To the victors

Throwback (five centuries) Thursday

Now for some genocidal insensitivity.

That's me, dressed as Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, enterprising explorer or destroyer of worlds, depending. The marching band lent us the suit. The glue-on Van Dyke had begun to fray in the breeze.

Mike Pellerin lay in loincloth and headdress, slain on sandstone rocks overlooking the Pacific somewhere near Lompoc ("lom-POKE"), my hometown. No telling where Mike's outfit came from. I'm trying to remember whether the blood spilling down his chest is Karo®™ syrup or chocolate sauce, which would have shown up well in black-and-white.

My friend Wayne Singleton, photo editor of the school newspaper, took the shot. This is a print he made and framed and signed for me.

It was a triumph of journalism, and a stunning gamble on our tender psyches. Though it could have gone all "Dewey Defeats Truman" on us, we lucked out.

Cabrillo beat Lompoc 35 years ago. A slight wobble in the fall weather, an unexpectedly fragrant breeze, just reminded me.

Cabrillo was my high school, home of the Conquistadores (we spelled it Conquistadors, but I see the correct spelling has since prevailed), in operation only 11 years when I was a freshman. It was the upstart school on the bluffs overlooking Lompoc, for the Air Force Base brats, the country club kids, the posers, the suburbanites (if Lompoc could be considered big enough to spawn a suburb).

Our school stands high upon a hill.
We strive to win and win we will.

— Cabrillo Alma Mater

Lompoc High, home of the Braves down in the Valley of Flowers, probably as old as the town, educated the townies, the children of farmers and civil servants and miners of diatomaceous earth.

Both of these were true, and none of these. Maybe it's why John Steinbeck's opening to Cannery Row struck me:

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.

We were the same but believed ourselves different. (I wonder: Would a high school built today be named after someone like Cabrillo, or have Braves for a mascot?)

It was a real rivalry that my kids missed, having grown up in a true suburbia with high schools every three miles. At my elementary school, a unique mix of Lompoc and Vandenberg Village and Mission Hills and federal prison and Country Club kids, we were already loyal to our two high schools — future Braves played future Conquistadors for recess football.

The lore I learned is that upstart Cabrillo had quickly become a countywide sports power; if so, its power had diminished by the time I went to school. Cabrillo and Lompoc traded off: Cabrillo dominated in water polo and golf and girls' volleyball, Lompoc led perennially in baseball. Track as a team seemed to be better at Cabrillo. Lompoc was better in wrestling my senior year, though individual Cabrillo wrestlers beat their Lompoc counterparts.

The transience of Air Force life could radically affect high school life from year to year, especially sports. The basketball team my junior year won a south-state championship in large part because a talented Air Force kid transferred in.

Football, if I remember, swung Lompoc's way that year. Cabrillo was the underdog.

I was editor of the newspaper, the Fore And Aft, my senior year. A new journalism adviser had come to the school, and with it an arrangement to have our newspaper printed on an offset press, like a real newspaper. Mrs. Lucas had built my writing foundation before retiring; incoming Mr. Jory nurtured my growing interest in design.

Before then, our paper was printed on what seemed like leftover linen card stock. It wasn't typeset; it was typewriter-set: We typed the rough copy into prescribed narrow columns, counted the spaces between words, then typed the final copy carefully onto photo-sensitive paper, averaging the spaces on each line to create justified type — lined up evenly right and left, like in real newspapers.

Then we waxed the back of the paper and laid the columns onto grid paper, constantly splicing single lines of copy with a knife in a maddening effort to align and balance them. It looked about as good as you imagine.

The new printing capabilities, with sharper reproduction, gave us room and time to experiment, time we had wasted typing and counting, waxing and splicing. No better way to experiment than risk great big failure and ridicule all over campus. It was the week Cabrillo played Lompoc in the big game, and we wanted to make a statement.

Wayne hauled us and our costumes and props out to a place he knew along the coast, which may or may not have been on Air Force property, and set up the shot.

The Tierra Royal yearbook page about our
newspaper. Dennis Sherwood had the gall
to write his best wishes over the brooding sky.

We ran the photo over the entire tabloid cover of the new Fore And Aft, just the photo with the new masthead Kevin Wood had designed, printed over the roiling sky in the upper corner. No caption; our readers didn't need one. We had effectively made light of a brutal historical truth for the meaningless hope of a football game. But all in good humor! We crossed our fingers.

Cabrillo won, 14-7.

Don't ask me how. My late friend Greg Cox could have rattled off an accurate game summary. I bet Brian LaMay could too, if I called him. I have no memory except Cabrillo won. The cover of that paper looked so much better come Monday morning. Notwithstanding the echoes of bloody holocaust. (Would that cover pass muster anymore? I don't remember anyone raising ire.)

Times have changed, of course. Cabrillo plays different schools than when I attended. What used to be small-school towns have all grown up, and I suppose Cabrillo has shrunk, so they're on even footing now. This week's football game is against Pioneer Valley, a new (for me) high school in Santa Maria, in the north part of Santa Barbara County where the population continues to grow.

