Name-a-Day Calendar, April 9: Maine Black Bears
Page 154 of 365
Chosen in: 1914
Chosen by: Former Old Town police chief O.B. Fernandez, in a roundabout way
The University of Maine began playing intercollegiate sports in 1892, when they founded their football program. Their first teams had no official nickname or mascot, but that all changed around the turn of the 20th century thanks to a heist for the ages.
As the story goes, a student named Seldon in the Class of 1903 gathered two of his friends to steal an elephant — like, an actual, live elephant — that a local clothing company was using for advertising purposes. Turns out all they needed to do was lure it away with peanuts in the middle of the night and it was all theirs. They named it Great Bolivar because they were so shocked their plan actually worked that one of them apparently exclaimed “Great Bolivar!” in bewilderment.
The 1900s were so corny, man.
Once the company realized their giant mammal was missing and the police were on the lookout, the students hid the elephant in an encasement they built under the football stadium. They let it out at the next football game, and voila! Great Bolivar was Maine’s first mascot.1
Of course, that couldn’t last forever, and soon Maine would be on the search for another mascot. In 1914, a black bear cub was born on Mount Katahdin in north central Maine. The cub was kidnapped by a guide in Old Town and presented to O.B. Fernandez, a wild animal collector and the former chief of police in Old Town. Fernandez then loaned the cub to the University of Maine. The university’s account states that Fernandez did this “in hopes that the ailing football team would get some good luck as a result of having the beast in their training quarters” but the cub was evidently introduced before the team’s October 31 game at Colby College, at which point Maine was already 5-1 and coming off a four-game win streak in which they had outscored their opponents 148-7, so I’m not really sure what was “ailing”.
Somewhere along this journey — it’s not clear when or by whom — the cub was named Jeff, and when Jeff was introduced at a late October pep rally, the crowd roared with applause. Jeff then stood on his head, causing the crowd to “go bananas”. The school renamed Jeff “Bananas” and he stuck around for the remainder of the season as their mascot. Gradually, the team itself also became known as the Black Bears.
The original Bananas would be retired after the 1914 season, but Maine has had several bear mascots, live and costumed, since then, all of them being named Bananas in honor of the original.
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Whether I believe this story is true is for you to decide.
And that has led the Black Bears to success, especially in the AmEast men's basketball tournament since 2006.