Name-a-Day Calendar, September 10: UC Irvine Anteaters
Page 308 of 365
Chosen in: 1965
Chosen by: Water polo players Pat Glasgow and Bob Ernst via student body vote, almost certainly inspired by a Johnny Hart comic
Are you familiar with the comic B.C.? If you’re not, you’ve probably at least seen it in passing, and I’d bet you’d recognize it if you looked it up. It’s that one comic with a bunch of cavemen and prehistoric animals. It was created by Johnny Hart in the mid-1950s and made its syndicated newspaper debut in 1958. Despite its relative obscurity today, it was originally extremely popular.1
Among its early fans were two water polo players at the newly created University of California, Irvine, which was established in 1965 as part of California’s response to the baby boom that followed World War II. Those players were Pat Glasgow and Bob Ernst, who were both particularly drawn to an anteater character in the comic. How exactly that fandom resulted in “Anteaters” being suggested as a nickname for the new university’s athletics teams is a little fuzzy; either Glasgow and Ernst came up with it while discussing the comic together or the thought occurred to Glasgow as he baked in the Newport Beach sun during his summer job as a lifeguard. The university credits both students for birthing the nickname.
These thoughts came as part of a concerted effort by the university to determine a mascot, an effort that had started before classes even began in fall 1965. Ernst and Glasgow, who also lived at the same dorm, worked with some friends to spread the word of their preferred anteater mascot while welcoming new students to the dorm, going as far as creating buttons with “U.C.I.” and an anteater on them.
This campaign of sorts continued until the students finally voted on a few nickname/mascot suggestions on November 30. The final ballot was Anteaters, Bison, Centaurs, Roadrunners, Seahawks, Toros, and “None of these”, with a 50%+1 majority of votes needed for any suggestion to win. To the chagrin of athletic director Wayne Crawford, who preferred “Seahawks”, the winner was of course “Anteaters”, which received 559 out of 998 votes (56.01%). “Anteaters” so dominated the competition that the runner up, with 121 votes (12.12%), was “None of these”.
Today, UC Irvine’s mascot is a costumed anteater named Peter. If you’d like to know more about him and his history, check out this deep dive by NCAA.com’s Andy Wittry, from which I pulled much of the information for this article. Of note: Peter’s signature “ZOT!” exclamation was also inspired by the anteater character in B.C.
Previous page: UC Davis Aggies
Next page: UC Riverside Highlanders
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!
P.S. The establishment of UC Irvine in 1965 predates the incorporation of the City of Irvine in 1971. Both are named for James Irvine, the real estate developer who owned the land on which the campus and the master-planned city were eventually built. Through his family’s Irvine Company in 1960, he sold 1,000 acres of land2 to the University of California for just $1, only charging that dollar because company policy disallowed him from donating any assets to the public.
Which has probably led to its continued syndication today despite Hart dying in 2007 and handing authorship down to his grandson Mason Mastroianni. While I’m footnoting, I feel obligated to note that Hart was extremely Christian and conservative, and he became notorious late in life for spouting off these views both within and without the context of B.C. In a 1999 Washington Post interview, he insisted that “homosexuality is the handiwork of Satan” and that “Jews and Muslims who don’t accept Jesus will burn in Hell”. He also added that “the end of the world is approaching, maybe by the year 2010”, bringing his total number of incorrect assertions in the interview to (at least) three.
That’s about two-thirds of the current land area of UC Irvine’s 1,527-acre campus.