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ESSAY: How W&M got its feathers
By Will Molineux
JAMES CITY -- William & Mary’s former, but certainly not forgotten, sports logo featuring two feathers was originally displayed upside down.
It was adopted almost overnight, without the studied deliberations of a committee, and flipped at the suggestion of the chief booster of the college athletic program. And it was created on the cheap.
This now-lamented symbol appeared in the summer of 1974 and entered the campus arena casually to replace the face of a grinning Indian whose image had adorned football tickets and the scoreboard at Cary Field. Soon the new uncomplicated logo became a universal symbol affixed to shirts and caps and anything else that imaginatively might be marketed as being associated with the college.
The twin feathers have since been officially erased as possibly offensive to Native Americans, despite the lack of their complaint. What were once the Indians of William & Mary are now known collectively as the “Tribe,” an appellation that denotes a broad range of amicable connotations. Today a committee of the college community’s most inventive minds is laboriously selecting a new mascot, a decision out of which will emerge a new sports logo.
Before that announcement is made next year, it is appropriate to record how the twin feathers came into being. It was a creation informally conceived.
Three college administrators who occasionally had lunch together were of like mind: The use of a cartoon characterization of an Indian brave had to go. “This silly toothy Indian,” as Ross Weeks Jr. labeled it in e-mail correspondence, “was inappropriate for a distinguished university trying to build its national image.” Weeks, who now lives in Tazewell, then headed the public relations staff and edited the Alumni Gazette. He avoided acknowledging that the scoreboard Indian could be seen as resembling the trademark of the Cleveland Indians baseball team.
Barry Fratkin, the sports information director who that year become executive director of the W&M Athletic Educational Foundation, also wanted to take down the toothy Indian for practical reasons. “It wasn’t original, correct or proper for William and Mary,” he recalled.
Weeks and Fratkin and the late S. Dean Olson, who led the publications department, called in George Crawford, then a graphic artist for Colonial Williamsburg who took on outside projects. He is the designer of logos for Williamsburg Community Hospital, the Trellis, W&M Law School, Housing Partnerships and other institutions.
“I went over to the campus to see Dean on my coffee break,” Crawford recalled, “and he had a quick little assignment to craft an insignia for football. He said he needed it right away. Like tomorrow.”
Crawford was instructed to “get rid of the Indian face,” but he could keep the feathers so as not to eliminate recognition of the traditional W&M Indians. Even then, the Indian nickname was commonly replaced on sports pages by the term “Tribe.”
“That night I drew boxed-styled ‘W’ and ‘M’ letters overlapping to create a sporty look. I found out that the Powhatan Indians of Virginia wore feathers on the back of their head so that they hung down, and I added feathers pointing down.” The letters were green, the feathers golden with tips of green.
In a day or so Crawford presented his sketch to Olson, Fratkin and Weeks. “They liked it.”
Sometime later, Fratkin, a 1964 W&M graduate, had an inspiration: “Put the feathers up, and that way they form a V for victory.” All that had to be done was to turn the logo upside down, since the block letter “M” instantly became a “W” and the “W” became an “M.”
“That was it,” Fratkin reported in a telephone conversation from Richmond where he now lives. The feathers-up logo was appropriated by his Athletic Educational Foundation.
While the use of feathers was, as Fratkin said, “a tieback to the Indians,” the images and terminology implicit of Native Americans were fast fading from use. The word “Indians,” which had not been on football jerseys, was taken off basketball uniforms in 1975. Indian dancers left the sidelines and Chief Wampum gave up giving out war whoops. Papier-mâché Indians failed to show up for Homecoming parades. Without notice and without deliberate design, W&M had become a reservation with only feathers as a reminder of its athletic Indians.
The twin feathers logo remained an innocent logo until 2006 when it was decreed inappropriate by the NCAA, a sideline snipe that the college unsuccessfully appealed.
Crawford, who lives in the Williamsburg area and teaches art at Kecoughtan High School in Hampton, recalled that Dean Olson asked him to submit a bill. “I figured I had spent about an hour and a half on the project. So I said $37, and he paid it.”
