From claw hammers to Yellowhammers
My high school mascot was a Yellow Jacket. The school newspaper was called the Jacket Journal. On football Fridays students wore spirit ribbons that carried the phrase “Sting ‘em” or something similar. In normal times our class has two reunions a year.
We call them swarms.
I think the names of high school mascots are interesting. One that has perplexed me for years is the Rotan Yellowhammers.
I finally found someone who could shed some light on how the name of the mascot came to be.
Ted Posey coached at Roby 9 years then was at Rotan 20 years. During his days at Roby, his budget for equipment and supplies was meager. “For football, basketball and track five hundred dollars for the year,” says Ted. His salary wasn’t much either. “I had 4 children. My take home pay was $365 a month. The house payment was $100. Every morning I’d ride the school bus to school with the kids. I lived 3 miles out. In the evening I hitchhiked home. I didn’t have to wait very long for a ride.” Coach Posey has seen lots of changes. “I grew up; out there by the double mountains. We still had the teams and horses. In the second grade I plowed with the team.”
Ted has tons of memorabilia from his coaching and teaching years, some of which has to do with how the Yellowhammers got to be the school mascot. “I have a 1921 annual. I’ve seen a 1922 annual and it had a picture of a claw hammer. That was the school mascot then. I also have a 1946 school annual and the mascot then was the yellowhammer. So sometime between 1921 or 22 and 1946 they went from a claw hammer to the yellowhammer.”
The yellowhammer is a bird and coach Posey says every once in a while he thinks he sees one by his house. “Actually it’s a woodpecker. In 1962 the Rotan student council decided to have a school newspaper. It was called the Flicka. In 1927 the yellowhammer became the state bird of Alabama.”
Coach Posey doesn’t know of another sports team anywhere that has the yellowhammer as a mascot. The Dallas Morning News named the yellowhammer as one of the most unique mascots in the country.
Ted Posey is still in great shape at age 85. “I still feed cattle. I’ll pick up 6 or 8 50-pound bags of feed, throw them in the pickup and go feed.” He has been known to jump flat-footed from the floor to the top of his desk. “I asked some folks if they thought I could do this and they said no. So I just squatted down and jumped straight up. Landed on the desk standing up.”
Ted played high school sports in Rotan. In football he played offense and defense, fullback and defensive end. He made all district in high school and later played at Cisco Junior College and Abilene Christian University.