Purdue Pete

Common card · No. 499111

Purdue Pete is a mascot of Purdue University. Despite his on-field presence at Purdue sporting events, Pete is only an athletic mascot of the university. The official mascot of Purdue University is the Boilermaker Special. Purdue Pete was first designed as a logo by the University Bookstore in 1940. In the summer of 1940, Robert “Doc” Epple borrowed $10,000 from his father to invest as part owner of the University Bookstore. Doc had just graduated from Purdue and he and his partner, Red Simmons, decided their business should have a logo. They commissioned Art Evans to create it. Carl Verplank was the model for the caricature he created. Carl weighed 210 pounds and ran the 100 yard dash under 10 seconds. The bookstore would use the character on their products and portray him dressed up in different clothes for the different majors. The owners of the bookstores gave him the name “Pete”; no one today knows why this was chosen to be his name. He was given a physical identity in 1956 as...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Tom Britt, CC BY 2.0