September 2, 2005

Purdue Pete seeks votes: Mascots to face off in Capital One competition

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Hammer in hand, hardhat firmly set, Purdue Pete has a simple message: Vote for me.

Pete is on the campaign trail. As one of 12 college sports mascots on the 2005 Capital One All-America Mascot Team, Pete is seeking the vote of every Boilermaker.

He will be seen across the country and around the world this fall in TV commercials, hamming it up with his hammer and competing with fellow mascots in the M – for mascot – Games.

Pete joins the mascots of South Carolina, Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Baylor, Miami, UCLA, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Auburn, Kansas and Washington State on the fourth annual Capital One mascot team, announced Wednesday (Aug. 31).

"This is a great thrill for Boilermaker fans around the world and here at home," said Morgan Burke, Purdue athletics director. "We have had great success getting out the online vote in the past, and we hope to get it done this time around."

In head-to-headgear competition each week, Pete will take on each of the other 11 mascots in voting at the Capitol One Bowl web site. Beginning Sept. 1, fans can vote daily for Pete at capitalonebowl.com. Polls close Dec. 19.

To vote, click on Mascot Challenge to see the matchups. Voting is limited to once per day

The mascots with the best win-loss records will face off in online runoffs in December.

On Jan. 2, during the Capital One Bowl, one of the 12 mascots will be crowned Mascot of the Year, determined this year for the first time solely by online voting totals. In years past, the online vote was combined with judges' scores.

New this year is the interactive Mascot Mobile Tour, featuring voting stations, interactive games, and mascot facts and statistics. The tour made its first stop at Washington State on Thursday (Sept. 1). The tour will be in West Lafayette the weekend of Oct. 1, when Purdue takes on Notre Dame.

The mascot team was chosen in June by a panel of judges from Division IA and IAA athletic programs with football teams. The panel included representatives of ESPN and Capital One, and mascot historian Roy Yarbrough, author of "Mascots!"

While Pete is not the official university mascot – that honor goes to the Boilermaker Special, a replica of a Victorian-era locomotive – he brings the Boilermaker spirit alive wherever he goes.

Purdue Pete's lineage began as a bare-chested advertising icon used by a campus bookstore, beginning in 1940 and continuing today. At the end of World War II, the editors of the Debris yearbook picked up the hulking specimen and drew in period garb for illustrating the schools of civil engineering, with Pete looking through a transit; home economics, with our hero wielding a mop and bucket; and agriculture, with Pete wearing overalls.

Pete came to life in 1956, when a tumbling, costumed student with a papier-mache head danced in the firelight of a Friday night pep rally.

Is Pete the mythic boilermaker, first described in an 1891 headline: "Wabash Snowed Completely Under by Burly Boiler Makers from Purdue?" Yes and no. Other than sketches in the Exponent student newspaper as far back as the 1890s, no depiction of the boilermaker has ever emerged. Pete, with muscles and hammer, has served as a symbol of that burly boilermaker of old.

Finally, the boilermaker will take on a new dimension this fall as a statue rises east of Ross-Ade Stadium. In November, a statue by sculptor Jon Hair, whose work adorns the U.S. Olympic Training Center, will be complete. The work combines the notion of the tireless maker of boilers with a more modern depiction of the workaday personification of the Purdue spirit.

Sources: Jay Cooperider, associate athletic director, (765) 494-3197, coop@purdue.edu

Morgan Burke, (765) 494-3198

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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