The Bates Bazaar is a curated, occasional offering of curious and quirky Bates-related items that are just a click away on websites devoted to what’s vintage, historical, and wicked cool.
1929 Bates baseball championship charm: $75
As often happened back then, the baseball team winning its second straight Maine title, in 1929, led to all hell breaking loose: A parade down College Street into Lewiston, then a bonfire atop Mount David. And players received baseball-shaped charm, like this one on eBay, to “R.G.C.” (No size is indicated on the item.)
That’s Roy Glendal Cascadden ’30, the team’s rightfielder, who was good hit, no field, according to the newspapers. “Roy Cascadden’s fly-catching ability won’t make the sticky-paper manufacturers have nightmares, but he can more than ply the wagon-tongue.”
“Wagon tongue” is a baseball bat, so named because early bat makers used wagon parts to make bats. The tongue of a wagon is the cylinder that helps to connect a wagon to the horsepower.
1966 Bates vs. AIC football program: $16.50
This is the cover of the 1966 football program for the Bates vs. AIC game at Garcelon Field. Really.
Today, football programs are designed by the home team, and feature photographs.
But during much of the 1900s, covers were illustrations, and sometimes generic, provided by the printer. By the 1960s, photorealism was blending with experimentation (if yet outright psychedelia) with the bursts of color seen on this cover.
Blazer or sweater patches: $89.99
Bates Bazaar readers know that when they see a seal with the founding date of 1864, it’s likely a pre-1988 item. That’s when the college adjusted its founding date to 1855, to match the year that the Maine State Seminary was chartered.
Blazer and sweater patches like these were popular in through the mid-1900s.
Merimanders CD from 1992: $14.95
Mom jeans. Some big hair. Lots of colorful T-shirts. It’s the early ’90s at Bates — and the perfect cover for the Merimanders’ CD, On Track, featuring tracks like Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” and ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me.”
The photo shoot was done in Auburn aboard a freight engine from the Boston & Maine Railroad. And the photographer? None other than the beloved faculty member Gene Clough, who died last fall.
The Meris’ outfits were “a visual nod to our concert dress,” explains Sheila Brennan ’94, featuring “a black skirt with a brightly colored camp shirt (singer’s choice) that were easily acquired and plentiful at The Limited store in the Auburn Mall.”
Bates All-Sports Camp cap: $45
This trucker cap, foam in the font and mesh in the back, depicts a mainstay of Bates summer programs for years, the Bates All-Sports Camp.
Co-founded and directed by Erik Bertelsen ’72 for more than two decades, the camp brought nearly 8,000 campers to the Bates campus from the 1980s into the early 2000s.
Bates basketball tournament medal: $24.00
This pendant went to all participants in the 1935 Bates Tourmanent, a high school basketball tourney sponsored by Bates.
It’s high school tournament time in Maine, a good time to note that Bates founded “schoolboy basketball’s annual grand finale,” as it was once described.
In 1922, Bates’ promotions-minded athletics director, Carl H. Smith, invited eight schoolboy teams to Lewiston to compete for the first statewide high school hoops title. By the 1930s, the Bates Tournament was a regional competition for teams from Western Maine.
In 1936, the Maine Principals’ Association assumed oversight of the state tournament, which it holds to this day.
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