Otterbein Homecoming: Making Tradition, Keeping Tradition

Otterbein Homecoming: Making Tradition, Keeping Tradition

The tradition of a “homecoming,” or a selected weekend set aside for the return of alumni to the scene of their undergraduate work, usually to enjoy a mid-season football game, is a time-honored event. Otterbein University is not unique in holding the autumn celebration. When Otterbein joined a national trend of holding collegiate homecomings, the idea of ‘homecoming’ was neither original nor unique. Colleges all over the United States were setting up homecoming celebrations. Nor was Otterbein’s concept of a homecoming “culture” noticeably distinct from other educational institutions. The football game, the parade, the theatricals, the Greek life influence, were and are features of Otterbein’s homecoming, and these are shared with many other colleges.

Otterbein’s Homecoming is in fact a mirror of student and alumni life. To the extent that Otterbein is unique, the story of her Homecomings is unique as well. That this history is shared by other, similarly sized colleges with a background of church ownership is not surprising. The college reflected trends nationally. Otterbein has been a pioneer in parts of her history. In Homecoming, she has been more of a follower. Yet, the purpose of Homecoming is, perhaps, more suitably fitted to the common themes of recollection, boosterism, and non-confrontational rivalry. Homecoming at Otterbein is not so much about creating new idioms but about reflecting on and preserving memories. With those caveats, let us reflect back on homecoming at Otterbein over the last century.

Otterbein College announced it would have a “Home Coming” in the Tan and Cardinal issue of October 15, 1917. The Tan and Cardinal, the recently created student newspaper of the college, announced it would take place on November 3 of that year. The event was planned by the Varsity “O” club, Otterbein’s athletic club. Varsity ‘O’ called on all local alumni to participate in the celebration. “The local Athletic Club” also established a committee, which planned “entertainment” for “visitors not included” in the Varsity ‘O’ plans.

By October 29, the T & C was able to declare that “Home Coming [Is] To Be Big Affair.” By then, Varsity “O” and the Otterbein Athletic Club were working together, with sixty people participating in the planning. Among the plans were that soldiers in uniform were to be special guests at the banquet following the game, while a separate dinner for women was planned at the Cochran Hall dining room. This was one of the few reminders that Homecoming was established in the midst of World War I.

In that first homecoming game, Otterbein lost to Heidelberg, 9 – 0. A banquet followed in the Association Building. The menu that evening was roast pig with “rich brown gravy,” baked beans, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and ice cream. Many of the other, “traditional” homecoming events lay in the future. In that first homecoming, the game and the postgame banquet made up the entire celebration.

It took five years before Otterbein won its first homecoming game, another match with Heidelberg in 1922, which Otterbein won 20 – 0. During those years, there was much fine-tuning of what “homecoming” was all about. In 1920, a homecoming “central committee”was formed, with subcommittees such as “Reception,” “Invitation,” and “Pageant,” a new idea. Varsity O was still involved in planning, although a year later (1921), Student Council began to play a roll. But the earliest homecomings were looser affairs. In 1918, a rally took place the night before the game. The next day, which saw Otterbein once again losing to Heidelberg, the crowd at the game, perhaps in frustration, knocked part of the grandstand off.

1920 also marked the first multi-day celebration. While the literary societies held open house on Friday night, Saturday had become a full day of activities. In the morning, a rally, including cheers, speeches, songs, and band music, followed by the football game. The day finished with a supper sponsored by Varsity “O.” 1921 was even larger, with the beginning of Otterbein’s Diamond Jubilee as a centerpiece. In an odd choice of venue, a pep rally took place in the Chapel. One of the speeches made by Philomathean member E. R. Cole was titled, “Racial Superiority.” The text has not survived, so we do not know how “politically incorrect” this effort may have been.

1922 was a landmark homecoming. The three hundred alumni who attended were entertained by a vaudeville act by students Joe Mayne and Paul “Piggy” Harris, which included “broom swallowing, puns, and repartee.” In a nod to new technology, Mayne also did a skit called “The Wonders of the Wireless.” As America eagerly entered the age of the radio, automobiles, and widespread electric power, the emergence of low cost and easily accessible communication and transport made weekend events like homecoming affordable and reachable. It is no wonder that Otterbein’s homecoming started and grew right along with the automotive society.

