

- Wow, wow!

And what about some of the other schools around here or out west, I mean, 450 schools?

That's a lot of different nicknames.

- Oh, yeah, and again, there's those fascinating stories from all different parts of the country.

And, you know, some are related to, again, their religious connection, some are related to professions, some are related to colors.

Some are very common, Hawks and Lions and Tigers and Eagles, the ones that people commonly use.

But there again, how they got those names aren't always the same.

Now there are 17 schools that use Hawks, for example, in Division 3, River Hawks, War Hawks, Sea Hawks, Duhawks, Kohawks.

Where my daughter goes to school at Coe College in Iowa, but they all have different backstories.

- Such as?

- The Kohawks, again, to use it as an example I'm well familiar with, the Ko, the K-O, came from an Indian prefix that a professor suggested in 1922, to put on the Hawks, Hawkeyes for the State of Iowa.

So, they wanted to be like the Hawks, and that's what Kohawks means in Indian language.

So Kohawks, the alliteration, again, as your introduction alluded to some of the names were a perfect match.

- Right.

- Allegheny Gators in Pennsylvania, sometimes the alliteration is there.

- It's just right there.

- The name just seems to fit.

- Well, now you have Griffins, I've never seen the spelling of Gryphons like that.

My sorority has a rampant Griffin, guarding her shield, But it's spelt-- - That's one of the reasons why I chose the Gryphons of Sarah Lawrence College in New York for the title.

- Okay.

- I was trying to find a title for the book that would pop.

I didn't wanna just make it a generic title.

I wanted it to stand out.

And so I went looking through the nicknames and I've hit on the alliteration.

Now, I had Lions, Tigers and Bears in my head but I didn't wanna use those common animals.

- That's already been done.

- Exactly, so I thought, well, let's come up with something different.

So, I found the 3G words that had the pleasant alliteration, just kind of rolls off the tongue, but Gryphon stood out because of that reason, because it's the unconventional spelling.

Griffin, G-R-I-F-F-I-N is the mythological creature.

- Is usually.

- But they chose to use that unconventional spelling, G-R-Y-P-H-O-N.

So that's why I chose Gryphon.

Gorloks is another mythical creature that was made up by the students of Webster University in St. Louis.

Gorlok, is a compound word formed by the intersection of Gore Avenue and Lockwood Avenue, which meet in the middle of campus in Webster Groves, Missouri.

(Catherine chuckles) So Gorloks was again, a fictional creature that they created.

- They just came up with.

- Claws of a cheetah, face of a (indistinct), horns of a buffalo.

- Wow!

- And gave it (Christine laughs) some legendary properties, and came up with their own little unique story.

Gusties is Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

One of a few schools in the country that just to have a derivation of their name.

Gustavus Adolphus is name for the former Norwegian king.

And so Gustavus, Gusties.

So each of them have a little bit of a unique twist to them, rather than just a common name.

- You've been working on this book, or you worked on the book for?

- Four years.

Four years.

- Four years.

Like really concentrating.

- I had a window of opportunity in the spring of 2017 to start writing.

So I dusted off the idea that will drive around in my head for probably 20 or 25 years, to put this collection of stories on paper.

And I started writing.

And it just took off from there.

- You never even, did you jot down notes all those other 20 years or?

- No, it was just all in my head?

- Oh, boy.

- And I just finally, I just finally had the time, and took the time to put those pieces-- - Get out of here!

- Out of my head onto paper.

And like I said, then it just took off from there.

So there are 42 conferences in Division 3.

I just went conference by conference, school-by-school, and tried to gather as much information as I could on my own.

And then as I said before, I reached out to others that they could fill in the blanks for me.

And I didn't wanna just write a book of words.

So I thought I'd put a couple of pictures in there.

I couldn't put a picture in for all our 450 schools, because not all 450 schools have an actual physical mascot.

So I thought I'd pick a nice cross section.

And I think the book does that.

I think there's some of the common, and there are some of the unusual.

But putting it all together it took that long to finally get it to where I was comfortable and I was proud of it too.

And so it just took a little while to tweak it and to refine it and to put everything in place.

- And you found someone to publish it, and then you also, it's available on Amazon.

- It's available on Amazon.

I went through a self publishing format.

