There’s something fundamentally wrong about naming a school the Poets. Where are the people that did that now? Laughing from beyond. At Oregon we called our Ducks the “Fighting Ducks”...give me a break. When was the last time you ever saw a duck fight? They would have been better calling them the fighting geese...at least a goose will try to bite you once in a while.
Whittierites are proud of the name. This is a Quaker school named for the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier--and Greenleaf, Whittier's main drag, is four blocks away from the college.
For many years, "Chief" Wallace Newman was the football coach for Whittier. An American Indian who graduated from the Sherman Indian School in Riverside--one of the few schools that has a winning record over USC (they last played each other in 1916)--Newman later was a star for the Trojans in the 1923 Rose Bowl game. He was known for saying, "you show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser." In 1969, as a member of the Whittier High School band, I watched as Newman presented President-elect Richard Nixon with his letter in football that he failed to win while playing for the Poets.