BAMA MAMMOTHS

BIG AL'S ETHNIC ROOTS

the University's standard origin story of BAMA's elephant mascot. https://rolltide.com/sports/2016/6/10/trads-elephant-html.aspx

Rosenberger's story Closing the Trunk: Rosenberger’s to Close After 120 Years - Over the Mountain Journal (otmj.com)

The BAMA "A" logo on Big Al's jersey was designed by a Mrs. Mooneyham who worked as a seamstress at Montgomery's Pake-Stephenson Sporting Goods.

History of the BAMA logo Alabama Crimson Tide Logos - NCAA Division I (a-c) (NCAA a-c) - Chris Creamer's Sports Logos Page - SportsLogos.Net

Vintage BAMA hat with discussion of "A" logo. Need help identifying this vintage Alabama hat that looks a lot like the one Paul "Bear" Bryant once owned. It has no tags or writing anywhere inside and I have found 0 traces of this online. I've reverse image searched it with no luck. : r/VintageClothing (reddit.com)

Vintage "A" logo "Bear Bryant" - Google Search

from the December 1, 1898 TUSKALOOSA GAZETTE ~ "A big circus hasn't touched Tuskaloosa now for several years and doubtless an enormous crowd would have come to town and merchants and [s.i.c.] proportionate sad. There will be several thousand dollars still in the county, however that the circus would have carried off but that won't satisfy the small boys, and the big ones, too, who wanted to see the elephant."

from A REBEL IN SPORTS by Champ Pickens (1956)

Page 69:

My connection to college football goes back some sixty years. During my entire undergraduate career at Tuscaloosa I got only one "A"-and it went on my school sweater, not my report card. I was the student manager of the 1896 football team.

Denny Field today is a fine, handsome, modern stadium, but you should have been with us in '96. Talk about pioneer spirit. Enrollment was under two hundred. Only eighteen came out for football. Equipment was scarce and the players put cleats on their street shoes. There were no helmets. The boys simply let their hair grow long to protect their scalps.

Games were played on the campus grass. Spectators stood on the sidelines because we had no stands. Admission was twenty-five cents. As the ball advanced, the fans moved up and down the field. It was all very informal.

Otto Wagenhurst of Penn was our first coach. He got three hundred dollars for the season. Otto, a sizzling star, was named on Walter Camp's All-America, but unfortunately his shine didn't rub off on our players. Otto did a good job with what he had to work with, and it wasn't his fault that we had only one hundred and fifty dollars in the kitty at the end of the campaign. We gave Otto the one hundred and fifty dollars and an I.O.U. for the balance. He got the rest the following spring when Alabama won the baseball championship. Baseball, you see, was the money-maker in those days.

Football rules have changed tremendously since the season of '96. I remember that the pigskin was never dead until the ball-carrier hollered "down." One afternoon in a game against Sewanee, Hill Ferguson, our cherubic quarterback, was lugging the ball on a long-gainer. A brawny Sewanee tackle caught hm from behind, slapping a ham of a hand over Ferg's mouth to level him to the sod. Poor Ferg was dragged back an extra ten yards before he could finally spit out the important word- "D-d-down!"

When the football season was over, Bob Jemison a college chum, and I opened a sideline we called "THE BIG STORE."

[ed note:

from the January 31, 1954 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

from the August 2, 1953 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER]

The University of Alabama was something of a military school in those days and we housed about two hundred cadets in our barracks. Bob's and my agency handled virtually everything, including uniforms. When the seniors graduated, we bought the uniforms from them and sold 'em back to the incoming freshmen the following semester at a good profit. The uniforms didn't always fit the customer, but we got rid of 'em anyway.

No other military school was better armed. We also sold caps for five bucks, and learned that a certain hardware company in Tuscaloosa would sell us a prominent brand pistol for three dollars. It was easy to bill a cadet's parents five bucks for the cap and furnish him with a pistol. We figured all the angles. Bob Jemison, incidentally, is today one of the South's top realtors. He learned his lessons well.

Among other items, Bob and I got the job as campus electricians. Part of our job consisted of climbing a large pole on the quadrangle and inserting a carbon stick for the giant arclight. The purpose of the arclight was to keep cadets from sneaking out after hours. A trigger-happy sentinel patrolled the quadrangle. If a cadet was discovered out after bed check, he received a demeret. This meant a walking tour on Saturday. By the time I left college, I figured that if all my tours were put end to end they would reach halfway to New York. I never want to hear the word demerit again.

Football was disbanded momentarily at Tuscaloosa, but when it resumed, we moved our games to Birmingham and used the Southern League ballpark. We called it the "Slag Pile" because slag towered over the center field fence like the Smokies. Admission to the game was upped to fifty cents. We charged another four bits to bring a carriage into the game. They were allowed to park about twenty feet from the playing field.

On one occasion, when our lieutenant governor drove to the ticket gate with a party of friends, he was told he have to cough up another fifty cents to bring in his carriage.

"Damn if I'll pay that to see a football game!" he snorted. He turned his carriage around and drove back to the city. Football was still its infancy in Alabama.

Even in the early days betting on football games reached fanatical proportions. Some of the fans took their defeats with all the graciousness of enraged bulldogs. If a team was behind in the late minutes, its worshippers who had a bundle riding on the outcome would swarm onto the field and the officials would have to call off the game. Hence that automatically nullified all bets. It didn't seem to occur to the referee to forfeit the game, but what was he going to do when both sides pleaded innocent.

I put a halt to these invasions once and for all. I had a ten-foot barbed wire fence put around the playing surface. As another safeguard, policemen were stationed at the main gate. The impromptu melee mysteriously stopped.

Time marched on. The game managed to get through the Stone Age Era, overcame the war years, and was gaining steadily when the Golden Age of Sport arrived.