Name-a-Day Calendar, June 29: Purdue Fort Wayne Mastodons
Page 235 of 365
Chosen in: 1970; efforts began in 1968
Chosen by: A student government committee via student body president Steve Pettyjohn
Indiana University founded an extension campus in Fort Wayne in 1917; Purdue University did the same in 1941. In 1964, the two extensions combined to form a joint institution on a single campus and Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) was born. The school’s “Mastodons” nickname comes from before it began intercollegiate athletics.
In IPFW’s early days, the school’s students were most often referred to as Hoosiers or Boilermakers, the identities of Indiana and Purdue, respectively. Then, in 1968, a farmer south of Angola, Indiana—about 40 miles north of Fort Wayne—unearthed a giant bone during a landscaping project on his property. Wanting to know what he’d just discovered, he contacted the IPFW geology department. Jack Sunderman, the department chair, identified the bone as coming from the leg of a mastodon, a species that has been extinct for several millennia. Sunderman arrived on the property with a team of department faculty and students, who kept digging and eventually found the mastodon’s entire skeleton, plus the skull of a baby mastodon alongside it. Excited at their discovery, the department preserved the bones and displayed them prominently on campus.
A few months later, IPFW student body president Steve Pettyjohn voiced his desire for his school to form an identity independent of its parent institutions. With the mastodon excavation still a point of pride for the school, Pettyjohn figured the mastodon would make an excellent mascot. In a letter to the Communicator student newspaper,1 he wrote:
“It sounds different, strange. That’s exactly why [we should choose it]. I’m tired of slavishly copying what Bloomington, West Lafayette, and other big schools do. Let’s have the courage to be a little different.”
The next school year, the IPFW geology club took up this mantle. Backed by faculty who oversaw the dig, the club began pushing the student government to make the mastodon the official mascot of IPFW. In spring 1970, their efforts became successful, as the student government committee did just that.
When intercollegiate athletics finally took off at IPFW in 1972, the school’s identity was well established. Their teams played as the IPFW Mastodons for about 40 years, then briefly as the Fort Wayne Mastodons in the mid-2010s due to a weird rule from their conference, the Summit League, that forced schools with a city name in their title to use that city name as their primary athletic branding.
Finally, in 2018, IPFW split back into two campuses: Indiana University Fort Wayne and Purdue University Fort Wayne. The Purdue half retained the former school’s Division I athletic programs and rebranded their teams as “Purdue Fort Wayne”.
Today, Purdue Fort Wayne is represented by a costumed mastodon named Don Mastodon. I found his résumé.
Previous page: Purdue Boilermakers
Next page: Queens Royals
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!
This newspaper was discontinued when IPFW split back into two universities in 2018.