Challenge yourself to Tom’s Trivia!
See if you know as much as King of UConn Trivia and University Deputy Spokesperson Tom Breen ’00 (CLAS).
Scroll to the bottom to reveal the answers.
In 1970, members of the marching band were told they would soon have a new mascot, abandoning the husky. The change never officially happened. But what would the new UConn mascot have been?
A: The Colonials
B: The Yankees
C: The Patriots
D: The Provisionals
What fictional office was contested every fall by students in the 1940s and 1950s who went by monikers like the Barefoot Natural Boy, Lena the Hyena, the Gin Dipper, and Waldo the Whistling Yak?
A: The Mayor of Storrs
B: King of the Jungle
C: Grand Troglodyte of South Campus
D: President of the UConn Football Rooters Club
After World War II, a student-run “night club” opened in the old dining hall known as the Beanery (now the Benton Museum) with everything from dances to sketch comedy to beauty pageants. What was the name of this late-night institution?
A: Connecticlub
B: Storrs After Dark
C: Club Husky
D: The Oak Grove
The Blizzard of 1978 was the first time classes were canceled due to weather since the hurricane of 1938. Which of these activities was not among the ways students passed the time?
A: Jumping naked from dorm windows into snow drifts
B: Shoveling out sidewalks and doorways at the Mansfield Training School
C: Cross-country skiing around campus
D: Trekking to a beer truck at Mansfield Four Corners that was selling six-packs
This February doesn’t seem so bad compared to 1978 and its historic blizzard
Answers
- B. Although Homer Babbidge accomplished many important things during his tenure at UConn, his strange, long-held dream of changing the mascot from the Husky to the Yankee never came true. Babbidge tried a number of strategies to ease the university into it, including changing the school’s official press abbreviation from “UConn” to “The U of C” and introducing colonial, tricornered hats at graduation, but the affection for the Husky was simply too strong.
- A. Along with the Pied Piper Parade, the election of a Storrs “mayor” was a highlight of campus social life in the years after World War II. Candidates tended to dress in bizarre costumes, adopt strange names, and make outlandish promises, like eight-course meals in each dining hall.
- A. Launched in the late 1940s and supported by campus organizations in a bid to combat “student apathy,” Connecticlub showcased student and professional entertainers, and had, as an added attraction, “late permission cards” given to women who were students, who otherwise had to be in their dorm rooms by midnight.
- D. Students (unwisely) stripped down and dived out of windows, (helpfully) cleared walkways and doors at the training school, and strapped on skis to traverse campus, but the enterprising package store owner with a beer truck was in Eagleville, not Mansfield Four Corners.
Wow! A lot of important trivia has been missed by this 1961 UConn graduate. And two years have already passed while I’ve been intending to respond with a trivial correction to Tom’s Trivia in June 2017 . Here goes:
In the mid 1950’s, when my father was a new addition to the UConn faculty, my family briefly lived in an apartment on the second floor in one of several frame buildings on the north side of campus that were available for temporary faculty and staff housing. While it is indeed true that our apartments were heated by kerosene stored in large drums in front of each building, I don’t recall ever hearing our buildings referenced as Oil Can Alley. Nope. Everyone in Storrs called our settlement Rainbow Alley because each of the several buildings was painted a different color. You got the Alley part right! We waited for our school bus in front of The Rock, which was a lot bigger back then.