Dr. Edgar Odell Lovett, Rice Institute’s first president, is responsible for many of the traditions there. He commissioned an academic seal to represent the school, the design for which incorporated owls, which symbolized learning and wisdom. Students adopted the owl as the institute’s mascot, although they did not give it a name. They created a 6-foot-tall, 191-pound owl made of canvas and stuffed with wood shavings. The mascot was taken to athletic events.
After a 1917 victorious basketball game against Texas A&M, Aggie students kidnapped the owl. The Aggies sent a message to Rice, “If Rice wishes to claim their bird and ever think they are able to take him back to the ‘Institoot,’ they can find him at 37 Milner Hall, College Station, Texas.”
A group of Rice students organized and called themselves the Owl Protective Association. The group hired a private detective to go to College Station to retrieve the kidnapped mascot. After recovering the owl, the detective sent a coded message to the Rice students, “Sammy is better and would like to see his parents at 11 o’clock.” This was the first time the owl had been given a name. Nobody changed it.
After receiving the telegram, 17 Rice students rushed to College Station to rescue the mascot from the U.S. Armory. A night watchman fired his pistol at the students. Awakened by the gunshots, Aggies gave chase and captured nine of the students. The remaining eight were hindered from escaping because of the heavy mascot. They cut off the canvas covering of the owl and burned the stuffing of wood shavings. A group of Aggie cadets saw the smoke and captured four more Rice students. Hunters rescued the last four. They and the owl returned to Houston. The 13 captured students remained imprisoned at A&M and stayed there until Rice President Lovett petitioned the A&M president for their release.
In 1935, another attempt was made to kidnap Sammy. During a football game against Southern Methodist University, some SMU freshmen tried to steal the mascot. Members of the Rice band intervened to save him.
The Aggies once again, in 1943, stole Sammy. They took him to the downtown Rice Hotel where they put him into the checkroom. Then they posted guards around the hotel. The manager of the hotel was “a friend of the Owls” and helped the Rice students to discreetly slip Sammy out the back door. He contacted a funeral home which sent an ambulance. Sammy was wrapped in a white sheet like a corpse, and was carried on a stretcher in the ambulance back to Rice.
In the mid-1960s most Southwest Conference schools used live animal mascots. Rice acquired a Great Horned Owl. During the next 30 years there were many live Sammys. The first one fell from a tree and broke his neck. Sammy II died of brain damage after hanging upside down overnight. Apparently his tether got tangled in his tree.
In the mid-1990s, Rice decided to use only a student dressed in an owl costume as its mascot. The costumed owl was used alongside a live mascot in the 1970s. Today the student who wears the Sammy the Owl costume is elected by the Rice student body. The costumed Sammy has been participating in Rice history for more than 40 years. In addition to cheering the athletes at sporting events, he attended the inauguration of Rice President George Rupp (1986). Sammy was elected homecoming queen (1995), and jumped on the dog pile after Rice won the College World Series in 2003.
Sammy has been kidnapped, shot at, smuggled out of a hotel disguised as a corpse, and even died several times. But despite all these adventures, Rice’s beloved mascot, Sammy the Owl, is still going strong after more than 100 years.