I had a couple interested traditional publishing companies, if you will, but they had a longer timeline and a bit of a higher price tag than what I was willing to invest at the time.

I didn't know what the audience would be.

I didn't know how the book would be received.

I didn't know if there was anybody out there that enjoyed those particular pieces of trivia.

- And you found out that?

- There are.

(Christine laughs) So, I kept it secret for a while, I worked on it when I could here and there, along with everything else that life throws at you.

And so, it wasn't until a couple of months before I actually published it this past September then I kind of let it out of the bag to my wife and some friends, and told them what I was working on.

And they were a bit skeptical.

And fortunately, the reception has been very humbling and very unexpected.

But just along the journey, just the process of putting it in a format where it could be published on my own timeline, and to my own liking was really very, very, very gratifying.

- Okay, and it's available on Kindle now, for people who don't have to, See, I'm one of those, I have to have it in my hands.

- It's available for there's a paperback.

- All right.

- For the traditional reader, and a as a Kindle electronic book for the advanced, if they wanna read it on their computer or on their tablet or on their smartphone, they can buy the electronic version.

It took me a couple of weeks to transition the print copy over to the electronic copy.

Because again, that was part of the process, I was doing the formatting and making certain the gutters and the margins and the pictures were placed just right so that the pages looked good on the printed page, instead of on a computer screen, different sizing and all that.

So that was probably harder than writing.

It was actually formatting it, (Christine laughs) learning the formatting process and doing that part of it.

- Are you pretty technologically advanced, or have you become so because of this?

- A little both.

- Okay.

- I guess I thought I was, (Christine chuckles) but there were some pieces of the process that took me a while to master.

And so when I write another book, then I think it'll go quicker than the first one.

The first one was a lot of trial and error, a lot of revising and rewriting and reformatting it, getting it just right, how I liked it, and then how it would transfer over to the printed page.

So people could open it up and look at it, like you said, "Hold it in their hands."

So getting it from my head to paper, and then from paper to-- - Correct margins and all that, - My hands, to hold it actually to hold the finished product in my hand was really a tremendous feeling.

- Wow!

So, you're hinting that maybe you'd like to write a second book, so we'll go to Division 2 now?

- Well, Division 2, yep.

I started again with just Division 3.

As I said, a lot of the books that had been published previously on the subject mascots or nicknames, kind of jumbled the two together.

They didn't separate out as much as I did.

They were inaccurate, they were incomplete.

They were outdated, because a number of schools have changed and there are continuing to change.

So, and again, because of my experience and my comfort with Division 3, that's where I started.

And I thought I'll share all of the Division 3, not just the ones that I'm familiar with, but I'm just gonna do Division 3.

And that's gonna start the journey, but I'm about halfway through writing the Division 2 book, and then Division 1.

There's an AI group, there's junior colleges.

So there's a lot of different subgroups of colleges and universities.

I just chose to start with the ones that I was most familiar with.

And all of them are from around here.

I went to Monmouth, went to Knox, Augustina, Eureka, Illinois Wesleyan, Illinois Central, Rockford, all those schools that maybe some of the viewers of your program have attended, their children have attended.

They know somebody who goes to school there.

- But they don't know how it all came about.

- But they don't know why they're called what they're called.

So I thought I'd share that information with the public.

And again, the reception has been really, really wonderful.

- And isn't that fun.

That's gotta be rewarding in itself.

And you said that you and your dad were very involved in sports for ever and ever and ever.

- That's how I got my start.

I played Little League Baseball at Woodrow Wilson, a great school down on the corner of Fenella and Forest Hill.

And then I got into soccer, and played the Little Youth Soccer, and then started running when I was a late in high school.

And, my dad was the sports inspiration.

You know, we grew up watching the Cubs and the Bears on TV, and he was a lifelong Chicago fan.

So I dedicated the book to him.

He passed away unexpectedly in 2020, and that was one of the things really Christine that spurred me to get it finished.

It was just a little bit here and a little bit there.

I hadn't really set up myself a timeline, but then when my dad passed, it just kinda made me sit up and think, and I didn't wanna leave it unfinished.

I wanted to wrap it up, and I wanted to get it out so that my kids could see it.

And so that I had something to share with the world.

And so my dad was part of the inspiration.

- The inspiration.

- Not necessarily at the start, but certainly at the end.

