ONE WEEK, BLACK AND WHITE, NO CAPTION CHALLENGE - DAY 4

There's A Billiken In My Pocket!

Another iteration of the Billiken, the bizarre mascot of St. Louis University, where I attended college and law school. There are different stories of its origen and meaning (see here and here). I have personally visited The Billiken Store in Juneau, Alaska, and stayed in a small ryokan in Kyoto that had a Billiken in the sitting room.

One of the Articans had this pair hanging out of his coat pockets, scanning the street for the Tick Tock Tavern. They were successful.

              

College Hoops

Carolyn, Emily, Madeleine and I went to the St. Louis University basketball game yesterday against the University of Rhode Island. It was played at SLU's Chaifetz Arena, where son-in-law Brian is executive chef. He got us great seats. 

The arena's policy is that you can bring a camera that will fit in the palm of your hand. My trusty 5D Mk 3 won't fit in my briefcase so these are iPhone shots, not bad considering. The home team is in white. Just don't ask about the final score.

Madeleine had a blast. She loved the noise, motion, color and, I think, most of all, the band. The kid clearly enjoys music. However, she really didn't know how to react to SLU's bizarre mascot, the Billiken. No one else does, either.                       

And Now For Something Completely Different

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It's very strange. The Billiken is the official mascot of St. Louis University, where I attended college and law school. The Wikipedia article in the first link says that it was created as a novelty doll from by a woman is St. Louis that became an international craze. But I've also read that the designer was from Independence, Missouri, near Kansas City. It eventually had a considerable presence in Alaska and Japan. There is a Billiken Gift Shop in Juneau (it doesn't have a web site) and I bought a little one there. We once walked into the living room of a guest house in Kyoto and wham, saw a large Billiken in the alcove with the television. The owners said it was a minor Shinto deity. If you look around on the Web there are conflicting stories about the order in which it moved among Japan, Alaska and the mainland US.

To my knowledge, its only competitor for weirdest college mascot is the Banana Slug of Cal State-Santa Cruz. The current version is kind of cute in a strange way but how seriously is it taken by athletes whose school mascot is the wildcat, eagle, lion or grizzly bear?

UPDATE: alert reader Birdman nominated a much weirder mascot - see his comment to this post. Then I found a web page with a purported list of the 10 weirdest college mascots in the country. It ranks the Banana Slug first (I disagree), Birdman's nominee second (it should be first), and our Billiken third. See the list here.

Be A Billiken

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Would you like to be a Billiken? I am, or was. (I'm not sure if it marks you for life.) The Billiken is the strange mascot of St. Louis University, where I attended college and law school. My abridged biography is that I was born in Manhattan, grew up in Queens, went to high school in the Bronx and then St. Louis U. was the college farthest away from home that let me in. Married this woman from Kansas a month before law school graduation and lived happily in St. Louis ever after.

The Billiken is just short of bizarre. It is based on a novelty doll from about 1910. You can see lots of pictures of it across time on Google Images here. The University's official story about how it became the mascot is here on its web site. But there are much deeper origins involving Alaskan coastal indigenous peoples and the Shinto religion in Japan. There is a Billiken Gift Shop in Juneau, Alaska, selling the little figure in hundreds of variations. I once checked into a guest house in Kyoto, went to the sitting room and, boom, a Billiken was the most prominent thing in the household shrine. I had more detailed notes about this with photos of the Juneau and Kyoto Billikens in a post almost three years ago. You can check here if you'd like to. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiken. And just for the record, the Billiken is not the weirdest college mascot in the US. The title has to go to the University of California-Santa Cruz's Banana Slugs.