Name-a-Day Calendar, June 19: Penn State Nittany Lions

Page 225 of 365

Chosen in: 1904

Chosen by: Baseball third baseman Harrison “Joe” Mason

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Penn State began as an agricultural school in 1855. By name, it was actually a high school—the Farmer’s High School of Pennsylvania—but it offered post-secondary education and only called itself a high school because the local population was opposed to the mere concept of universities. They bit the bullet and renamed themselves the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania in 1862, earning the state’s land-grant designation the next year.

I say all this because most other schools in this position would have called their first sports teams the Aggies. Not this one. The Pennsylvania State College, as it had been renamed in 1874,¹ began playing football in 1887 with no nickname. The school had since 1857 enjoyed the presence of a mule named Old Coaly, who had achieved the status of a quasi-mascot, but the teams were never nicknamed the Mules and Old Coaly died in 1893.

This all changed in an instant when the baseball team played at Princeton on April 20, 1904. Escorting the Penn State team to the field of play, a Princeton player walked them past a statue of their mascot, the tiger, and said: “See our emblem, the Princeton Tiger, the fiercest beast of them all.”

Not to be outdone, Penn State freshman third baseman Harrison “Joe” Mason quickly retorted: “Well, up at Penn State we have Mount Nittany right on our campus, where rules the Nittany Mountain Lion, who has never been beaten in a fair fight.” Penn State proceeded to demolish Princeton 8-1, the most lopsided defeat Princeton suffered all year.

Before the school was founded, mountain lions often roamed Mount Nittany and the surrounding areas, but by the time this game was played in 1904, they had long since been overhunted to extirpation. A taxidermied mountain lion was on display in Old Main, the primary building on campus, and Mason—proud of his quick wit in the face of an Ivy Leaguer—used its prominence to lobby for the “Nittany Lion” as the school’s official mascot.

As a senior in 1907, he co-founded a humor magazine called The Lemon and served as its editor-in-chief. Using a pseudonym, he penned a poem pushing for his dream to become reality:

“Yale she loves her ancient Bulldog,
Princeton has her Tiger cruel,
Dickinson her brawny mastiff,
West Point claims the Army Mule.
Pennsylvania is the Quaker,
Michigan the Wolverine,
But where is Old Penn State?
Oh! We’re sorry to relate,
She still sleeps ‘neath the shade of Nittany.”

In the magazine’s next issue, the gossip columnist, a junior also using a pseudonym, wrote that the junior class liked the idea and would incorporate mountain lion imagery in their senior edition of the La Vie yearbook the following year. They did, and the Nittany Lion took off from there.²

If you’re interested in more of the history of the Nittany Lion mascot itself, Penn State has you covered with this article, from which I pulled the majority of the info for this page.

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1. Became The Pennsylvania State University in 1953

2. The original Nittany Lion more closely resembled the animal you likely think of when you hear the word “lion”. Over time, its likeness shifted toward that of the originally intended mountain lion.