Fabled Kent State Critter Gets New Job

By: Carol Biliczky / Akron Beacon Journal (MCT)

Posted: 9/18/06

Their faces have been plastered on T-shirts. The student radio station is named for them. And alumni have received stuffed-squirrel toys as gifts.

But this year, after 45 years on the Kent campus, the lowly black squirrel is making its first foray as a somewhat official KSU symbol.

The Kent State Police Department began using a new character they call Simon the Squirrel this fall to promote student safety.

"Stay safe the KSU way," advises the rodent in ads. He is clad in a KSU T-shirt with giant human teeth superimposed by computer. Another slogan is "Be safe, not nuts!"

Campus police wanted to find a clever way to reach students about recent thefts, drugs such as marijuana, and sexual assaults, said administrative Lt. Bill Buckbee.

"We've had trouble getting people to pay attention," he said. "A large percentage of our students don't think anything bad will happen if they engage in high-risk behavior."

Police are plastering ads, handouts and posters of Simon throughout campus, and they are wisely including the phone numbers of pizza parlors on the back to make sure students hold onto them.

They even got Simon his own Web site on www.facebook.com, the Internet portal students use to meet and communicate.

Seventy students have signed up to be Simon's friends-a link police want to use to communicate with them throughout the year. More are signing up every day.

"We wanted something that was weird, strange, goofy," Buckbee said. "Something that said, 'Hey, made you look.'"

In fact, the squirrels have been local icons since Larry Woodell, the Kent State grounds superintendent, and M.W. Staples, a retired executive of the Davey Tree Co. in Kent, captured 10 of them in London, Ontario, in 1961.

To ensure the animals survived, Woodell had KSU workers install feeding stations and nesting boxes around campus. And he made a second trip up north to build their numbers.

The squirrels flourished and, according to Jon Harper, the assistant director of the KSU Student Center, have displaced the common gray variety.

"I've seen some with white feet and one with a red tail," he said. "I don't know how that happened."

In 1981, KSU administrators decided to put the furry rodents to good use as the namesake for a get-acquainted festival for students in the fall.

Since then, the Black Squirrel Festival has come to be one of the Kent campus' most popular events.

But, alas, the big time continues to elude the pop culture icon.

Never, said Kent State spokeswoman Rachel Wenger, has the lowly black squirrel been used to officially promote Kent.

"We build our ads around the theme 'Imagine,' which is student and faculty success," Wenger said when asked about the squirrel. "The squirrel doesn't make it."