OSU Stater Magazine Fall 2023

40 ForOregonState.org/Stater 5 THE ORANGE AND THE… BLACK? Oregon State University has had many names — Corvallis College, Oregon Agricultural College, Oregon State College — but one thing’s for sure, its colors have always been orange and black, right? Not quite. For 25 years, navy blue was the school color, until a faculty committee replaced it with orange in 1893. Students adopted black as the secondary color soon after, but its status was, surprisingly, a matter of some dispute. (Some speculate the reluctance to embrace black was due to Lewis & Clark College in Portland — known then as Albany College — having already adopted orange and black as their colors.) As a 1965 article in the Oregon Stater put it: “Over the years many have led themselves to believe that OSU’s colors are orange and black. It ain’t so.” Still, time — and dec- ades’ worth of swag — eventually settled the question. Today’s official university brand guidelines embrace both Beaver Orange (Pantone 1665) and Paddletail Black. —SCHOLLE MCFARLAND Nº Nº # ↖Decked out in school colors, fans cheer on the Beavs against University of Washington in 2021. Oregon State dances once came with an elaborate souvenir — the dance card. Tied with string around the wrist, these small booklets listed the evening’s songs with a space for the name of your dance partner next to each one. As they often captured first danceswith future spouses,manysurvive in OSU’s archives, carefully preserved in scrapbooks. School dances started in 1897. Until the 1920s, there were just five a year, but soon student organizations got in the mix.“Fora Hawaiian-themed dance in the 1950s,big glass tanks were brought in and filled with hundreds of goldfish,”archivistTiah Edmunson-Mortonwrote.“In 1951,the MU transformed into the merry land of Oz … Instead of the Emerald City, students were invited into the Orange City — and were invited to view the world through orange-colored glasses, which doubled as a dance card.” By 1967, with social mores around courtship in flux,the roughly70-year tradition came to an end. Still, expressions like “my dance card is full” or “pencil me in” remain, echoes of this once important part of student life. —SCHOLLE MCFARLAND KEEPSAKES CºURTSHIP OF

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