Mascot Madness

Hello readers and welcome back to the Hometown Heritage blog!
 
March Madness is coming up within the week, so I thought that we would have a basketball themed blog post today!
 
We have many basketball pictures in our collection, but many of them are simple pictures of team line-ups or stills of games in action. Most of them do not offer much interesting things to look at, aside from how uniforms have changed. However, a few pictures have unique aspects to them that cause one to pause. For instance, there is one picture titled “1979 Basketball Cheerleaders”. Similar to the other pictures, you can see in this picture how much the uniforms have changed. This is not, however, what I find most interesting about this picture. The most interesting part of this picture are the two people in the background! One of the two people is dressed as Santa. This is most likely because the photo was taken around Christmas time (at least I hope!), so he is of less interest than the man standing to his left. Looking carefully it would appear that this man is dressed as a giant bird! If I may be so bold, I would assume that this is supposed to be the Mascot, the Perry blue jay. However, to me he looks ridiculous! He barely resembles a bird (only the “beak” and eyes tipped me off) and I highly doubt that anything resembling feathers are anywhere on the costume. It is amazing how much different the costume is from today’s mascot who has feathers and is much more bird like. It makes me wonder if this one is still in storage somewhere! If you know anything more about this mascot costume, let us know in the comments, and join us next week for another blog post!

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