HIDY AND HOWDY CHEER SPIRIT OF ’88
Olympic mascots back for 25th anniversary
What’s white and furry, wears a white cowboy hat and is always part of a gleeful twosome?
That’s right, folks, it’s Hidy and Howdy, the corpulent brother and sister bear act that served as the mascots for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. For a good part of that heady decade, the two were our biggest local celebrities, jetting around the world and appearing at countless events before their enforced retirement just after the closing ceremonies.
This week, though, they’re dusting off their cobwebbed hats, their white polar bear suits having taken a spin in the wash cycle, as they prepare for a one-day repeat performance.
For this, you can thank — or blame — a couple of mischievous retired guys: Jerry Joynt, the ’88 organizing committee’s vice-president of communications, and Lane Kranenburg, chairman of the ’88 mascot committee.
On Monday afternoon, they give me the scoop on their plans for the bears on Feb. 13, the 25th anniversary of the opening ceremonies of the ’88 Calgary Winter Olympics.
“We’ve already got a few of their appearances decided, like the Olympic Oval and Canada Olympic Park,” says Kranenburg of the still-to-be-finalized events the mascots will be at as part of Celebrate ’88 Legacy Day. “And Ken King from the Flames is interested in them coming to the hockey game.”
If you are one of the nearly half million Calgarians who didn’t call this city home back in 1988, you may be a tad unfamiliar with the cuddly critters that in more recent times were known best as the faces welcoming those entering the city limits, before being shelved in 2007.
In 1981, the Calgary-designed, Edmonton-constructed bears first appeared in Baden Baden, Germany, when the International Olympic Committee gave us the nod to host the Games. Over the next few years, they popped up everywhere, from the Rose Bowl Parade in California to Kodak conventions in Japan, along with just about every school and kids’ hospital across the country. They even showed up on the big screen, in the late John Candy’s 1993 movie about the Jamaican bobsled team, Cool Runnings.
While Hidy’s skirt showed a little too much leg and Howdy didn’t even wear pants, they were nonetheless respectful ambassadors for our city. The well-behaved mutes never posed beside someone holding so much as a beer — and though it was decades before Facebook, I haven’t heard of a single photograph in existence showing one of them partaking in any illegal activities or drug use. And they never once lost their heads.
Still, not everyone was enamoured. In several polls taken over the years, the two regularly make the list of “worst Olympic mascots,” and some Calgarians weren’t thrilled with their over-the-top cuteness when they debuted in those more innocent times.
History has vindicated them, however, thanks to the likes of Wenlock and Mandeville, the creepy, one-eyed globules that scared children at the 2012 London Summer Games.
“They seem to go to extremes to be weirdly different,” is Joynt’s diplomatic response to some of the more recent mascot flops.
On Monday, Joynt, Kranenburg and Duane Schreiner — who was one of the 130 Bishop Carroll High School students who volunteered to wear the mascot outfits — talk about those golden years when Hidy and Howdy captured the spotlight.
“They represented Calgary at that time, a city that was volunteer-driven and very friendly,” says Joynt. “They were approachable and cuddly — they were everything a mascot should be.”
For Schreiner, the genius in Hidy and Howdy was their allure for the younger set. “One time, we were in this small B.C. town and a woman who’d just had a baby an hour earlier handed the baby to us,” says the now 45-year-old who remembers 16-hour days in the bear suit. “She was so thrilled, but we were just teenagers that didn’t know what to do with a baby.”
Kranenburg remembers one particularly stirring experience as the “Master of the Bear Cave,” a job that required him to, among a host of other mascot supervision duties, tag along on most out-oftown trips.
At the SickKids Hospital in Toronto, they came across a little boy in his bed. “They told us that he was in a near-coma, he wouldn’t respond,” he says. “When Hidy put out her paw, he smiled and put out his hand.”
Kranenburg later learned that the boy died just hours later. “It’s nice to think one of his last experiences on earth made him smile.”
A few months ago, Joynt and Kranenburg found themselves talking about what they could do for the 25th anniversary. Of the 22 original costumes of the pair — one set is on display in Lausanne, Switzerland, another two at Canmore and Canada Olympic Park — most had been destroyed. “But I kept one hidden away in my attic these past 25 years,” says Kranenburg with a smile.
They enlisted Schreiner — who was the recipient of an unofficial Hidy and Howdy visit at his 1997 wedding — to reprise his role as a mascot; they also plan to recruit a few of his fellow Bishop Carroll alumni for the day. “I had a lot of good memories in that suit,” says Schneider, who was so good, he was tapped to train the other kids on proper mascot bear moves.
“Hidy and Howdy were great ambassadors, a lot of people have great memories of them,” says Kranenburg, who’s hoping a new generation of young Calgarians will come out for a bear hug. “You just can’t have a 25th anniversary party and not invite those two.”