Will Molineux is a retired newspaper editor who contributes to the journal Colonial Williamsburg.
It was adopted almost overnight, without the studied deliberations of a committee, and flipped at the suggestion of the chief booster of the college athletic program. And it was created on the cheap.
This now-lamented symbol appeared in the summer of 1974 and entered the campus arena casually to replace the face of a grinning Indian whose image had adorned football tickets and the scoreboard at Cary Field. Soon the new uncomplicated logo became a universal symbol affixed to shirts and caps and anything else that imaginatively might be marketed as being associated with the college.
The twin feathers have since been officially erased as possibly offensive to Native Americans, despite the lack of their complaint. What were once the Indians of William & Mary are now known collectively as the “Tribe,” an appellation that denotes a broad range of amicable connotations. Today a committee of the college community’s most inventive minds is laboriously selecting a new mascot, a decision out of which will emerge a new sports logo.
Before that announcement is made next year, it is appropriate to record how the twin feathers came into being. It was a creation informally conceived.
Three college administrators who occasionally had lunch together were of like mind: The use of a cartoon characterization of an Indian brave had to go. “This silly toothy Indian,” as Ross Weeks Jr. labeled it in e-mail correspondence, “was inappropriate for a distinguished university trying to build its national image.” Weeks, who now lives in Tazewell, then headed the public relations staff and edited the Alumni Gazette. He avoided acknowledging that the scoreboard Indian could be seen as resembling the trademark of the Cleveland Indians baseball team.
Barry Fratkin, the sports information director who that year become executive director of the W&M Athletic Educational Foundation, also wanted to take down the toothy Indian for practical reasons. “It wasn’t original, correct or proper for William and Mary,” he recalled.
Weeks and Fratkin and the late S. Dean Olson, who led the publications department, called in George Crawford, then a graphic artist for Colonial Williamsburg who took on outside projects. He is the designer of logos for Williamsburg Community Hospital, the Trellis, W&M Law School, Housing Partnerships and other institutions.
“I went over to the campus to see Dean on my coffee break,” Crawford recalled, “and he had a quick little assignment to craft an insignia for football. He said he needed it right away. Like tomorrow.”
Crawford was instructed to “get rid of the Indian face,” but he could keep the feathers so as not to eliminate recognition of the traditional W&M Indians. Even then, the Indian nickname was commonly replaced on sports pages by the term “Tribe.”
“That night I drew boxed-styled ‘W’ and ‘M’ letters overlapping to create a sporty look. I found out that the Powhatan Indians of Virginia wore feathers on the back of their head so that they hung down, and I added feathers pointing down.” The letters were green, the feathers golden with tips of green.
In a day or so Crawford presented his sketch to Olson, Fratkin and Weeks. “They liked it.”
Sometime later, Fratkin, a 1964 W&M graduate, had an inspiration: “Put the feathers up, and that way they form a V for victory.” All that had to be done was to turn the logo upside down, since the block letter “M” instantly became a “W” and the “W” became an “M.”
“That was it,” Fratkin reported in a telephone conversation from Richmond where he now lives. The feathers-up logo was appropriated by his Athletic Educational Foundation.
While the use of feathers was, as Fratkin said, “a tieback to the Indians,” the images and terminology implicit of Native Americans were fast fading from use. The word “Indians,” which had not been on football jerseys, was taken off basketball uniforms in 1975. Indian dancers left the sidelines and Chief Wampum gave up giving out war whoops. Papier-mâché Indians failed to show up for Homecoming parades. Without notice and without deliberate design, W&M had become a reservation with only feathers as a reminder of its athletic Indians.
The twin feathers logo remained an innocent logo until 2006 when it was decreed inappropriate by the NCAA, a sideline snipe that the college unsuccessfully appealed.
Crawford, who lives in the Williamsburg area and teaches art at Kecoughtan High School in Hampton, recalled that Dean Olson asked him to submit a bill. “I figured I had spent about an hour and a half on the project. So I said $37, and he paid it.”
Will Molineux is a retired newspaper editor who contributes to the journal Colonial Williamsburg.
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