- Did he know you were working on this?

- Oh, no, no, he didn't.

- Did you ever discuss anything with him about that?

- No, we didn't.

Which I guess is a regret looking back at it.

But no, because again, it certainly wasn't finished at that time.

I wasn't near finish at that time, but it just in turn spurred the process up a little bit, made me maybe work harder.

I wanted to get done at the start of a school year.

So it was all accurate.

So I finished it up in the spring of '21 and got it published in September.

- Interesting.

Well, what do your kids and your wife think of this, this whole big process that you've been really concentrating on?

They didn't know you were concentrating on really?

- No, they didn't.

My wife was a bit skeptical, but now she's entirely supportive.

She's the social media presence in our house.

So she spread the word initially on Facebook, and through her social circles.

My children, I think they appreciate it, they recognize it, I now they understand my obsession, my passion with it.

Hopefully maybe over the years they will come to recognize that, but they know it's something that dad really cares a great deal about.

And they were pleased to see it actually in print as well, to see it in our hands.

And so they each have a copy of it and they've showed it to their friends and their families, and everybody has had really wonderful things to say about it.

So, it makes it worthwhile to get it out.

- It's a legacy.

- Yeah, yeah, that was why I wanted to get done, get it across the finish line, and I'm very pleased with how it's turned out.

- Amazing.

So that's your bucket list is to write at least one more book?

- Well, I wanted to go all three divisions of the NCAA.

Again, I was an NCAA student athlete.

And again, that started 40 years ago.

So Division 3, Division 2, Division 1.

So optimistically, there are two more in the works.

I'll work on Division 2 over the next few months, and hopefully get that out before the start of the next academic year.

And then Division 1 follows after that.

- And you're doing this in your spare time though, because you have another job?

- That's right.

That's right, (Christine chuckles) It's just a passion, it's a hobby.

It started when I was at Monmouth, and one of the things I did at Monmouth before I left as SID that I'm most proud of is I went back through 100 years of sports results, and then I created the all-time record book.

And that's how I researched the origin of the Monmouth College Fighting Scots.

- Okay.

- And so that's really where the nickname and the mascot fascination came from, was digging into my own album out of history, and then it just spread from there.

So, I picked a starting point, I don't know where it's gonna finish, I don't know where it's gonna end, but it's a really wonderful journey to be on.

- That kinda makes it exciting.

- Yes, it makes it exciting because as much as you think you know about a school, or as much as you think, "Oh, there's no really interesting story behind that," you open up the book and there is one.

So, as I tell people that have read the book or have expressed interest in it, they may know some.

They went to school there, again, you know, their child goes to school there.

It's in their conference or their state or where they live, they may know some of the 450 schools, but they don't know all of them.

So you turn the page and there's another story.

And you think, "Oh, that's interesting.

"That's really cool."

Or you turn the page and there's a picture, "Oh, that's really neat."

Hopefully it's a page turner, hopefully people enjoy reading it just as much as I did writing it.

- And they're in alphabetical order.

So if somebody wants to specifically.

- Alphabetic order.

- Pick something else.

- I started it with conferences in mind.

I broke it up by conference.

But then conferences changed so much now with the political and economic landscape of college athletics, that I thought, well, that it's gonna be outdated very quickly for some schools.

And so I thought alphabetical that'll never change.

- Okay, exactly.

- So I went back to the, A, through Z.

So if they wanna look at Rhode Island College, or they wanna look at Muskingum, or they wanna look at Lake Forest or Bowdoin, - They can find it.

- They can find it, its A through Z. Yeah.

- Well, thank you very much, Chris Pio for being here and sharing that story.

- If I can I'll give you one final mascot connection.

It's got a television connection.

- All right.

- Gwynedd Mercy University in Pennsylvania chose Griffin as their athletic symbol, the traditional spelling G-R-I-F-F-I-N.

But in trying to find a mascot name for their costume, Griffin, an assistant athletic director at the time decided to coin an acronym for the four academic pillars of the university, mercy, education, reflective learning and virtue, M-E-R-V, MERV the Griffin, MERV Griffin - Oh fun, fun.

- There's the television connection with mascots.

- That's a good trivium.

All right, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

Thanks Chris Pio for being with us, stay safe and healthy.

(bright upbeat music)