Kathleen Fox knows a great coast when she sees one.
That’s why the retired social researcher and full-time watercolorist spends her time in Maine these days.
Just like the waves breaking on those granite shorelines, she gets it all down on canvas.
Yep: Great coasts, she knows.
However, she can’t necessarily say that about Great Danes, the dogs that got her into the fight, as it were.
Still, that didn’t stop her from submitting the entry.
“I never thought that much about it,” she said.
“I just turned it in, and the next thing I knew, I won. Twenty-five bucks. That was a lot of money for a college student in 1965.”
Almost $250, in fact, in today’s currency, as adjusted for inflation.
Anyway, it all happened all those years ago at the University of Albany, whose Great Danes football team is coming to Morgantown on Saturday for a 6 p.m. matchup with the Mountaineers of WVU at Milan Puskar Stadium.
Of Socrates and safety blitzes
The Great Danes of Albany are the Great Danes – because then Kathy Earle said they were.
Or, rather, suggested they should be.
The school in upstate New York founded in 1844 as a teacher’s academy had fielded sports teams all along, to generally respectable results on the playing field.
That’s especially true for the present-day iteration of the gridiron Great Danes, who won 11 games last season.
Pre-Dane, however, said teams were getting shut out in the mascot department.
UAlbany didn’t even have one for well over a century, in fact, according to the school’s Media Relations Office.
And the one initially in place during Fox’s undergrad years may have been a tad esoteric for the whole deal.
Since 1948 and up until Fox’s day, the school had competed under the moniker of the “Pedagogues” – “Peds,” for short – which was lifted from “pedagogy,” the literal of art teaching, given the school’s mission.
Pedagogy, of course, is also the cornerstone of the Socratic Method.
Originator of said method, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, while being a blue-chipper on logic, was still a little tentative when it came to tracking that outside linebacker on 3rd-and-14 who wasn’t fooled one bit by the fake screen.
Albany’s mascot at the time, as reported by the media office, wasn’t helping the cause.
He was the “Pedguin,” which was a kind of Petri dish, Pop Warner-penguin morphing of, say, an Arctic fowl who read the Classics – when he wasn’t mired in the middle of two-a-days in August.
Walkin’ the dog
Clearly time for an upgrade, the school said.
A contest was launched. Who could come up with the best idea for a new mascot?
Fox before that just knew she was getting an upgrade in 1963. That’s when she first regarded the University of Albany campus.
She had been attending Cornell and caught a ride there for a Peter, Paul and Mary concert.
The folk trio was at the height of its fame.
For her, the answer wasn’t blowing in the wind. It was in the greenery and buildings of the school.
“I immediately fell in love with the place. I transferred.”
Then came the contest that made her somewhat famous two years later.
Fox was thinking about the nobler aspects of the Great Dane, a breed that began as a rugged hunter of boar in Germany.
Never mind that by the time of Fox’s first foray at Albany, the giant dogs had long had their evolutionary tails wagged into a new species of lovably goofy family pets – and thusly were depicted as such in popular culture.
Marmaduke, for instance, had been around in the comic strips for 10 years by then.
Astro was just finishing his first run on “The Jetsons,” a prime-time cartoon that would orbit in reruns for decades.
Scooby-Doo would make his debut six years later on Saturday morning TV.
Fox, as said, was touching on the Great Dane’s original canine character, opposed to comic foil that would come later.
“It has a proud bearing and imposing stature,” she noted in her entry. “It is clean, graceful and proud.”
The media-savvy undergrad, who was studying journalism at Albany, also said “Danes” would be punchy, in both the headlines and copy crafted by sportswriters covering the game.
“Sounds quick and alert,” she added.
Albany, by degrees
Meanwhile, she was alert in the classroom at Albany.
So much so, in fact, that she earned her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees there.
Fox went to be a professor and researcher, while also directing outreach agencies tending to the emotional health of indigenous people in New York State and Maine.
Now, she authors children’s books under her maiden name, Earle, but she’s mainly known, as said, as a painter in Maine – where her vibrant water colors, which have netted numerous awards for their whimsy, go well beyond the dark imaginings of another creative sort who lives there, Stephen King.
There are the lighthouses and seascapes.
And the little boy learning to be a lobsterman and the older lady sawing out a tune on the fiddle.
There’s the Ernest Hemingway-looking fisherman and a bemused Edgar Allen Poe – maybe a riff on King after all – with a raven perched atop his head.
Visit kathleenafox.com for links to her other pages on social media, along with galleries of her work.
“The University of Albany has been good to me,” she said.
In turn, she’s been good to her alma mater, which boasts 17,000 students, nine schools and colleges, 50 undergraduate majors and 125 graduate degree offerings.
Fox makes regular dollar donations to the school that’s been part of her life and times for 61 years.
“I get a real kick out it any time I get an envelope from New York with a Great Dane on it.”
