By Jeff Hunter ’96

---

At the time, Cache Valley was considered hostile territory for Ken Mitchell, and the Nelson Fieldhouse represented the enemy’s strongpoint.

While serving as the assistant sports information director (SID) at Brigham Young University, Mitchell and his wife, Becky, ventured north from Provo on the night of Feb. 1, 1968, to attend the Cougars’ men’s basketball game on the campus of Utah State University. Games were played in the Nelson Fieldhouse back then, with bleachers set up on the sides of the court, while chain-link fence separated the players from the fans along both baselines.

In the much-anticipated in-state showdown between Aggie scoring machine Shalier Halimon Jr. and BYU big man Neil Roberts, the Cougars absolutely torched the scoreboard and headed back to Utah Valley with a 118–103 victory. But while they were thrilled with BYU’s highest-scoring output of the season, the Mitchells were far from pleased with their experience while sitting amongst impassioned Aggie fans at one end of the court.

“It was really something that night,” Mitchell recalls while replicating the sound of USU students fervently shaking the metal fence. “Becky and I were just sitting there, but the regular Aggie fans were just awful. Foul-mouthed and the whole thing. And now, we’re not saints, but I wouldn’t want to be a part of that, let’s put it that way. And on the way home, I said to Becky, ‘I’ll never go to another game up there.’

“The next year, I’m the SID at Utah State,” Mitchell adds with a huge laugh.

AGGRESSIVE ILLUSTRATING

Fifty-eight years later, Mitchell regularly attends Aggie basketball games at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum. And even in his 90th year, he can still be found on a chair just past the north end zone of Merlin Olsen Field at Maverik Stadium, standing watch during USU football games at the door to the Aggies’ locker room ready to usher coaches and players in and out of the building.

Officially, Mitchell retired as a full-time employee in 1998 after serving in a variety of roles during his nearly four decades at Utah State University, primarily serving as director of special projects in Advancement and academic advisor in Athletics. But it was during his five-year stint as sports information director that he rather inadvertently transformed the way USU is visualized.

And until last winter, he had kind of forgot about it.

“Becky and I were watching an Aggie basketball game, but I wasn’t really paying attention when they flashed the Aggie bull caricature up on the screen,” Mitchell recalls. “Becky said, ‘You know, you started that.’ And I said, ‘Started what?’

“She replied, ‘The bull. You were the first to use the bull head caricature to represent Aggies.’ And honestly, it had never occurred to me that that was right, I did start that.”

While he admits that the exact details of the story have faded over the decades, Mitchell’s recollection is that while working in athletic media relations, he first started using what would now be viewed as a rather rudimentary drawing of a bull’s head in 1972. Sometimes referred to as “the snorting bull logo” due to the angry fumes coming out of the bovine’s nostrils, the blue-and-white drawing somehow ended up on Mitchell’s desk in the fall of 1971.

“I really messed up not recording who brought it in,” Mitchell admits. “But I have a vague memory that it was someone from Brigham City, and I’m guessing that it may have been an art teacher from the Intermountain Indian School — but that’s just a guess. I can’t clarify anything other than that it came from Brigham City.

“I assume the guy who brought it in was the one who created it, but I’m not even sure of that. And it makes me just sick that I didn’t record the name and date. But at the time, I remember thinking, I’ve got this bull’s head. Now what I am going to do with it?”

At that time, the bull was not necessarily regarded as an emblem representing Utah State athletics. The university’s brief embrace of a live bull mascot known as GUS (“Go Utah State”) was still four or five years away, and the emergence of the iconic Aggie mascot known as Big Blue didn’t take place until the late ’80s.

Mitchell says that even while he was at BYU, he was rather annoyed that longtime Deseret News sports editor Hack Miller, a University of Utah graduate, “delighted” in using a caricature of a farmer in overalls holding a pitchfork when he penned articles that involved Utah State athletics.

“I soon realized that there wasn’t an Aggie mascot,” Mitchell recalls. “University-wide, everyone used the logo of the outline of the state of Utah for letterhead and all printed materials. Then when I started traveling with the Aggie football and basketball teams, people would ask me, ‘What the hell is an Aggie?’ and I really had no answer.”

