The University of Cincinnati’s beloved mascot, the Bearcat, was not named after the animal of the same nickname (officially known as the binturong). Nor was it a creation of the university’s marketing team or the athletic department. Instead, the name came from a chanting cheerleader and a cartoonist for the student newspaper 100 years ago this month.
On Oct. 31, Student Government and other campus groups will celebrate the Bearcat’s centennial on the front steps of Tangeman University Center where students can eat free cake and sing “Happy Birthday” to the UC mascot and meet Lucy the Bearcat from the Cincinnati Zoo.
“By the time we adopted the Bearcat, colleges were starting to have identifiable mascots with their teams,” said Kevin Grace, head of UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library. “Before that they were simply called ‘varsity’ or called the ‘Red and Black.’ No official name.”
The origin of the Bearcat comes from the last name of UC football fullback and team captain, Leonard “Teddy” Baehr.
During a football game against the Kentucky Wildcats on Oct. 31, 1914, Norman Lyon, a UC cheerleader and editor of the student paper, created the name Bearcat through a play on words, using the Wildcat’s name against them. He chanted in support of Baehr, referring to him as a “Baehr-cat.”
For the Nov. 3, 1914, issue of the UC student paper — then called University News — cartoonist John Reece drew a depiction of an animal, named Cincinnati Bearcat, chasing away an animal named Kentucky Wildcat.
Greg Hand, former UC associate vice president of public relations, uncovered the mascot’s origin in 1997 while reading old newspapers on microfilm at the university. He was researching UC’s earliest years of basketball for a book he co-authored with Grace, titled “Bearcats! The Story of Basketball at the University of Cincinnati.”
“I probably spent 40 to 50 hours reading old newspapers at a microfilm station in Langsam Library,” Hand said. “At that time – 1997 – no one really knew where the Bearcat name came from. There were several theories.”
Those theories included the naming of the team in a 1912 article, a photo of a UC football player next to a Stutz Bearcat car and a reference to a player, Leslie Bryant, as “Bear Cat” in a 1913 Cincinnati Post article. Hand’s findings showed the first two theories to be unfounded. Although the last theory was true, it didn’t count because the name “Bear Cat” was only referring to a particular player, not the whole team.
The name and image of the Cincinnati Bearcat wasn’t put to regular use until after a Cincinnati Enquirer writer, Jack Ryder, used the moniker in a 1919 article covering a UC game against Tennessee. From then on the name was officially adopted.
Many logos and mascots have been created since then, the first of which was a bear on its hind legs, standing in front of the letter C. The Bearcat’s image has changed over time through numerous redesigns that range in appearance from adorable to ferocious, with differing amounts of cat or bear influence. There was even a “Lady Bearcat” mascot used between the 1950s and 1980s.
“It was for several decades really just a ferocious bear,” Grace said. “Then, probably 1940s, early 1950s, we started merging these images of both a bear and a cat. And ever since then there have just been variations on that thing. It’s sort of been an evolution of not only how it looks but what it means to the school.”
Even now the Bearcat has multiple images associated with it from the menacing statue outside Fifth Third Arena to the gray “C paw” kitty.
“There are different representations of the Bearcat,” Grace said. “One is supposed to be somewhat warm and fuzzy to appeal to children – and that’s more related to apparel sales – and then there’s the one that’s ferocious in a way that lends itself to athletic teams.
“When you hear [of the] Bearcat in this country, it’s unique to UC when it comes to universities. How many schools are there that are named The Wildcats or something like that?”
For more information on the history of UC’s mascot, visit the official Bearcat Centennial page at http://www.uc.edu/bearcats.
