On the Saturday before Christmas, the University of Missouri Tigers arrived in Texas by jet to play in the Ohio State Buckeyes in the 88th Cotton Bowl. The game took place last Friday.
Truman, the Mizzou mascot, hopped a ride on a carousel horse. At least, the tiger that Linda Lampkin made in honor of the occasion did. He is the only tiger on the carnival ride, she said, which has a lion, giraffe, an elephant and 10 other animals, plus eight horses.
Truman chose a steed on the Appleton City Carousel, which Linda bought after the carnival that brought it to town closed. After building an octagonal gazebo to enclose it, she reopened the carousel last May on the town’s main street. The MU mascot is visible though the window, which is strung with school pennants. Linda is also displaying the covers of the MU football programs her father collected.
Neither she nor her father, Philip Lampkin, were MU alum, but he loved Mizzou football, she said.
“It was his only hobby,” Linda said, “He had season tickets over 50 years.”
Her father did play football, at Appleton City High School, then as a student at Central Methodist College in Fayette. That was back in 1929, she said.
“He would hitchhike to Columbia and sit in the pecan trees to watch the game,” she said.
When she searched through her storage, Linda found she had more than four dozen football game program covers her father had collected. They feature cartoons by Amadee Wohlschlaeger, a self-taught artist who was a sports cartoonist for the St. Louis Dispatch. Amadee, as he signed his work, drew the covers of the MU football programs starting in 1959, when Missouri was in the Big 8 conference. The programs, which sold from 50 Cents to $2, feature Amadee’s cover art of the Mizzou Tiger assaulting the mascots of the other teams, including the Oklahoma Cowboys and the KU Jayhawkers.
The Jayhawk is usually depicted being served on a platter.
“They always played KU around Thanksgiving,” Linda said.
Linda is trying to get the University of Missouri to do a book of Amadee’s cover art, and has talked to the university archivist.
The son of a printer, Amadee was born in 1911, and started at the paper as a copy boy at age 14 in 1925, then was promoted to the art department. Amadee was one of six artists who drew the St. Louis’ Post-Dispatch Weatherbird. A cartoon character that originated in 1901, the Weatherbird was originally a cigar-smoking crow whose sketch served as a weather forecast, depending on if he was holding an umbrella or wearing a coat, and is the oldest continuously-running daily cartoon in American journalism.
Amadee stopped creating cartoons for the MU programs when the football coach wanted pictures of his team’s players on the covers instead. Linda learned from the MU archivist, who was working with the team coach, that Amadee was not happy about the decision, as he already had a drawing ready to go.
She finds his cover art intriguing, and does not feel the team photographs have the same dynamic vibe.
“I’d like the alumni group to pick up on it, but haven’t found a connection there yet,” she said of getting Amadee’s program art published.
Linda remembers going to the Cotton Bowl in 1962 in Texas with her parents when she was in high school. Two things stand out: it was cold as the dickens, she said, and they drove past Lyndon B. Johnson’s limo in the parking lot and parked near it. She also went to four other bowl games: the ’68 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., the ’78 Liberty Bowl in Memphis, Tenn, and two Orange Bowls, including when KU played Penn State, and one of the last calls of the game was reversed, flipping the score.
Linda decided to revive the carousel as a way to thank Appleton City residents for supporting her father and her uncle’s business, Lampkin Bros. Grain Company, which they owned for 20 years. Her great-uncle owned the Appleton City hardware store for almost forty years. She has old signs from the businesses on the back wall of the carousel building, but a few weeks ago, decided to transform the carousel’s main window into a paean to the MU team.
The MU team’s name was chosen in 1890 to honor a home guard unit called the Tigers that formed during the Civil War to protect Columbia from bushwhacker. MU used to have two tiger mascots, but they were consolidated into one tiger, named Truman, in 1984, when a contest was held to choose a name. Linda’s Truman is based on the original depiction of the mascot, she said.
“They change him about every 30 years,” she said.
This is the fourth appearance of the MU Tigers at the Cotton Bowl, which has been held annually since 1937. The Tigers had a 2-1 record in the Cotton Bowl going into last week’s game. They lost to the Texas Longhorns in 1946, but beat the Arkansas Razorbacks in 2008, and the Oklahoma State Cowboys in 2014.
Last Friday, the Tigers rallied in the fourth quarter to score two touchdowns, beating the Buckeyes 14 to 3.
Another Appleton City connection, once removed: Abby Dodge, granddaughter of Pat Artz Bauer of Appleton City, helped broadcast the Cotton Bowl. Abby’s mother grew up in Appleton City. Abby worked the Super Bowl broadcast last year, Linda said, and now is at KMBC/Channel 41.
“I just saw her on the news,” Linda said.
The Weatherbird still appears on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and is the mascot of the newspaper, which owns a Weatherbird costume that an employee dons for promotional events. The Weatherbird also remarks on current news. In the years Amadee drew him, 1932 to 1981, the Weatherbird commented on D-Day and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Operated as a non-profit, the Appleton City Carousel was open last summer on weekends from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day Sunday. It attracted riders from 12 states, Spain and South Korea.
Linda said Truman and the display of Tiger football memorabilia has drawn media attention from around the state. To create more awareness, Linda hopes people will go online and vote for the Appleton City Carousel as “Best Children’s Attraction” in Rural Missouri magazine’s annual ‘Best of” contest. Deadline is Jan. 15 to vote at ruralmissouri.org/best-of-2024.
