School Spirit, Urban Legend Style
Audio file
FolkThing Ep 2 School Spirit Urban Legend Style.mp3
Transcript
00:00:01
Picture it: Friday Night Lights. The marching band warming up. The crowd is buzzing. And then the team runs out.
00:00:09
But they're wearing the wrong colors.
00:00:12
Gasps. Confusion. Betrayal. What do we do?
00:00:16
Accept them anyway. Rah, rah! It's probably a folk thing.
00:00:29
Welcome to it's probably a folk thing, the podcast about everyday experiences that turn out to be older, weirder, and way more meaningful than we realized. I'm Aaron Crawford. Today's episode is about school, spirit, identity, and uniforms, specifically a story you may have heard floating around northern Utah.
00:00:50
The legend that two high schools - Roy and Box Elder - accidentally swapped colors because of a uniform mishap. Sounds silly. Sounds suspicious. Sounds like folklore.
00:01:03
The story goes like this: Box Elder High School, home of the Bees, used to be black and gold. Roy High school (the Royals) was all about purple and white. But one fateful year a uniform manufacturer mixed up the colors. Box Elder got purple and white.
00:01:22
Roy got black and gold. And instead of sending them back, the schools just said, “Well, OK.”
00:01:30
And that, dear listeners, is why Box Elder now has a very regal looking bee.
00:01:36
This is what folklorists call a legend. First, it spreads informally. There's no district-wide memo, no, “hear ye! Hear ye!” Just person to person. That's what makes it folk.
00:01:49
And then legends are narratives. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a story. And they take place in historic time, not “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” Not in the mythological past, but right here in the U.S. in the 20th century.
00:02:06
Legends like this tell us something not just about the past, but about how people feel about the past. But is it true?
00:02:15
That's not usually a folklorist concern, as author James A Owen once said, “All stories are true, but some of them never happened.”
00:02:23
Still, let's indulge our inner historian for a moment.
00:02:27
First, the logistics. High schools don't order all their uniforms at the same time, from the same company, for every team and club. The idea that two entire schools could have their entire color scheme swapped, uniforms, band outfits, cheerleading gear, gym banners, folder graphics, painted hallways.
00:02:47
By accident.
00:02:48
That's well... it's ambitious.
00:02:52
Second, there's a customer service angle here. Even in the 1960s, nobody was just shrugging off a major shipment error from a private company. “Oops. I guess we're purple now,” said no school board. Ever.
00:03:05
And finally, the timeline: Box Elder was founded in 1905. Roy High, 1965.
00:03:14
And here's the kicker. Box. Elder's original colors were red and white. They changed them in 1906 because according to the Box Elder News-Journal, they were the same as the University of Utah's Box Elder started out as Brigham City High School, which only offered two years of high school curriculum. Students then took the train to the University of Utah to finish their high school experience.
00:03:38
So it's no surprise that once they started a high school that included all four years, they wanted to establish their own identity.
00:03:46
And their own colors.
00:03:48
So unless a time travelling fashion disaster reached back 60 years, this swap never happened. So if it's not factual, why does it persist?
00:03:59
Because legends aren't about facts, they're about function. This story does some heavy cultural lifting. First, it explains an oddity. Bees aren't purple, they just aren't. So why are the school colors purple and white? Well, this explains it. And second - and probably more important - it unites people in a shared knowledge.
00:04:20
“Oh, you know that story.”
00:04:22
“Well, welcome to the club.” Folklore helps build a community.
00:04:27
So no, Box Elder didn't change their colors in 1906 because of Roy High. Roy High didn't exist yet, but the story, the one about mistaken identity, sports drama and school pride, it survived longer than any uniform ever will.
It's definitely a folk thing.
00:04:47
Until next time.
00:05:05
Music for it's probably a folk thing, humorous and comic intro by free music. It's licensed under Creative Commons, so I get to use it for free as long as I give them credit. It's available on SoundCloud distributed by chozick.com.
