9/6/2023 0 Comments Easy dance moves for mascots![]() ![]() But today, the first Saturday in April, as the Mascot Hall reopens for the first time since COVID-19 restrictions began last spring, Raymond is stuck at home in the Philly suburb of West Grove, Pennsylvania, awaiting a second dose of the vaccine. At the groundbreaking ceremony in the fall of 2016, he stood shoulder to shoulder with nine mascots as they plunged shovels into the hard Indiana dirt. Over the past several years, Raymond has lost count of the number of times he has made the journey to Whiting. And now Raymond is refashioning this place, quite improbably, into the mecca of mascotry. It is a town Standard Oil put on the map 132 years ago, a town that for decades has been best known for its annual Pierogi Fest. Reggy's motorized googly eyes seem to peer out at Whiting's rows of modest homes at the quaint corridor of shops, cafes and restaurants along 119th Street at Oil City Stadium, where the Northwest Indiana Oilmen play Midwest Collegiate baseball. (During construction in 2018, Raymond says, storm winds blew the booger down the street, where it was eventually corralled by police.) A multicolored ornamental booger dangles from Reggy's nose. Jutting from its facade: the giant decorative head of the Mascot Hall's own hypebeast, Reggy the Purple Party Dude, his french fry hair flapping in the wind off the lake, which lies just past a stretch of freight train tracks in the building's backyard. Standing three floors high, it is the world's only shrine to the immortals of the big-furry-costume realm. ![]() The building seems to glow amid the otherwise gray terrain, beckoning guests to Raymond's grand folly: the $18 million, 25,000-square-foot Mascot Hall of Fame. A few hundred yards beyond the barbed-wire fence at the refinery's edge, an elegant glass-and-steel structure rises from a patch of ground that was once a lumber yard. Its skyline of towers spews dense clouds of steam and ominous columns of flame into the troposphere. On the horizon looms the BP oil refinery, the largest operation of its kind in the world. The final stretch, a woebegone landscape of liquor stores, discount tobacco shacks and forsaken gravel lots, leads him, at long last, to Whiting, Indiana, a tiny village (pop. Googly eyes, Sasquatch suits and a runaway booger: Welcome to the Mascot Hall of FameĭAVID RAYMOND'S PILGRIMAGE to the happiest pantheon in sports always begins rather drearily.Īfter a flight from Philadelphia to Chicago's Midway Airport, he takes a 40-minute drive in a rental car southeast, down the construction-plagued Skyway toll road, across a bridge that spans one of the nation's most polluted waterways (the Calumet River), through the sulfurous fetor of the industrial Illinois-Indiana borderland. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser ![]()
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