The other new event in 1922 was the parade, missing before that year but quickly becoming a feature of “traditional” homecoming. The first mention of a parade in 1922 was followed in 1923 by a much bigger affair. That year, the names of some of the parade floats survive: “The Spirit of 25,” “Bring the Bacon Home, Boys,” and float with a model of Otterbein’s new gymnasium. “Piggy” Harris returned to do a ventriloquist act, while his fellow student “Skinny” Weinland did a “horseshoe” act.

The parade quickly become an annual feature of Homecoming. A series of rainy homecomings in the later 1920s kept attendance down, but there appears never to have been any doubt that the parade was a permanent fixture. In 1924, several Westerville businesses decorated their buildings for Homecoming weekend. Rain forced Robert “Slippery” Snavely to punt in a 12 – 0 loss to Muskingum in 1926.

Homecoming was and is an occasion for the premiers of new campus buildings. In 1928, President Walter G. Clippinger and board of trustees chairman F. O. Clements broke ground for a new Gymnasium. The two presidents got into a good-natured disagreement about who should turn the first spade full of earth, settled only when Clements gave Clippinger a direct order to go first. The building was dedicated at the 1929 homecoming a year later. The tradition of dedications continued with the groundbreaking for Cowan Hall in 1950, followed by its formal opening on Homecoming Sunday, 1951, while East, West, and North Halls were dedicated at Homecoming, 1960. Homecoming, 1964 included dedication of the Campus Center, and Homecoming 2004 saw the dedication of the Dick Fishbaugh Baseball Field.

As the carefree age of the Roaring Twenties descended in to the Depression of the 1930s, Otterbein College saw a downward trend in enrollment and finances. It also welcomed the next evolutionary steps in homecoming icons, that of the Homecoming Queen and the Homecoming Play. Both of were introduced on October 12, 1933. Marjorie Bowser won election as Homecoming Queen that year. There was some minor controversy; the T & C failed to run a picture of the Queen in favor of printing a blank scorecard for the convenience of football fans. Meanwhile the Theater Department put on a play titled “Oh! Susan.” With some interruptions, the homecoming theatrical was a centerpiece of the evening of Homecoming Saturday untilthe 1980s. Plays are still a part of Homecoming in some years; 2016’s Homecoming featured “The Addams Family” as post-game entertainment.

The position of homecoming queen has survived with only a few alterations. In 1934, the queen presented the football used in the homecoming game. Homecoming 1936 called the parade a “procession,” while the queen rode in a “phaeton.” As the years rolled by, other, non-Otterbein groups joined the parade, literally, starting with the Ohio State Patrol in 1940. The Westerville High School band joined later, and by 1946, the parade included seven sororities, three fraternities, and nineteen clubs and organizations.

Just as Homecoming was the ideal venue for buildings, it has also been the scene of at several presidential inaugurations. Dr. J. R. Howe was inaugurated president on Homecoming Saturday, November 4, 1939. That homecoming eve saw one of the most daring stunts of the decade. A person or persons unknown replaced the American flag with a hand-lettered flag that read “FRESHMEN.” The rope below the flag was cut, which made lowering the rogue flag impossible. Freshman James Sheridan was able to climb the flagpole and get the American flag in place before the game. President J. Gordon Howard was also inaugurated atHomecoming in 1945, and current president Kathy Krendl was inaugurated the day before Homecoming, 2009.

As in World War I, World War II affected Homecoming in only minor ways. The disappearance of much of the male student body had an effect, but less so than the huge numbers of freshmen veterans did in the 1950s. Homecoming 1941, just weeks before Pearl Harbor, saw the first staging of a homecoming dance. The dance, usually following the play, was a tradition for many years. The wartime 1942 Homecoming saw the play cancelled, the dance relocated to the Westerville Armory, and the banquet details withheld.

Postwar homecomings seemed to present no outward changes. In some years, the postgame banquet was replaced with an ox roast. In the late 1940s, an all-campus Leaf Raking party took place during Homecoming. By then the fraternities and sororities were taking over many of the social aspects of Homecoming, with lunches and afternoon receptions dominating the once standard dinner. Homecoming in the 1950s was not unlike America at large: serene, placid and unflappable.

