By: Daniel Holladay
Hello, again Missouri Western. In the last post, I spoke of several interesting mascots from various high schools. I asked questions like, why would you choose that? But then it dawned on me, why did we choose the Griffon as our mascot? With the help of Jackie Burns and our librarians, I found a yearbook entry from 1923. This yearbook tells a metaphorical story of why the Griffon came to MWSU. “Junior College needed a griffon to guard the ‘dreams’ that their 'treasurers of high ideals and hopes…meant someday to realize,'" Frances Flanagan writes in Missouri Western State College: A History 1915-83. This sounds nice, but I still wondered: why a Griffon? Mythical beasts such as dragons or phoenixes would make splendid guardians as well. According to Flanagan, there is actually a very good reason. A student from the class of 1918 by the name of Norman Knight chose the Griffon because it is the "[m]ythical guardian of buried treasure...” The first things that came to mind when I heard 'buried treasure' were pirates. But, that was definitely not where Knight was going with this. He believed that “education is a buried treasure obtainable only through hard ‘digging.'” So, we got the guardian of buried treasure to ‘protect’ those who wished to work hard to unearth an education. which is awesome if you think about it.
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AuthorDaniel Holaday is the blog writer for Canvas, Missouri Western State University's literary journal. Archives
April 2018
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