More on Hairy Wumpus

You know - I think there may be some cosmic signicance to the whole Hairy Wumpus thing. We now are living in Bowling Green Ky, home of Western Kentucky University.

(for those confused on who Hairy Wumpus is - look down a couple of posts for a complete history)

WKU sits atop a hill in the middle of the city and students there are known as "Hill Toppers" - yes I know - it inspires nearly as much fear into opponents as "Corn Huskers" but at least the Corn Huskers in Nebraska do pretty well in their sports. - not that sports are really all that important. (I'm not sure how they are in academics though, I've heard one story that the "N" on their otherwise unadorned football helmets stands for Nowledge)

A lot of our family dollars go to WKU and we've earned a few dollars working for WKU.

So how does one make a mascot for a Hill Topper. Well - they didn't really try. They made up the mascot "Big Red", which is kind of a hairy red blobby fellow.


Little did I know as a 9 year old that my stocking would end up looking like the mascot of my adopted home town... Makes you wonder

singing at the mall

Barbershop in the mall from Levi Schuck on Vimeo.

I've had a load of fun singing in the Caveman chorus. We did renegade caroling at the mall last week. They won't let you officially sing there, so we went to 5 different places and sang 2 songs and then dispersed before the mall cops could kick us out. Loads of fun.

I didn't know they were going to film us, so when the camera got in my direction I did look away, since they spent a lot of time on the guy next to me, it looks pretty stupid, but I was singing.

Merry Christmas

A Merry Hairy Wumpus Christmas

Well - this bears some explaining..

Many years ago - around 1977 if I had to guess - Mother decided she would do something nice for us and make us special Christmas stockings. We got to design our own stockings - nothing standard like a plain old sock would do for us..

Matt and I had these really cool shark shirts - Matt ended up with a Shark stocking. It was really something special. Don't know what Santa thought of putting toys and candy in a shark - but hey - he left stuff there anyway.

I think Rebecca had a raggedy Ann doll type of stocking - don't remember as it didn't make a huge impression - but it was girlie. She was at most 5 years old.

One of my younger siblings had a coloring book at the time - being 9 or so I was far too old for coloring books myself! In the coloring book was a rather rotund looking bigfoot like creature walking through the woods with the caption "Hairy Wumpus". He wasn't very scary - in fact he kind of looked like a hairy pillsbury doughboy. Nevertheless, he became the model upon which my most awesome stocking was to be based.

Mother did marvelously and Hairy Wumpus was the envy of every kid who managed to catch a glimpse of him (I think in retrospect they may have been even more impressed with the shark). He had sleek red fur and bright green eyes. A rather marvelous stocking.

Hairy is over 30 now - he's definitely getting over the hill. He lost an eye somewhere, not exactly sure where or when, but I think it just lends more character. Santa doesn't bother leaving anything in Hairy anymore - but he usually gets to hang out for a few weeks around Christmas for memory sake.

Merry Christmas.