Like any good fairy tale starring a bear, the story of how Baylor University acquired its first live mascot is a curious mixture of legend, lore and luck.

The university’s sports teams didn’t even have a nickname until 1914, when school President Samuel Palmer Brooks invited students to vote on a representative species. Although the nominees included the buffalo and even the “bookworm,” the winner was the bear.

Baylor’s mascot for most of the 1930s and into the 1940s was a black bear named Joe College, a refugee from a traveling show. “Joe College” was 1920s slang for the anonymous, typical male student of the early 20th century, the “John Q. Public” of higher education. The bear lived to be 25 years old.
The Round-Up photo

More than 50 bears have since called the campus home in the last century.

In November 1917, just before the annual Texas A&M game, Baylor saw the arrival of the first live mascot on campus. The 107th Engineer Battalion of nearby Camp MacArthur donated the bear the members had dubbed Ted to the university, before they shipped out for World War I in France.

But according to Ollie Mayr of Dallas, grandson of Herbert E. Mayr (1896-1950), his ancestor was actually the one who gifted the university with the little bruin. Big Herb, as he was called, was riding the same train carrying the 107th Engineers to their duty station in Waco when the locomotive made a stop along a rustic wood, where the cub was found by soldiers who took him aboard.

The elder Mayr — who ran several businesses in town, including a saloon — was a gambler as well. And he succeeded in winning the cub from the battalion members in a poker game.

“He actually kept the bear until he got too big for a pet. The bear tore up the backseat of his new Ford and that’s when he decided to give him up,” Ollie Mayr said.

A new name

The bear was renamed by Baylor when it was obtained because its original name was Little Poo Poo. Fearing that the Baptist institution wouldn’t accept a gift from a drinker and gambler, Big Herb did it in the name of the 107th  Engineers from whom he’d won the creature.

“You gotta love old family history like that,” said Mayr, who runs a catering company in Dallas.

One of the most famous of the mascots was the late 1930s incarnation, an entertainer known as Joe College, who arrived by way of a traveling carnival. Performance apparently was in his genes and vaudeville in his soul, for the bear was a theatrical athlete and was known to swill soda, especially Dr Pepper at any opportunity.

Starting in 1974, the custom has been to dub each mascot “Judge” — along with the name of an individual the Baylor Chamber of Commerce had chosen to memorialize or laud. Baylor chamber members are the caretakers of the bears.

Baylor alum Kip Averitt, former state senator, was the bear wrangler from 1976-78. His tasks included daily feeding and cleaning as well as periodic visits to the veterinarian, along with escorting the bear on its game-day rounds. 

Baylor’s 10th president, Abner McCall, cradles two future mascots.
Baylor University photo

A snapshot by Waco commercial photographer Fred A. Gildersleeve from the mid-1930s shows a woman feeding a “Waco” (Dr Pepper soda) to the Baylor mascot, Joe College. The bubbly beverage was banned from the bruins some 15 years ago in the interest of their health.
The Texas Collection at Baylor University photo

The former legislator, an economics and finance student at the time, was in charge of Judge, the “show bear,” and Kelli, the “travel bear.”

“I met her when she was just a cub,” he recalled. “Not only was she very smart, she was very mean.”

So mean, in fact, that she was retired at age 2 to live out her days at a Montana wildlife park.

“If the animal is docile, (Baylor) will keep them for several years,” Averitt said.

As he was walking Kelli onto Kyle Field for the 1978 game with Texas A&M University, he said, Averitt was stopped about a dozen times along his route by “aged Aggies anxious to share their story” about the time the Baylor bear was kidnapped.

According to several apocryphal accounts, a brazen band of A&M students raided the Bear Pit one night to abduct the mascot. The drugged creature was bound, tossed into the trunk of a car and hauled away.

But somewhere on the road to College Station, the story goes, the bear awoke, busted loose and clawed its way through the back seat. The terrorized cadets bailed out of the vehicle, which they quickly abandoned.

One version of the legend said the local lawmen investigating the misdeed drove Baylor’s bear home in the back of an old squad car, with the rescued bruin sitting quietly and looking out the window the entire way to Waco.

In 2005, the university finished the $1 million renovation of the Bill and Eva Williams Bear Habitat, a facility including a 13-foot waterfall, three pools, two dens, grass and eye-level viewing. It is licensed as a Class C zoo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The practice of keeping a live mascot and bringing the animal out for games is not as popular as it once was, especially in an age of political correctness. With heightened awareness in recent decades of the need to care for all aspects of the bears’ lives, for example, the venerable habit of providing a Dr Pepper to the bear went by the wayside 15 years ago.

Averitt said although some people today look askance at keeping live college mascots, the bears of Baylor are a beloved institution and campus unifier.

“Some traditions are worth keeping,” he said.

Additional sources: The Baylor Bear Mascots, by Esse Forrester O’Brien, Baylor.edu, The Lariat Online, Here Come the Bears: The Story of the Baylor University Mascots, by  Eugene W. Baker (Baylor Press, 1996)