Bill Rockwell came to Berkeley in the fall of 1941 with an idea in his head that would transform Cal spirit forever. He’d already shared it with a Stanford girl he met while hitchhiking across the country the summer before. “I told her when Cal played Stanford at the Big Game, look for a little bear, a guy dressed up like a bear, running around the field.”
Most origin stories are lost in the mists of time. Not Oski’s. Thanks largely to a 1994 oral history with Rockwell housed in the Bancroft Library, the Cal mascot’s genesis is well-documented, if not widely known. Oddly, it’s a dual creation story: There were two creators and two Oskis, both of which appeared almost simultaneously in late September 1941—one as a cartoon in the Daily Cal, the other a costumed mascot in Memorial Stadium.
While the cartoon was short-lived—it ran for only one season before its creator graduated and was sent to war—the costumed bear was just getting started. Nearly 85 years later, the eternal sophomore abides.
Those who knew Bill Rockwell personally say he was painfully shy and rarely made eye contact. Being Oski, a longtime Oski Committee advisor once observed, allowed him “to do things he normally couldn’t do. When he put on the costume, Rocky didn’t exist.”
It was a realization Rockwell himself first made at Long Beach Junior College when he was recruited to play Ole Olson, the school’s viking mascot. As Rockwell related the story in the oral history, he was in class when his professor told him, “Bill, they need someone your size over at the band building.” Rockwell was 5’5”. The suit fit in more ways than one.
“Well, that started it,” Rockwell said. “I went to all the [Long Beach] football games and the basketball games and did all kinds of crazy things like walking and balancing on the crossbar of the goalposts and pretending to grab the football when the ref wasn’t looking. Things like that.”
Transferring to Berkeley, he hoped to reprise the act. Up until that point, Cal had only ever used live mascots, a black bear and a brown bear, which it eventually phased out. And for good reason. A grizzly cub is one thing. A full-grown Ursus arctos horribilis is another entirely. Rockwell had something far less intimidating in mind: the ursine equivalent of Ole the Viking. He thought he’d call him Algy, or Algy C. Alifornia.
For help conceiving the character, he dropped in on the Daily Californian offices and found Warrington Colescott, art editor of the student newspaper. Colescott had already begun working on a cartoon strip to run during the football season featuring a little bear in a letter sweater who did weekly battle against opposing team mascots. While the cartoon predated Colescott, he put his own spin on it.
As Colescott told California in 2011, the bear “had the hots for this young lady named Rosy Bowl … and each week he had to face off against someone else. There was an Indian [Stanford] and a husky and so forth.”
Colescott called his cartoon bear Oskie—spelled with an “e”—after the traditional “Oski Wow-Wow” yell, which, lore has it, was brought to Cal from the University of Illinois around the turn of the 20th century. Now he gave Rockwell some sketches upon which to model his masks and costume. He also persuaded him to drop Algy for Oski.
Rockwell got to work. With $25 from the Rally Committee, he bought clay to make the mold for the head and padding for the stomach. The band gave him two old pairs of pants that he had turned into one. From the athletic department he bummed a pair of size 13 ½ shoes, which he painted gold. He fashioned the mask around a football helmet. The finishing touch: white cotton gloves.
On Friday, September 26, 1941, the day before the season opener against St. Mary’s, Colescott’s cartoon bear premiered in the Daily Cal. Under the title “First Stop Moraga – Rose Bowl in Sight,” it showed Oskie bidding his mother adieu to search for his true love, Rosy Bowl. Meanwhile, a “slicker” in a car labeled “St. Mary’s” sized him up as “a sucker with a fat roll” he might lure into “a little game.”
That same evening, Rockwell’s Oski made his debut at a bonfire rally at the Greek Theatre, where he pantomimed speeches, threw tomatoes at freshmen, and jitterbugged with the girls. The next day, in Memorial Stadium, he donned the costume again, waiting under the stands as the yell leader roused the cheering section with a chant of “We want Oski!” After a few minutes, he charged out of the North Tunnel to an appreciative roar, tripped, and went skidding across 20 feet of turf. Back on his feet, he ran to the rooting section, took the baton, and directed the band. During the first half, he waved at little kids and admired pretty girls. At halftime he climbed a goalpost and used it like a balance beam. It was Ole the Viking all over again.
