Photo of the 1913-1914 Columbia High School basketball team with a kewpie doll at the bottom. From the 1914 Cresset yearbook courtesy of Daniel Boone Regional Library.

When Miss Mizzou was introduced, the character raised some eyebrows because it was reported that she didn’t wear anything under the trench coat. However, it turns out that Miss Mizzou is not the only “naked” comic character associated with Columbia, Missouri. A naked baby character called a Kewpie also became a prominent figure locally when Hickman High School adopted the character as a mascot in 1914. The Columbia Missourian has full coverage of the 100 year anniversary of the mascot in a series of stories that appeared earlier this month.

The Kewpie was the creation of southern Missouri resident Rose O’Neill for a comic that appeared in the Ladies Home Journal in 1909. The character, inspired by the Roman god of love Cupid, became popular and spun off into a successful line of Kewpie dolls that have become world famous.

How the Kewpie made it’s way into being a mascot for Columbia High School (later called Hickman High School) is more of a mystery with varying stories. One of the prominent stories has been that a reporter of a sports game remarked that the Columbia players looked like Kewpies. Another story that surfaced in 2009 came from the great uncle of Lucy Church. She tells her story here:

My great uncle was quite an athlete, who not only played basketball at Hickman but also at MU, and he was the first Kewpie to letter in four sports. Although I did not know him too well because he lived in Florida, I do recall that he came to visit us once in the 1960s. During that visit he told us about the Kewpie, which was quite significant to him. Apparently, the school secretary owned a Kewpie doll, as they were popular figurines then, and she kept it on her desk. At one of the basketball games, she placed the Kewpie in the center of the court (I guess for good luck), and the entire game was played around it without its being broken. This was somewhat remarkable since the dolls were very fragile. Because it survived the game and brought a victory, it was thereafter considered the good luck mascot. You can see a picture of it underneath my great uncle’s chair in the team photograph. Also, the Kewpie does not appear prior to 1914 in any other Cresset.

You can see a video of her telling her great uncle’s story up on Charley Blackmore’s website. Whatever the actual story is, the character stayed as the mascot for the school the last 100 years. While several mascots share names with comic characters, the Kewpie seems to be the only comic character that has inspired a mascot.

Sorry for the digression this week, but I thought this news item might be of interest. Stay tuned for more Miss Mizzou centric posts in the future.