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The Complete Guide to
Illinois High School Mascots
 What
do Bunnies, Orphans, Midgets, and Pretzels have in common? What is a
Caxy, a Tar, a Whip-Pur, or a Piasa Bird? All of them are
Illinois high school mascots -- and their stories are all explained in
a new book by Fred Willman
called Why Mascots Have Tales.
The 788 high schools of
Illinois are represented by
250 different mascots, 144 of which are very unusual. Why Mascots
Have Tales examines what they mean and how they got their names.
In addition, Illinois mascots are compared to mascots nationwide. Two
other ingredients of school spirit, school colors and enrollments, are
also examined. Mascots reveal much about Illinois geography and
history as well as the diversity, distribution, character, and careers
of its people.
Why Mascots Have
Tales is a reference book, a humorous book, a trivia book, a
geography book, a history book, a sociology book, and an anthropology
book. It is also a non-fiction book, but is greatly affected by
fiction. High school mascot names are real, but why they were chosen
involves history, natural surroundings, folklore, and that powerful
emotion called school spirit. It is a carefully collected and
organized storehouse of information about the montage of emotional
symbols of all the high schools representing the communities of our
state, making it both fun and academically significant. |