The Week Porter Stopped Being the Millwrights

Two boxes in a storage room

In June, a Facilities crew walking Founders Hall ahead of next summer’s renovation opened a storage room off the high bay that had last been inventoried in 2009. Behind a stack of drafting tables they found two plywood boxes, painted navy, with a slot cut in each lid and “STUDENT SENATE — DO NOT REMOVE” stenciled on the side. Inside were the tally sheets from March 2 and 3, 1994, the two days Porter students voted to stop being the Millwrights.

“I’ve had a key to that room since 1998,” said Duane Kolsrud, director of Facilities. “I just never had a reason to move the drafting tables.” (Kolsrud’s keys are a story of their own in this issue.)

The boxes are now in University Archives. We used them as an excuse to find the people who filled them. What follows has been edited for length and, in one case, for language.

A name nobody could explain

The teams had been the Porter Millwrights since the 1920s, a nod to the manual-training school’s shop floors. By the early 1990s, the name had a recruiting problem.

“I had a mother ask me, at a football recruiting visit, whether her son would be expected to repair the looms. We did not have looms. We have never had looms.”

— Gordon Ness, athletics director, 1979–2001

“The mascot was a guy called Millie. He was a millwright, so he had overalls and a foam wrench about four feet long, and a head that was basically a papier-mâché bucket. In November 1992 the head got left on the team bus after a road game at Eau Pleine and we never saw it again. So for the whole 1993 season Millie was a guy in overalls with a wrench and a stocking cap, which honestly read more like a plumber.”

— Pete Wojcik ’96, the last person to wear the Millie costume

“We ran an editorial in November 1993 called ‘Who Are We Playing For?’ It said, more or less, that a name should mean something to the people wearing it, and that nobody under sixty knew what a millwright did. We got forty letters. Thirty-eight of them were from alumni.”

— Annika Lofgren ’94, editor-in-chief, The Porter Current, 1993–94

The ballot

In January 1994 the Student Senate voted 19–6 to put the question to the whole student body, with the athletics department agreeing in advance to honor the result.

“Gordon Ness came to the senate meeting himself, which athletic directors did not do. He said, ‘If you pick something I can put on a helmet, I’ll put it on a helmet.’ That was the whole negotiation.”

— Dale Rusch ’95, student body president, 1993–94

Four names made the ballot, plus a write-in line. Ironclads came from a history major who argued in the Current that the state’s World War II shipbuilding was the region’s great industrial story, and that a polytechnic should be named for one.

“Someone wrote a letter pointing out that Porter had never built a boat larger than a rowing shell. We printed it. It turned out to be a selling point. Students liked that it was a little bit absurd.”

— Annika Lofgren ’94

“Foundrymen had a real constituency in engineering. Rivermen was mostly the rowing club. And Millwrights had everybody who thought the whole thing was a waste of time, which was a lot of people.”

— Dale Rusch ’95

Two days in March

Polling tables went up in Founders Union and at The Forge dining hall on Wednesday and Thursday, March 2 and 3. That same weekend, the men’s basketball team — 27–4, the best season in program history — was playing in the NCAA tournament on its way to Porter’s only Sweet Sixteen. (The team is in the Athletics Hall of Fame.)

“We had budgeted for maybe 1,500 ballots. By Thursday lunch we were cutting new ones out of copy paper with a paper cutter from the Current office. Everybody was in a mood to have an opinion about the teams. I don’t think the vote happens the way it happened without that basketball team.”

— Dale Rusch ’95

“I voted on my way out of a Statics exam I was sure I had failed. I remember standing at the table and thinking that at least this was a question with no wrong answer. I am not going to tell you how I voted. The chancellor’s ballot is secret, and so was the sophomore’s.”

— Dr. Elaine Vandehey ’96, then a mechanical engineering sophomore, now chancellor

The tally sheets in the recovered boxes match the totals the Current printed the following Tuesday:

“It was a plurality, not a majority. The senate resolution said plurality, in writing, in advance. I have explained this at every Millrace Week for thirty-two years.”

— Dale Rusch ’95

Losing gracefully, mostly

The magazine’s predecessor, The Porter Alumnus, received 212 letters about the vote that spring. By the editor’s count at the time, 171 were against it.

“I spent April on the phone. What settled it was keeping the things that were actually the Millwrights’ — homecoming stayed Millrace Week, the stadium stayed Millwright Stadium, the Alumni Band kept the 1961 fight song. Change the jersey, keep the house. Most people could live with that.”

— Gordon Ness

“Millie’s last appearance was the spring awards banquet. Overalls, wrench, stocking cap. I got a standing ovation, which I think was mostly relief. The wrench is in the archives now. The overalls I wore for another two years.”

— Pete Wojcik ’96

That fall the athletics department ran a design contest for a new mark. There were 64 entries.

“Mine was the one that would still read on a helmet from the top row of the stadium. That was the whole brief I gave myself. People think the P has some deeper meaning. It is a P.”

— Corinne Brekke ’95, who drew the original Ironclads “P” as an Applied Arts senior

Thirty-two years later

The Ironclads first wore the P on September 10, 1994, against Chippewa Valley State, and lost 17–14. Nobody has seriously proposed changing the name back. A 2011 online petition for “the Porter Falls Porters” gathered 41 signatures, which is three more than the write-in got.

“Every recruit asks what an Ironclad is. That’s the best thing a name can do — it starts the conversation. Then we tell them about the vote, and that the students picked it, and they like that more than any mascot.”

— Chuck Running, director of athletics

“We thought it was the biggest decision anyone would ever make about this place. It wasn’t. It was a name. But it was ours, we did it in public, and it held. That’s not nothing.”

— Dale Rusch ’95, now principal of Cedar Bluff High School

Gordon Ness died in May, a few weeks after he sat for this interview; he is remembered in In Memoriam. The 1994 vote remains a staple of Millrace Week trivia night, and the recovered ballot boxes will be on display in the Welcome Center during Millrace Week. More on how the name fits into campus life is on the Traditions and History pages.