The Pioneer Valley … Panthers. Of course — safe, alliterative, unimaginative, pointless. I was going to guess "Pioneers." (The other high school in California named for Cabrillo, which is in Long Beach, is home of the Jaguars.)

Cabrillo's last regular-season game, following tradition, will be against the Lompoc Braves, at Huyck Stadium (some say "Howk," others "Huck;" what a challenge to live in my hometown!) After a quick read of clips, I think this year Lompoc might have the edge.

But just try and beat my school for barbarous mascot.

Best logo ever, secondary education division

"Yes, our spirit will conquer all …"

My pick is my alma mater, Cabrillo High School, Lompoc, Calif.

Yeah, I'm biased. Also — one wouldn't break a sweat arguing — lazy. But I'd wager a lot of hard searching would transpire before one found a better high school logo.

To start, it's unusual. Of all the violent, oppressive mascots one could conjure to represent secondary education, few could measure up to Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and the conquistadores. Only one other California high school, in Long Beach, calls itself Cabrillo High. Though named after the same guy, the Long Beach school chooses as its mascot the jaguar. Huh? Cabrillo College in Aptos, Santa Cruz County, is home of the Seahawks. (Strange typeface, too.)

Wimps.

Of course, Cabrillo High in Lompoc has eviscerated, stuffed and prettified the conquistador for safe student use, so that he's no more a threat than a cuddly Disney™®© pirate. But I feel sorry for the students of so many other high schools and colleges, with their cookie-cutter mascots. Lions and Tigers and Bears. Oh, boring. I attended Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a university world renowned for many majors (none of which I studied); its mascot is the Mustangs. Boring and bland.

Secondly, the Conquistadores mark has gone remarkably unchanged and untrammeled since 1965, when the Lompoc school began, named for the Spanish explorer and destroyer of worlds who sailed the coast nearby.

(I guess that's why the high school is so named. My junior high's mascot is the Minuteman, and since it's the school serving an Air Force missile base, I'm guessing it refers to the nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, though the figure is a revolutionary war hero. The missile would have been funnier and more fitting.)

As with the Monterey Bay Aquarium logo, this mark's maker is unknown, but I'd like to meet him/her. Long before I thought about illustration and graphic design as something to do, I was drawn to this logo's conquistador in profile, with stark shapes in white to define the face in a black mass, and just enough detail to delineate the helmet and plume.

This is the full mark (above), with a variation on the Spanish crest (castle and lion). I'm not sure about the four stars; they might have filled an otherwise large dark space in the mark.

We used USC's "Conquest" to celebrate touchdowns,
but the band rocked it …

Here's the conquistador's profile in the school's marching band logo (right). Some color is added to the black and gold (seriously awesome color combo, by the way!), and the shapes have been sharpened, but the mark maintains its integrity. The typeface is a bit different from the main mark, but doesn't deviate much.

(The marching band used to wear conquistador helmets as part of their uniforms; now I notice they're more like black vaquero hats …)

My point is, Cabrillo has stuck with the mark throughout the years, rarely getting off track. Even my junior varsity baseball cap bears the gold elongated C on a black field, nearly a quarter-century after the school began. The school's web site displays the mark prominently.

It's almost as if Cabrillo has a graphics standards manual, like many businesses have, dictating the do's and don'ts of their logo's use. I doubt one exists, but I give credit to my old school for respectful and consistent use of its marks.

(I'm sure it wouldn't take long before someone showed me that Cabrillo has muddled the mark on its uniforms and other uses, but don't bother; leave me to my delusions.)

The graphic integrity of Cabrillo's mark, I'd bet, is the exception.

More common is the school where my children attended, El Camino Fundamental High School in Sacramento, home of the Eagles (all but one of the high schools in the San Juan Unified School District are saddled with alliterative nicknames: Mira Loma Matadors, Casa Roble Rams, Bella Vista Broncos; yawn …).

Don't mess with Boston College!

Maybe there's a reason
this eagle is screaming …

El Camino is older than Cabrillo by far, but has no visual center. Any and all eagle graphics, and every conceivable typeface is used for whatever manner and need arises. Apparently, Boston College put down the legal hammer and forbid uses of its mark, which meant El Camino, even though it had changed the B to an E and red and gold to green and white, had to stop using the mark. The football team's helmets still bear the same eagle that adorn the Philadelphia Eagles' helmets, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

El Camino has since unveiled its own mark, created by an art teacher, that combines the E and C into the shape of an Eagle's head. You can judge for yourself how it turned out (above, right); the eagle looks like it's been skinned alive, giving it a sort of Freddy Krueger look (left).

Robert Mott created this for all his fellow fogies assessing progress
on their long-ago dreams and plans.

My friend and high school classmate Robert Mott, who went on to run his own stellar graphic design shop, designed the mark for our 30th reunion (I didn't attend); though it's the farthest afield, graphically, that I've seen the Conquistador mark, Robert maintained its integrity while re-purposing it (man, I hate that neo-word) for this one-time use.

Robert was true to the logo and to his school.