When I was the Head Basketball Coach at the University of Delaware, 1966-71, I put together a recruiting brochure, with the help of my best friend in town, Charley Burns, a commercial artist for Du Pont. The guy was really a talent. So, he and I did the art work for the two pages you see below, which illustrate the Eastern Section and the Western Section of the Middle Atlantic Conference, as it was then. Obviously, all of these schools are in different conferences today. Basically, the D-I schools were in the Eastern Section and the D-II schools in our Western Section.
Now, for some of these 12 logos, we just simply used the school’s existing logo. Where no such ‘mascot’ logo existed, we designed one. Here are the correct credits for the six Eastern Section teams, as I recall them: Temple (used their logo); La Salle (Charley did it from scratch and he did a truly beautiful job); St. Joseph’s (I believe Charley did that); West Chester (existing logo); American U. (existing logo); Rider (Charley did that from scratch); Drexel (I did that one and it took a lot of research; Charley cleaned it up). We wrote all nicknames on the figures.
For the Western Section, again, as I recall who did what: Delaware (Charley did that, from scratch); Rider (I believe Charley did that from scratch); Gettysburg (I did that one and Charley put on the finishing touches); Bucknell (I did that one and Charley finished it up); Lehigh (I did that one and Charley cleaned it up); Lafayette (I did that one and Charley put on the finishing touches). We wanted to inlcude their nickname: Owls, Explorers, etc. The ones Charley did were, in my opinion, really little masterpieces, like the La Salle Explorer, with the pennant.
I wanted something that would tell recruits, at a glance, who we played: the name of the school in block letters and the name of the mascot on the mascot itself. I wanted things that would, as the saying goes, ‘… jump off the page.’ Thanks to Charley, we had that. It helped me land the best Freshman team ever at Delaware. Those prospects knew all about Delaware before I ever showed up at their houses. As they say in Italy, “The eye also wants its part.” Well, that’s what this kind of art must be, a word-picture. We had that, many thanks to the great Charley Burns.