To be clear, Aggie is short for the original nickname, Agriculturalist. But much like the New York Knicks and Mets, who prefer not to be referred to as the Knickerbockers and the Metropolitans, respectfully, Utah’s agricultural college quickly adapted a more headline-friendly name over a century ago.

Aggie athletes were also referred to unofficially as the Farmers in the first half of the 20th century, but that nickname died out about the time Utah State Agricultural College changed its name to Utah State University in 1957. A spirited movement to abandon the Aggies in favor of the Highlanders emerged in the late 1960s, but that idea ultimately, uh, fizzled out.

But Mitchell, who grew up in the tiny backwoods Kentucky community of Bizzell Bluff before relocating to Los Angeles for high school, found the bull caricature to be more intimidating as far as Aggie athletics were concerned. And early in 1972, Mitchell decided to use the drawing from Brigham City on the cover of USU’s spring sports guide — with one significant alteration.

“The original version wasn’t blowing me away,” Mitchell says. “There was just no aggressiveness in him.”

That led to Mitchell crossing campus to pay a visit to Glen Edwards with the original bull caricature in his hands. An art professor at USU for 32 years, Edwards is one of the most renowned artists to ever come out of Cache Valley. Mitchell says Edwards, who passed away in 2019, knew exactly what to do.

“I asked Glen to take it and make the bull look aggressive, and he said, ‘OK,’” Mitchell remembers. “All he did was add the snorts, and it worked. It’s perfect. That’s what I was trying to convey is that the bull is snorting and suggesting, Get out of my way!

“And that was the start.”

SYMBOLIZING SUCCESS

Needless to say, in present day, the use of a new logo at a major university would first require the creation of numerous options presented by several different graphic designers, unlimited meetings and an extensive review process. Then there’s the legal aspect of trademarking and licensing before making the bold move to change a logo that has previously represented the institution for a long period of time.

But from 1972 to ’74, Mitchell says he regularly used the Aggie bull head logo “without any concern.”

“I don’t know why, but it took about two years to notice it,” Mitchell adds.

It wasn’t until the spring of 1974 that some alumni started asking questions, leading to Rolf Kerr, a former Aggie quarterback and then-vice-president for university relations at USU, to request that Mitchell make a presentation to the alumni council’s executive committee.

Afterwards, Kerr sent a letter to Utah State athletic director Ladell Andersen dated April 16, 1974, that stated “Ken did a very fine job in making the presentation,” but that one member of the committee, “who had expressed some very negative feelings about the use of the bull was not in attendance at the meeting.”

The Executive Committee requested that I write a letter to you indicating their support for your continued use and exploration of the bull head as the visual symbol for the Aggie. They stress the importance of maintaining the term Aggie, and in doing all that we can avoid any thought that we be referred to as the bulls. They further suggested that we word this statement of support in such a way as to indicate the continued exploration rather than to suggest any final and long-lasting sanction. They are desirous of exploring with you the acceptability of this visual image. Their response is generally positive, but maintained a slightly reserved position, allowing for possible negative reaction and for the development of a great sense of support as its use is continued.

That determination promptly led to the “snorting bull logo” being used on official correspondence from the entire USU Athletics Department, and it represented the Aggies (along with an alternative, “USU” flanked by bull horns option) until the creation of a new logo in 1992. By that time, Big Blue had emerged as Utah State’s mascot, and the new logo, which featured a snorting bull jumping through a giant letter “U” lasted about three years. It was replaced in ’95 by a cartoon version of a muscular standing bull, which was quickly nicknamed the “Pumbaa” logo due to its similarity to the warthog from The Lion King.

Since 2001, Utah State athletics has primarily been represented by a version of the “U-State” logo, but in recent years as vintage looks have become more coveted, it’s not too hard to find a T-shirt or hat emblazoned with the original bull logo created by an anonymous Brigham City artist, enhanced by a legendary USU professor and championed by Mitchell, who is known to his longtime friends by the nickname “Smiley.”

“I think if you go in the campus store, you’ll see the bull head on something,” Mitchell says with his trademark grin. “And it’s not just that. They approved the full-body bull in 2011, so that kind of brings us full circle from 1972.”