Name-a-Day Calendar, July 13: Saint Louis Billikens
Page 249 of 365
Chosen in: 1911
Chosen by: St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Billy O’Connell via football coach John Bender, in some fashion
To understand why Saint Louis University’s sports teams are called the Billikens, we must first understand what exactly a billiken is.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the United States got real big into “New Thought”, which you could maybe describe as a spiritual movement if you’re being extra charitable. Its core beliefs focused on human thought being a powerful force both internally and externally, holding that all of life’s problems originated in the mind and could be solved with enough divine thought. The issue, of course, is that this is objectively incorrect, and even dangerous when applied to physical health; if you’re in dire medical straits and you’re under the impression you can ignore all medicine and just think your illness away, you’re going to die. New Thought is a lot like the more popular Christian Science in this regard, and for this reason, many detractors have dismissed both movements as cults.1
In 1908, an art teacher in Kansas City by the name of Florence Pretz claimed to have dreamt of a figure that represented the “God of Things as They Ought to Be”. She received a patent for a charm designed like the figure she alleged to have dreamt, later naming it Billiken, a name historians believe Pretz lifted from the 1896 poem “Mr. Moon: A Song of the Little People” by Canadian penman Bliss Carmen.2 Though this has never been confirmed, Pretz was notably a fan of Carmen’s work.
Pretz’s marketing for the figure played right into the New Thought fad of the time, and within months, the billiken was everywhere—and I mean everywhere. It had spread all over the United States as a symbol of good luck and had even crossed the Pacific Ocean and gained a foothold in Japan. Pretz sold her patent in 1909 to the Chicago-based Horsman Doll Company, who both used the design for charms and pasted it on various other knick knacks. This essentially printed money for the company—so much so, in fact, that they quickly renamed themselves the Billiken Company of Chicago.
Wishing to give themselves good luck, several sports teams nicknamed themselves the Billikens around this time. Most of them were short-lived Minor League Baseball teams, but one Billikens team has survived to the present day.
Enter Saint Louis University, already almost a century old3 at this point in their history as the oldest university west of the Mississippi River. Sports at the school had just begun to take off, with the football team first taking the field in 1899. This team had no official nickname for a little over a decade before established coach John Reinhold “Chief” Bender coincidentally came to the school as a law student. Bender took control of the school’s football team when he arrived in 1910, and it’s universally agreed upon that Bender originated the “Billikens” nickname for Saint Louis,4 but how exactly this happened is up for debate between two competing stories.
The first story: During Bender’s second season in 1911, the local media noted his resemblance to the billiken. One of Bender’s law school classmates, Charles McNamara, happened to be a skilled cartoonist, so he drew a caricature of Bender as a billiken and posted it on the window of a popular local drug store. Sooner or later, people began to call the team “Bender’s Billikens”.
The second story also involves a drug store, but it’s not clear if it’s the same drug store: Bender was a regular customer at this store and became close with the owner, Billy Gunn. One day, as he patronized the store, he talked to Gunn and Gunn said, “Bender, you’re a real billiken”. This story is not widely thought to be true, but it did appear in Gunn’s obituary in 1946.
Regardless of which story is true, the first person to call Saint Louis’ football team the Billikens in print was St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Billy O’Connell. The first story holds that O’Connell was merely following an established fad, while the second posits that he was coincidentally in the building as the exchange between Gunn and Bender occurred.
Though the billiken remains a prominent symbol of good luck in some other parts of the world (namely Japan), its fad died off in the United States just a few years after it began. Despite this, the practice of calling the Saint Louis football team the Billikens continued even after Bender left for Washington State in 1912, and it continues still today—at least, it would if Saint Louis’ football team didn’t disband in 1949. Because today, all Saint Louis University sports teams are known as the Billikens. Saint Louis is certainly the only college in North America to use this nickname and perhaps the only active collegiate or professional sports team in the entire world.
Saint Louis is represented by a costumed billiken mascot, which was most recently redesigned in 2017.
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Not Scientology. I’m talking about the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist. Everyone and their mother knows Scientology is a cult.
Carmen would become Canada’s poet laureate in 1921 and serve in that position until his death in 1929.
Founded as Saint Louis Academy in 1818, renamed Saint Louis College in 1820, and earned university status in 1827.
Longtime Name-a-Day readers might recognize Bender as the origin of both Kansas State’s “Wildcats” nickname and Houston’s “Cougars” nickname. Dude’s responsible for three different notable Division I program nicknames. Legend.