Purdue Fans Steamed That ‘Boilermaker’ Won’t Make the Party

Its band will march in the Rose Parade. Its football team will play in the Rose Bowl.

But Purdue University’s official mascot has no place to go on New Year’s Day.

Of course, the West Lafayette, Ind., school that calls its team the Boilermakers doesn’t have an ordinary mascot, such as the furry dog used by Rose Bowl rivals, the University of Washington Huskies.

Purdue’s is a 5 1/2-ton model of a smoke-belching steam locomotive and has been ruled too brawny for the parade--and too bulky for the football stadium.

“It’s not covered in flowers, so it can’t be in the Rose Parade. And it’s too big for the Rose Bowl,” Kathryn Matter, a Purdue spokeswoman, said with a shrug Friday.

That has upset Purdue students who trucked their “Boilermaker Special V” to town for the New Year’s Day festivities, their university’s first Rose Bowl since 1967.

“We’re definitely disappointed,” said Joan Grott, a 23-year-old graduate student who is one of the Boilermaker Special’s drivers.

“We’ve all watched the parade on TV in Indiana and dreamed of being in it. Our athletic director and band director have pleaded with them, but it didn’t do any good.”

Back home in Indiana, the Boilermaker Special is legendary. University officials proudly proclaim it to be the world’s largest collegiate mascot.

Its genuine five-tone freight-train horn brings students and alumni to their feet when the locomotive leads the football team into the Purdue stadium.

First introduced as the university mascot in 1940, the locomotive symbolizes the legacy of Lafayette’s old Monon Railroad Shops. The manufacturing of steam boilers that was done there gave the school its Boilermaker nickname in 1881.

The current version of the locomotive was built seven years ago atop a beer truck chassis. It is powered by a 7.3-liter diesel engine that gets eight miles to the gallon and seats a dozen in a rear passenger section that resembles an old-fashioned coal tender.

Pairs of students have driven it as far as Texas and Florida to games. One steers and the other serves as lookout, peering around a 30-foot-wide blind spot created by its massive black smokestack and Victorian-era locomotive headlamp. The Boilermaker Special conked out on the way to Pasadena in 1967 and never made it to the Rose Bowl.

Students say they were ready to maneuver the Boilermaker Special down Colorado Boulevard on this New Year’s Day.

“To tell you the truth, I was looking forward to the parade more than the game,” said Bryan Shaffer, 24, a senior from Columbus, Ind.

On Friday, Shaffer and Bill Ward, a 21-year-old senior from Carmel, Ind., had to be content with steering the locomotive through traffic in Santa Monica, where the Purdue band and hundreds of fans are staying.

Baseball caps bearing the logos of eight college teams that Purdue beat this year to win its Rose Bowl berth were attached to the ornate steel cow-catcher on the front as the pair drove the Boilermaker Special onto the Santa Monica Pier.

Its clanging bell and a long, mournful toot of the horn drew cheers from Indianians visiting the pier and beach. Others simply stared in amazement.

Purdue alumna Nancy Saylor of St. Joseph, Mich., snapped a photo of the Boilermaker Special with the blue ocean behind it.

“No, I never expected to see it over the Pacific,” Saylor acknowledged. “It’s been 34 years since our last Rose Bowl.”

Three Purdue students, Jennifer Lucas, 21, Katharine Currie, 22, and Sarah Harmeyer, 21, who had just waded in the ocean, cajoled Shaffer and Ward into giving them a ride off the pier. Their jeans legs were still wet as they climbed aboard.

“This is a big deal. This is Mecca for us--no snow!” Currie said.

As if on cue, Ward yanked on the horn cord and a white puff belched from the fake smoke stack.

Icy white crystals made from CO2 gas and resembling snow rained down on Currie and the others riding in back. That, laughed passenger and professor Ted Fahlsing, was “to remind us of home.”