Points of Pride
Dragon Evolution
The Original: The Moorhead State Dragon was born in the fire that devastated Old Main, the school’s central building, on Feb. 9,1930. Legend has it that Flora Frick, a prominent physical education professor then, came up with the school mascot when she saw the football team running out of a temporary dressing room below the campus heating plant and said: “Why, they look like dragons!” It's a great story, but it’s a bit wide of the truth.
Moorhead State adopted the Dragon in the spring of 1930 by a vote of the student body, wrote Clarence “Soc” Glasrud, an MSU alumnus and professor emeritus who wrote two histories of the university. “Before then the school’s athletic teams were called the Peds, for pedagogues, a fancy word for teachers, and before that they were simply called the Teachers. But a lot of the teacher colleges back then shared the same name,” Glasrud said.
As school spirit rallied around the catastrophic 1930 fire, Glasrud said, the students decided to vote on a new symbol to express renewed campus vitality. According to The Mistic, the campus newspaper then, the name committee insisted that the new mascot, besides reflecting school spirit, “should be a two-syllable word, and one that is yelled from the lungs and not the thr
oat.”
The choices narrowed down to the Mistics, the Trojans, the Eagles, the Spartans, and the winning choice, the Dragons.
Glasrud, who enrolled at Moorhead State the following fall, became a features editor of the 1931 yearbook which dedicated that year’s edition to the new post-fire vitality: “To the Dragon…Symbol of the spirit of MSTC (Moorhead State Teachers College): Born of the devastating and purifying fire…”
The original symbol of the Dragon was drawn by artists at Buckbee Mears Co. in St. Paul, who produced the engravings for the yearbook. That original, an oriental-style dragon rising up on its haunches, stood alone as the university’s symbol for nearly a decade.
The 1930s & 40s Dragon: In the late 1930s, the oriental Dragon was upstaged by Denny the Dragon, a cartoon figure that resembled a Walt Disney duck.
An amateur cartoonist most of his life, Robert Bruns drew Denny the Dragon for Moorhead State’s 1947 yearbook. “I graduated in 1947 in a class of only 47 students,” he said. “Those were good days.” He taught 40 years and retired from Fergus Falls High School as its audio-visual director. Bruns is quick to admit he didn’t create Denny the Drag
on. That credit goes to Mina (Peoples) Miller, who drew the original Denny Dragon and he continued drawing it into the 1950s.
The 1970s Dragon: After Denny the Dragon, chaos reigned. An assortment of dragons, ranging from the funny to the fierce, appeared on Moorhead State brochures, football helmets, T-shirts and stationery. But none of them commanded enough presence to eclipse the others.
The 1987?? Dragon: The new dragon arrived just in time to celebrate MSU’s centennial.
“It was a project for one of my first graphic design courses,” said Haley Johnson, the creator the MSU’s modern dragon who now owns her own design firm in Minneapolis. “I had no idea the university would select it. But my teacher, Phil Mousseau, really liked the design and brought it to the attention of the administration.”
Mousseau, now retired, had assigned the Dragon as a class graphic design project for 15 years and Johnson’s, he said, was the best he’d seen.
“We’ve never really had one single dragon that stood for the official school symbol,” Mousseau said. “And in my opinion, the ones we had didn’t project the charisma, feeling and severity that are expected of a university mascot.” But he said the new dragon—a geometrical, fire-breathing serpent curled in a tight circle—combines a strong character with an unforgettable shape. “It’s compact, vital, aggressive and it’s usable in any kind of space.”
Johnson wanted $1,000 for the design, but settled for the university’s offer of $500. Today, she said, she charges in the six-digit dollar range for creating a college logo.