Author: Adam Greenhouse
The next time you watch Oswald the Tiger jumping around at a football game or feel a sudden urge to roast a Sagehen, remember these traditions are rooted in over 100 years of history.
After World War I, Oxy’s league, the Southern California Conference, engaged in a large school-spirit outbreak. It resulted in many nasty inter-campus raids between the Oxy, the University of Southern California and Pomona College. Before the USC football game in November of 1919, a group of USC students, angry that their team lost the previous season’s football game 7-6, snuck onto campus and stole Occidental’s mascot, a papier mache tiger.
Arthur Gardiner Coons ’20, who eventually served as Occidental’s President from 1945 to 1965, led a raid on the USC fraternity houses to search for the lost tiger. Almost every Oxy student invaded USC’s campus. The hunt was unsuccessful, however, and resulted in a brawl between Tiger and Trojan students at 16th Ave. and Figueroa. Someone reported a riot to the police, but the crowd dispersed before they arrived. The more spirited students, in reaction to the failed mission at USC and to Pomona’s premature igniting of the Oxy homecoming bonfire the night before, journeyed to Pomona that night and returned to campus with a cherished Sagehen banner.
USC returned the mangled beast many months later, but because it was already eaten up by moths and in bad shape, Oxy students decided to have it publicly burned in the Coliseum before the beginning of the next football game against USC. The destroyed papier mache tiger was replaced with a new one in 1924.
Students finally destroyed the latest papier mache tiger in a melee in February 1948. In Sept. 1948, Mrs. William T. Carlisle and her daughter Alzada, a sophomore at the time, donated what the press called a “fearsome-looking” 80-pound Bengal tiger replica made out of wood, stone and steel to the college at a ceremony at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. “When she learned last year of the demise of the old tiger, Mrs. Carlisle immediately arranged for the construction of Oswald,” press coverage of the event said. “To insure accuracy in dimensions, the taxidermist who did the construction work copied every measurement from a mounted tiger specimen in Chicago’s Field Museum.”
This was the first Oxy tiger to be called Oswald. Before 1948, it was simply known as “the tiger.” President Coons and ASOC President Jack Knox accepted the mascot, and were among those who originally named the mascot Oswald. College archivist Jean Paule talked to some of those involved in naming the tiger Oswald, but nobody remembers a specific reason why they picked the name, she said.
Inter-college raids did not stop in the 1920s, and Oswald the Tiger remained a fixture in rivalries with other schools. In October of 1958, Caltech students stole three objects from campus: the Oxy tiger, a large Occidental banner, and a headstone saying “Occidental College, Founded 1887.” The Occidental Weekly reported on Oct. 17, 1958, “Apparently the items were taken last week and since then they have been on display at Caltech. Exact details of the theft are unknown.”
The same year in 1958, students from Caltech attempted to prematurely ignite the traditional Oxy bonfire the Thursday before the homecoming game. First-years who were designated to guard the bonfire captured the three Caltech students and shaved their heads. A picture in the Weekly’s Nov. 11, 1960 issue shows three shaved Caltech heads from the event two years earlier. The Oxy first-years designed the first student’s hair to make the shape of an “O,” the second an “X,” and the third a “Y.”
Oswald may safely reside on campus today, but be wary of sneaky Trojans or Sagehens looking to steal him from his home. If our rivals do snatch him, then maybe we’ll start a riot on Figueroa.
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