Not long ago a lady asked me how come Albert Lea High School selected the tiger as its symbolic critter and the hues of cherry and blue as the official colors. She thought the colors should be more coordinated with the real tigers, like black and yellow or some shade of orange.

Right at the time I didn’t have the answers. However, I said this particular situation could be the basis for more research, plus a possible column.

To get the answers to these topics, I consulted with Roger Lonning, retired librarian of Albert Lea High School. He said the colors of cherry and blue date back to 1912.

They were selected as a way to distinguish the local teams as they participated in sports events with other schools. Those other teams had different color combinations like red and white, green and yellow, purple and brown, and maybe even black and blue.

How the selection of the tiger came about as the as the official Albert Lea High School symbol is a little bit more complex.

Roger says credit for the tiger becoming an important part of the high school’s

teams and student life goes to Russ Voight, sports editor of the Tribune in the 1920s.

In 1925 or ’26 Albert Lea had a town team which played baseball games with other town teams. These players, incidentally, had no connection at all with the high school.

Each town team became known by a name and the one selected for Albert Lea was the Tigers. This name may have been inspired by the Detroit Tigers.

Anyway, this particular town team faded away a few years later and in time a newer baseball league team became better known as the Albert Lea Packers.

Voight started to refer to the high school football, basketball and baseball teams as the Tigers in his Tribune sports news articles.

By the early 1930s two names became acceptable for the local high school teams. One was Bengals, a name based on a part of India famous for its wild tigers, and the other name was the Tigers. Roger said these two names were interchangeable for a few years.

In time, the Tigers became the name for the A teams. The Bengals were the B teams, and the Tigerettes label was given to the girls’ teams.

This matter of coordination between a school’s official or accepted sports name or critter and the colors got me to thinking about the high school I attended out between the sagebrush hills of east Oregon.

Baker High School’s teams were known as the Bulldogs. Now there’s a mighty tough and tenacious canine to inspire fear in the opposing teams.

The school colors were purple and gold. And like the local situation, those two factors don’t match up at all.

In reality, those school colors of purple and gold were very appropriate. The color of purple has been associated with the plant called sagebrush. In fact, there’s a famous novel by Zane Grey named &uot;Riders of the Purple Sage,&uot; plus two well-known musical groups with the same name. Baker County, Ore., has more than its fair share of sagebrush.

By the way, there’s a tremendous difference between sage, the herb, and sagebrush, the large plant with very few redeeming attributes.

The gold part of the colors for my alma mater, Baker High School, is even more appropriate. The town was created in the early 1860s as the result of a gold rush in the nearby mountains. In fact, Baker County is still the major gold producing area of Oregon.

My original hometown high school had about eight or nine school songs. The words were matched to the music used by other schools like Notre Dame, the U.S. Naval Academy, University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, and Southern California. When I was a senior, I added still another song to the school’s collection. I’ve forgotten the melody used, but I do recall starting the song with the words gold and purple to match the musical notes and cope with a syllable thing. To some students back then I committed a major sacrilege. It’s comparable to now saying Albert Lea High School’s colors are blue and cherry.

Ed Shannon’s column appears each Friday.