Name-a-Day Calendar, June 22: Portland Pilots

Page 228 of 365

Chosen in: 1935

Chosen by: University president Rev. Joseph P. Boyle, vetoing his own students

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The school we currently know as the University of Portland was originally (and rather confusingly) named Columbia University when the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon established it in 1901. It was named for the Columbia River that sits about four miles north and serves as the border between Oregon and Washington.

The university was built atop a bluff overlooking the other major river in Portland, the Willamette, and its first sports teams were nicknamed as such; when men’s basketball and football began play in 1907 and 1909, respectively, they were first known as the Cliffdwellers (or, less commonly, the Columbias).

Columbia was also run by the same congregation that founded the University of Notre Dame, so the two are considered sister schools. This led to Columbia’s teams, especially the football team, being called the Irish or the Fightin’ Irish by the late 1920s, around the same time this took hold for Notre Dame.

In 1935, the school was tired of being confused with the Columbia University on the other coast, so the administration changed their name to the University of Portland.¹ After this switch, they held a student body nickname contest, through which “Chinooks”—the name of the local Native American tribe and of a local fish species—was selected as the school’s new sporting identity. Then, university president Rev. Joseph P. Boyle basically just said “nah” and picked his own nickname: Pilots, on account of the nautical theme that already permeated the campus due to its riverside location.

Almost immediately after this development came the introduction of the mascot that still represents Portland today: Wally Pilot.

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1. They also considered Christie University (after school founder Alexander Christie), McLoughlin University (after notable Oregon Catholic Dr. John McLoughlin), and Multnomah University (after the Chinookan name for the Willamette River; Multnomah is also the name of the county where Portland sits).