The Cavemen and the school princess: Mishawaka High as a culture house

1922 OR 1923 TO THE PRESENT

Every Indiana town has a high school; Mishawaka's high school generated two of the city's three durable folk identities, and both are documented. The first began at Cartier Field, in 1922 or 1923, at a football game against South Bend High School: a fan named Curt Johnson held up a sign reading "OUR TEAM WILL FIGHT LIKE CAVEMEN!" Mishawaka won; the name stuck; and the Cavemen it has remained. The account comes from Robert D. Smith — former Mishawaka coach, teacher and principal — as carried in the School City of Mishawaka's own newsletter, and the same account carries the community's standing boast, printed here as the attributed claim it is: that Mishawaka is believed to be the only school in the country with a caveman for a mascot. The teams themselves, their seasons and championships, belong to this history's schools and sports records; what belongs to culture is the mechanism, identical to the princess's: a piece of folk invention, made on the spot by a private citizen, adopted by acclamation because it fit, and carried for a century as the name under which the city's young people compete.

The second identity met the first inside the same building. The school's yearbooks document an annual crowning of a Princess Mishawaka at Mishawaka High School, kept in connection with the Central — South Bend — football classic, the rivalry game around which the hickory stick trophy also turned; the 1943 Miskodeed names Princess Rosemary Masters and her court. The citywide contests of 1932 and 1983 both crowned or sought their princesses in the same schoolgirl mold — Virginia Ainlay in 1932 was a Mishawaka High student — so that for much of the century the office of Princess Mishawaka was, in practice, a school office with a citywide franchise. Read together, the school's two traditions state the city's cultural settlement in miniature: the Caveman for the fight, homegrown and unbeautiful; the Princess for the ceremony, borrowed from a storybook and beloved. Mishawaka kept both, and saw no contradiction — the record of a hundred years of yearbooks says it never occurred to anyone that there was one.

Sources:

1. School City of Mishawaka newsletter (October 2015) — Robert D. Smith's account of Curt Johnson's sign at Cartier Field, 1922 or 1923, the adoption of the name, and the only-school claim, attributed.
2. Mishawaka High School, The Miskodeed, 1943 edition, full text at archive.org — Princess Rosemary Masters' court and the crowning's place in the Central classic season.
3. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — Virginia Ainlay's 1932 crowning as a Mishawaka High School student.
4. The schools record of this history — the teams, seasons and the school's whole course, carried there.