rockbeachmermaids.com
Bring back
the Mermaids
This is not a student campaign that started last year. It started in 1976, and it has been on the official logo since 1994.
rockbeachmermaids.com
This is not a student campaign that started last year. It started in 1976, and it has been on the official logo since 1994.
What this is
Nobody here is asking you to take a side. Everything below is checkable, most of it is on university property right now, and none of it was put there by us.
Read it in order. If you get to the end and think it is a coincidence, that is a completely reasonable thing to think. Most people do not.
The colors were fuchsia and green. Not chosen — a high school wanted a game in two days and they were the only two bolts of cloth in the shop. Thirty-five years of it before anyone switched to black and white.
Debbie Amazon refused to put the Lava Monsters on the mark. She was a nurse who raised five children here. The other account of why she refused is the one people repeat.
Andrea Christine drew the Breaker — and put a mermaid tail in the water. It is in the original sketch. She said she drew it for her sisters left in the sea.
The tail moved into the rock, where it still is. The board chair killed the version that made it visible, over the color. She did not kill the badge, because once the scales were dark she could not see it.
McShane Fordham found the 1994 sketches while pulling files for the seventy-fifth year of the black and white. The fuchsia version went on one t-shirt, one night, never to be reprinted. They still trade.
The Sirens’ Section fills a block behind the basket every home game, in costume, in fuchsia and green. There is a sign over it. Nobody has taken it down.
The tail is on the pizza boxes at concessions. It has been for years. No department has ever explained it and no department has ever removed it.
The other side
She was a ship’s captain, which was not a common thing to be. She survived a wreck on the lava rocks off this coast. The wreck killed her husband, who had followed her on board. And she said, for the rest of her life, that she heard a siren.
Five generations later a Gardner sat on the board of the school that exists because of that stretch of rock, and voted against putting a mermaid on its logo. She was not being difficult. She was being consistent.
We put this here because a campaign that hides its best counter-argument is not worth reading. And the answer to it is the one this school was built on: there was no light on those rocks that night. That is why there is one now, and why it is on every mark we have ever had.
Wear it
There has been exactly one official fuchsia shirt. It was printed in 2011, for one night, and never reprinted. They still trade, and people still ask us where to get one.
There is no shop behind this button. The Cove sells the licensed gear and this is not The Cove — this site is run from outside the university and always has been. If you want a White Caps jersey, go there. There is a mermaid in the store at weekends, which is its own small argument.
What is not in The Cove, and has not been since one night in 2011, is the fuchsia. When there is something here it will be the 1976 tail — the one Andrea Christine drew for her sisters left in the sea — in the two colours the school actually started with.
Nothing is being collected in the meantime. No list, no email box, no pre-orders for a thing that does not exist.
ComingHave your say
Two questions. Results are live — you can see where it stands before you pick, and you can change your mind afterwards.
This replaced the open thread on 23 September. Nobody’s posts were deleted, but the thread is not on the page any more. A vote is one click, nobody has to sit and read it for slurs, and it actually produces a number. Nothing about you is stored beyond a scrambled mark for your browser, so the same browser only votes once. No name, no email, no age, no account.
Loading…