Oski started the game with the number 13 on his sweater. As the final whistle approached, he flipped the digits to reflect the score. Cal won 31–0.
Colescott’s Monday strip showed Oskie in the driver’s seat, the St. Mary’s slicker now “slicked”—naked in a barrel and suspenders, left by the side of the road.
Unfortunately, it was the Bears who mostly got skinned that season. As Colescott recalled in his 2011 interview, “The simple story was that Oskie didn’t do very well that year, and every Monday he would be beat up, destroyed one way or another, but still in pursuit.” His Oskie, he remarked elsewhere, was “a humorous little loser, which so fit the state of our football team that Oski became the university’s mascot, and a costumed replica cheered up the fans after each loss.”
Colescott may have been giving his cartoon bear too much credit for Oski’s success, but the new mascot was, by all accounts, a hit, beloved for his good spirits and slaphappy antics. Before long, the costumed Oski was everywhere—rallies, dances, sorority teas. That fall, Rockwell was so busy, he nearly flunked out of the engineering program.
Meanwhile, Stub Allison’s Bears limped to a 4–5 finish on the season, ending with a win over Stanford on November 29. Then, on December 7, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and everything changed.
War had loomed large that year. The Daily Cal ran wire stories covering the Nazi advance across Europe. Colescott recalled drawing caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. Now, as a mortal threat emerged across the Pacific, patriotism and paranoia surged up and down the coast. Wary of a possible Japanese attack on Pasadena, the Rose Bowl moved to North Carolina.
Rockwell immediately tried to enlist but failed his first physical because of a plantar wart on his foot. He tried again in April and was accepted into naval flight training. Along with some 50 other Berkeley students, he joined the Flying Golden Bears. Rockwell designed the training squadron’s insignia: a fierce-looking Oski, charging above the clouds, wielding a lightning bolt like a spear.
While in flight school, he corresponded with his old roommate from the Atherton Hall Cooperative, Kenji Sayama, who wrote to him while incarcerated at detention centers in Santa Anita and Arkansas. Sayama would eventually join the Army and serve in the occupation of Japan.
After training, Rockwell switched to the Marines and flew torpedo bombers in the Pacific, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross for action in the Solomon Islands and Bismarck Archipelago. The small, shy boy who hid behind a mask was now a bona fide war hero.
Colescott finished his art degree while working at both the Daily Cal and the California Pelican, the campus humor magazine. As he recalled many years later, “For that last wartime semester and through the summer session we produced art and writing that reflected that time of disasters faraway and unreal events locally, as the people around us began to disappear, one by one and in small groups. After the summer issue … my number was called and I disappeared as well.”
He spent the next four years in the Army. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he was in charge of a mortar platoon on Okinawa, supporting operations against Japanese resistance for the 7th Infantry Division.
After the war, both men returned to Berkeley on the G.I. Bill, Rockwell to finish his mechanical engineering degree, Colescott to get his MFA.
Colescott went on to become an art professor and widely collected printmaker whose satirical etchings earned sufficient renown to merit a New York Times obituary when he passed in 2018 at age 97. Speaking to this magazine, Colescott readily admitted that his art, densely narrative with cartoonish figuration, was rooted in his student work at the Pelican and Daily Cal—experiences he has said were more important to him than his art major.
(Bancroft Library)
On his return to Cal, Rockwell briefly became re-involved with Oski, but his heart was no longer in the mascot business. “The rah-rah spirit wasn’t with me after the excitement of war,” he said. Flying airplanes in combat, he later admitted, was “a lot more interesting than playing around on a football field.”
He never completely moved on from his creation however. In his later years, he handcrafted ceramic figurines of Oski as gifts for friends—including his old roommate, Sayama, whose wife later surprised him with one.
And he left a set of rules for all future Oskis. A hand-scrawled note in the oral history lays out his guidelines. Rule No. 1: Oski “should enter and leave with a bang, and not stay for encores, because Oski can get very stale very quickly.… Do something, then get OUT!”
Pat Joseph is the Editor-in-Chief of California. While the rah-rah spirit is rarely with him, he will occasionally bust out with an Oski Yell.
