is a vulcan a bird

A short history of the Vulcans of UH Hilo

Staff Writer Trixie Croad Photos Karlee Oyama

We at UH Hilo are referred to as the Vulcans, in the same way that students at UCLA, Oregon State, and Penn State are called the Bruins, Ducks, and Lions, respectively. Although the majority of us are aware of this and proud to wear the Vulcans logo on our chests or support them at sporting events, how many of us actually understand what this means and its history?

I started asking students about this in a very informal way—I was by no means using a representative sample—and was shocked to learn that a large number of them had never really thought about it. An alarming number of people believed a Vulcan to be a type of bird, and some speculated that it was related to volcanoes. Most had no ideas at all.

I felt it would be appropriate to set the record straight and explain how the Vulcans of UH Hilo came to be. The Vulcan Athletics Student Handbook, which is distributed to all student athletes at the start of each year, was the only student resource I could locate for my research. Additionally, I was able to locate former basketball coach, athletic director, and “founding father” Ramon Goya, who provided me with additional detailed information about the history of the Vulcans.

When UH Manoa was first established in 1947, our nickname symbolized our connection to UH Hawaii at Hilo. Since we shared the same green and white hues, we were called the “Little Rainbows.” After UH Hilo’s athletic department got going in 1965, the faculty, staff, and community set out to come up with a moniker that represented UH Hilo separately from the Rainbow Warriors. One individual who was crucial to this process was Ramon Goya, the basketball coach at the time. Goya claims he got down with Herb Hamai, the athletic director at the time, and some of the students to start bouncing ideas around. During the initial brainstorming, Goya says, “We thought, what is the most unique thing about this island? It’s the volcano.”

The primary focus of the name-finding process shifted to volcanoes. Pele is probably the first person that comes to mind when thinking of Hawaii’s volcanoes. While she is a significant figure on the Big Island, Goya and the committee felt that commercializing Pele would be disrespectful to Hawaiian culture because she is a sacred god to the native Hawaiians.

Rather than focusing on other options, the committee ultimately decided to use Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and volcanoes, to symbolize the theme of volcanoes. UH Hilo officially adopted this nickname in 1966. “He [Vulcan] was the son of Jupiter and Juno and he was an important member of the Roman pantheon,” according to the Vulcan Athletics Student Handbook. He fashioned Jupiter’s magical thunderbolts and Cupid’s arrows. Volcanic activity was thought to have originated from his forge. ”.

Deciding on the school colors was the second step in this makeover. Goya reveals that at first, they chose the colors red, white, and blue, with a focus on the red because it is the color of lava. Goya explained that the color scheme was based on the New York Knickerbockers and was what they felt was the most aesthetically pleasing. However, the blue could have represented the ocean, an important aspect of island life.

Next on the agenda was the Vulcan logo. The current bookstore does not use the original logo, but if you look closely, you can still see it in a few locations around campus. It is depicted on the plaque outside the athletics department’s hall of fame room. This logo was a simple “V” with a picture of a volcano in the background and a mele lei wreath encircling it.

Goya told me that the idea behind the mele wreath was to symbolize the olive wreaths traditionally given to Olympian champions, but with a Hawaiian twist. The “V” and the volcano obviously have symbolic meanings.

In 2009, this as well as the red, white, and blue color scheme were altered. It was believed that in order to effectively promote the Vulcan brand, the logo needed to be updated. Darin Igawa and Susan Yugawa of the UH Hilo graphics department were in charge of the design. In 2009, Yugawa gave an explanation of the design to Malamalama, the UH system’s discontinued magazine.

Yugawa states, “We did our best to create things that were representative of our island home.” “We incorporated the volcano and our voyaging heritage into the main Vulcan ‘fire and sail’ as consistent themes.” ”.

This “fire and sail” is the “V” that is currently seen on campus. The volcano is represented by the fire shooting from the top of the “V,” while the left side of the “V” is inflated to resemble a sail. The “H” emblem, which is frequently seen on the uniforms of our athletic teams, was also designed by Yugawa and Igawa with the intention of representing UH Hilo away from home, while the “V” for Vulcan was meant to represent our teams on the Big Island at home.

Therefore, even though the Vulcan name has been associated with UH Hilo since the 1960s, along with its changing logo and color scheme, it doesn’t seem that the school has ever had an official mascot. When I questioned Ramon Goya about it, he said that they chose to concentrate on the logo to symbolize the Vulcans and that he had no idea what a Vulcan mascot should look like or the need to create one.

Typically, a school’s mascot is an animal or another easily recognizable object; however, Vulcan is a little less tangible than that, and the idea of a volcano igniting the crowd seems unrealistic and unappealing from a marketing standpoint. Speaking with the current athletic director Pat Guillen, he agreed that a Vulcan mascot wasn’t really necessary.

“We engage with our keiki and participate in the community to promote the Vulcans brand.” We will keep doing outreach in this manner since it is the most effective, he declares. To encourage school spirit, the First Year Experience program introduced “Big Eye Lance,” an unofficial mascot. This was probably the closest we have gotten to having a Vulcan mascot. Big Eye Lance would show up at events on campus, looking like a giant eyeball for a head and wearing a red morph suit. Although he wore Vulcan colors and had a name that was a play on “Big Island,” he made no mention of the school’s Vulcan identity. Since then, First Year Experience has withdrawn Big Eye Lance from their program, so UH Hilo is once again completely mascot-free. Sports, according to Guillen, had little to do with Big Eye Lance, and although he would support their return or something similar, they are not a priority right now.

After reading this, maybe you’ll be a little more understanding and proud to be a UH Hilo Vulcan the next time you don your Vulcans sweatshirt or yell “Go Vulcans!” at a volleyball match.

However, Le Verrier observed a tiny, black dot on a face on the Sun that was 3 75 inches (95 mm). Though he saw it moving, he mistook it for a sunspot. After seeing Mercury transit in 1845, he surmised that he was seeing another transit, this time of an unidentified body. After making some hurried measurements of its position and direction of motion, he calculated the transit’s duration to be one hour, seventeen minutes, and nine seconds by using an antique clock and a pendulum to measure his patients’ pulses.

Not everyone accepted the veracity of Lescarbaults “discovery”, however. At the exact moment that Lescarbault claimed to have witnessed his mysterious transit, Emmanuel Liais, an eminent French astronomer working for the Brazilian government in Rio de Janeiro in 1859, claimed to have been studying the Sun’s surface with a telescope twice as powerful as Lescarbault’s. The passage of a planet over the sun at the indicated time was thus “in a condition to deny, in the most positive manner,” according to Liais.

Le Verrier calculated Vulcan’s orbit using Lescarbault’s “transit,” which held that it orbited the Sun at a distance of 21 million kilometers, or 0 14 astronomical units. The orbit had an amazing precision of 12 degrees and 10 minutes of inclination toward the ecliptic during the 19 days and 17 hours of revolution. Vulcan’s maximum elongation from the Sun, as viewed from Earth, was 8 degrees.

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