Name-a-Day Calendar, January 22: Eastern Kentucky Colonels
Page 77 of 365
Chosen in: 1966
Chosen by: University president Robert Martin
This name has nothing to do with fried chicken. Though KFC was founded in North Corbin, just 55 miles away from Eastern Kentucky University’s Richmond campus, Harlan Sanders is not the namesake of the Eastern Kentucky Colonel. This name also has nothing to do with the military, though its true etymology is linguistically derived from the military rank.
A Kentucky Colonel is an honorific title that can be given by the Governor of Kentucky to any adult civilian for any number of reasons: contributions to the community,1 military service,2 even just being really famous.3 You don’t even have to be from Kentucky!4 It’s the bluegrass remix of knighthood.
In 1960, Robert Martin took over as president of what was then called Eastern Kentucky State College. At this time, their sports teams had always been known as the Maroons, though not necessarily by choice. In the 1920s, the student body successfully voted to make the leopard their mascot, but their plan to purchase a live leopard from a Memphis zoo fell through, so they abandoned the name entirely for some reason. Four decades later, the “Maroons” name remained, but Martin couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out how to turn the concept of “maroon” into a mascot.
So he didn’t. Instead, in 1963, Martin introduced the Kentucky Colonel as the school mascot. The sports teams were still known as the Maroons,5 but at least now they had some physical manifestation to lead them in cheers. It ended up being so popular that Martin just outright changed the name of the team to “Colonels” in 1966.
Eastern Kentucky considered a change of mascot in the early 2010s, but officially decided against it in 2013. The Colonel lives on.
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Harlan Sanders was a Kentucky Colonel; it’s where he got the title.
Several Kentuckian veterans have been nominated for colonelcy and pretty much all of them have been accepted.
Jack Harlow is a Kentucky Colonel.
Tiger Woods and Reba McEntire, for example, are both Kentucky Colonels. Woods is from California and McEntire is from Oklahoma.
This seems to be a common misconception, even in modern sources affiliated with Eastern Kentucky University. Game recaps from the mid-1960s still called their teams the Maroons.