The November 1949 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette reported at length, as the magazine usually did in that era, on Penn football’s strong play. With victories over Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia, and Navy, the Quakers had gotten off to a hot start to its ’49 season under head coach George Munger Ed’33, who routinely had Penn positioned among the nation’s best until the program began its transition to the Ivy League in the early 1950s [see “The Price They Paid,” this issue].
What caught our eye, though, was a small photo and paragraph alongside the several pages devoted to football coverage. The headline? “Pennsylvania Gets a Mascot.”
In what could possibly have been the first sighting of a Penn Quaker mascot—at least according to this magazine’s fine editorial staff in 1949—the Gazette reported that a student named Jack Melnick W’51 “has become, apparently, a permanent part of the Pennsylvania scene.”
Decked out in full Quaker attire, Melnick, dubbed “William Quaker (from Quakertown),” was “conceived by the Spirit Committee” as an apparent homage to William Penn, the Quaker who founded the Province of Pennsylvania during the British Colonial era. (Although Penn has never been a Quaker institution, its athletic teams began to be called “the Quakers” in newspapers in the late 1800s, according to University Archivist Emeritus Mark Frazier Lloyd, who told the Daily Pennsylvanian in 2010 that because “Philly was known as the ‘Quaker City,’ it was natural for sports writers to call the Penn athletic teams the Quakers.”)
Melnick, er, “William Quaker” (or “Willie” for short), introduced himself to his fellow students, alumni, and other fans with this chant at a pep rally before Penn’s season-opening 21–0 win over Dartmouth on October 1, 1949:
“Now, Yale can keep its Bulldog
And buy fireplugs all day,
And Army keep its Army Mule
And chase the flies away,
And Harvard keep its Cantabs—
Whatever they may be,
’Cause Pennsylvania’s got a man,
A real live human—me!”
In addition to those “stirring words” at the Dartmouth pep rally, the new Quaker mascot had “been pulling halftime stunts during football games and generally providing a focal point for student enthusiasm,” per the Gazette’s report.
Over the next 75 years, many other undergraduates would go onto wear old-school Quaker garb, before the mascot’s costume changed to a fully enclosed suit and oversized head (with different iterations of its look along the way). But dressing up in clothes of a different era might not be completely lost. During Penn’s 2024 football home opener on September 28 at Franklin Field, some fans were spotted wearing Colonial-style hats, wigs, suits, and dresses—almost exactly 75 years to the day of the Quaker’s debut appearance. —DZ
