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Providence Stories

By Patti Cassidy

Walk on the campus of Brown University and you keep running into its history.

The Bear Facts
Take the bear, for example. As you enter the campus green, a giant statue of Bruno, the school mascot, rears up on his haunches to greet you. Though he's now the symbol of Brown's athletic teams, it wasn't always so.

In 1902, local real estate man Isaac Goff thought he had found the perfect mascot for the school. He had a brown and white burro shipped in from Colorado to kick off the football team, but the crowds didn’t go wild for the burro and it felt the same about them.

Two years later, Theodore Francis (T.F.) Green, class of 1887, presented the school with the trophy head of a great brown bear for the new student union. He felt it would be the perfect mascot because, as he said, “It is not one of a herd, but acts independently. It is intelligent and capable of being educated (if caught young enough!). It is a good swimmer and a good digger, like an athlete who makes Phi Beta Kappa. Furthermore its color is brown; and its name is Brown.”

Beginning with two bears, named Dinks and Helen, who were loaners from the Roger Williams Park Zoo, most of the bears that appeared at the school's games were real, though students in bear suits now do the job.

Walk up to the ornate black and gold Van Wickle Gates in front of University Hall. Though you can wander in and out the side gates, the grand center gates are only opened on two days a year — Convocation (when they open inward) and Commencement (when they open outward). Legend has it that if you enter the campus through the gates more than once as an undergraduate, you'll never graduate from Brown.

Those undergrads who have to do it, though, including members of the school band which plays on those ceremonial days, march through the gates backwards to fool the fates!

Library Legends
Across the street from the gates stands the John Hay Library, with its green bust of Dante Alighieri observing the passing crowds outside. The bust was given to the school by Rhode Island’ Italian citizens in 1921 to commemorate the sixth centenary of the death of Dante. The building itself, though, contains its own slices of school history.

In addition to Babylonian clay tablets and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tea set, the special collections there include three rare books — two volumes of The Dance of Death and an anatomy book — that are bound in human skin. Though that was not totally unusual for their time, they give modern visitors pause.

On another front, the online catalogue for the university collection is named Josiah, after the mythical teacher Josiah S. Carberry. Touted as a professor of psychoceramics (the study of cracked pots), he first appeared on a campus bulletin board in 1929 where it was announced he would give a lecture on Greek architecture. In 1955, he established a fund to buy books, providing that every Friday the 13th be designated Carberry Day and members of the college community deposit spare change for the fund into brown jugs.

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