As the postwar generation came to college age, things began to change. In what may have been foreshadowing, the 1962 Homecomingwas all but replaced by a convocation titled “Crisis of Freedom.” Meetings of intellectuals, capped by an evening address by Senator Karl E. Mundt, which replaced the play, replaced all but the game, the queen, and the dance. Homecoming at the end of the 1960s looked much like those before the 1960s. Junior Chris Eversole lamented in the T & C in 1970: “homecoming had gone off without a hitch and without any reminder of war, unemployment, and suffering.” Homecoming, like Otterbein herself, missed much of the turbulence of the 1960s.

Small changes were seen in the decade following. 1972 saw the first African-American candidate for homecoming queen, Victoria Coleman. The Homecoming dance, on hiatus in 1970, was not resurrected. The student body elected Independent queens, with no connections to Greek communities, in 1970 and 1973. If coverage by the T & C was any gauge, the 1970s were a decade of informality and less attention to tradition. The later 1970s saw little coverage of homecoming beyond the election of the queen and the football scores.

In 1987, Homecoming itself professionalized, as the Campus Programming Board took over planning and created a “Traditional Events” committee. The year before, students elected the first Homecoming “king,” repeated in 1989 and a Homecoming tradition ever since. As Otterbein’s class sizes expanded and the student body grew in diversity, it was perhaps inevitable that Homecoming would change as well. The days when class size was small and drawn from a (mostly) homogenous population faded. To appeal to the greatest number of students, some traditions inevitably died out.

For the first time in 1993, the homecoming parade was (re) opened to non-Greek participants. The following year, all campusorganizationswere allowed to offer candidates for king and/or queen. Ninety campus organizations queried for entrance rules. More and more signs of deviation from tradition appeared. In 1996, no less than four dinners were offered to accommodate diversity: Cardinal, “O” Club, Reunion, and Parent & Student. With the design of Homecoming now accomplished by committee, albeit a mostly student committee, new ideas were tried. A “donut run” to Schneider’s Bakery in uptown Westerville was popular for several years. At Homecoming in the Sesquicentennial year of 1997, a carnival was tried during the football game for attendees who could not stay until the end.

During the 1990s, talk of Homecoming being “too Greek” and overwhelming other campus interests came to the fore. 1999 saw a complaint of the lack of publicity aimed at students outside the Greek system, while a T&C editorial in 2007 complained that Homecoming was too “Greek-oriented.” Fraternities, perhaps inspired by the 1978 film Animal House, occasionally set a bad example. In the 1992 Homecoming parade, Eta Phi Mu passed out condoms instead of candy. The 1997 parade included a “Ratmobile,” a marcher disguised as Bill Clinton, and a poster with a borderline-obscene joke. Clearly, and not always willingly, the conservative, Christian denominational college was being frog-marched into the modern world.

As the twenty-first century began, the Campus Programming Board continued to tinker with the Homecoming formula. A bonfire was added to Homecoming eve and kept up over the century’s first decade. Friday pep rallies were added, although in 2004 the T&C noted the bonfire attracted a “limited number of students.” 2007 saw the first biracial King and Queen. By 2016, the last Homecoming as of this writing, Homecoming was both familiar and mysterious. Homecoming still had the parade, the Queen (and King), the football game, and the play. New was the “Grove Festival,” with food trucks, music, zoo animals, a mixer, a pancake breakfast, a soccer game, and other tidbits.

As we end our look at one hundred years of Homecoming at Otterbein, we again note that Homecoming reflects trends in society at large. If students in the early 1920s marveled at the radio, students in the 2010s are glued to their I-phones and I-pads. If a previous generation of Homecoming attendees were entertained by church choirs, it is perhaps not surprising that the Columbus Gay Men’s Choir sang on Homecoming eve in in 1993. If students in Warren G. Harding’s time rushed to trade the horse for the Model T, students in Donald Trump’s America are using social media to make the world both closer to home and keep it farther away. Changes are bound to keep coming to Homecoming, but if the task of Homecoming is to keep memories of time spent at Otterbein alive, the task will continue as long as does the institution.

[Written for a Homecoming presentation. Thanks to Stephen Grinch, who used the bulk of it.]