Back in the day – the 1800s – the senior class of certain schools on the east coast would celebrate the completion of their courses with festivities and much merriment — and a school ritual called “planting the ivy.”  Graduating seniors planted evergreen vines on campus, usually near a wall or building, and marked the occasion with a decorated stone engraved with the dates of their graduation.

It didn’t take long for the enthusiastic plants to crawl up the walls of buildings and stone walls, but it wasn’t until 1935 that anyone referred to the schools by what was growing on them. In an article written by Associated Press sports writer, Alan Gould, coined the term, “Ivy League.”

In truth, the use of “ivy” to describe the eight private colleges and universities that made up their football league appeared two years earlier when New York Herald Tribune sports writer, Stanley Woodward, wrote “ivy colleges” when reporting on upcoming football games between these schools, and this was how the description, “Ivy League School” was born.

And for anyone wondering, the Ivy League is made up of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; Columbia University in New York City; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey; and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

And speaking of Yale, it was the first of the Ivy League schools to adopt a mascot which, the school claims, is the oldest mascot of any in the country. It also became the first institution to have a live animal as an athletic team mascot.  “Handsome Dan” made his first appearance in 1889 when a freshman, Andrews B. Graves, saw a Bulldog sitting at a local establishment’s storefront. Graves bought him from a blacksmith for $5 and named him Handsome Dan. Since Graves was an athlete on the crew and football teams, Dan went along to the games where he walked across the field before games for good luck.  Dan attended football games for a decade, and after his passing, he was preserved and remains still in a sealed case in the trophy room of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

Yale University has had 19 Handsome Dan mascots since the original dog, and in 2016, the school switched from having an English Bulldog as its mascot to an Olde English Bulldogge with the selection of Handsome Dan XVIII, aka “Walter.”  The change was recommended by a former handler of four previous Handsome Dans, Chris Getman, Class of ’64, and Walter became the first Olde English Bulldogge to serve as Yale’s mascot.

The breed, by the way, was recognized by the United Kennel Club in 2014. Of the Olde English Bulldogge, the UKC writes: “In 1971 a breeding project began using a line breeding scheme developed by Dr. Fechimer of Ohio State to rapidly achieve a purebred dog. The goal of this project was to return the bulldog to the appearance of the Regency-Period bulldog, now named the Olde English Bulldogge (OEB) to clearly differentiate the new breed from the modern English Bulldog.”

The current mascot, Handsome Dan XIX, known to his confidants and confidantes as “Kingman,” was born on January 2, 2021, and continues the university’s long-standing tradition of that began in 1890.

Image: Olde English Bulldogge by Don Valentine/Dreamtime