Tony Chiado

The husky has represented the University of Washington for over 100 years now. But Sunny, a young All-American boy with a positive demeanor and a bumbershoot at his feet, preceded the husky as an official mascot. He was a sun dodger, eluding that bright orb in the sky as he nestled into the green and grey land between sound and mountain.

The Sun Dodger mascot was adopted in 1920 after some years of informal and uninspiring mascots. The Sun Dodger mascot, too, was met with apathy. But perhaps apathy was better than the ridicule the mascot faced in its short existence.

The Daily, UW’s student newspaper, wrote about the brief life of the Sun Dodger in 2019. The article mentioned that the Sun Dodger had no particular meaning beyond its reference to the local weather, was introduced by a campus humor magazine, and then informally adopted by area sportswriters before winning the vote to become the official team mascot.

But the investigation into the Sun Dodger name stops there. In that article and every other history I’ve read of the early UW mascot, no one seems to penetrate the mystery of why the University of Washington affiliated itself with the Sun Dodger. It just… happened?

Like many other names in Seattle, I theorize that real estate developer James Moore had an influence, if indirect, on the mascot name. In 1890, five years before the University of Washington would vacate its downtown campus for a larger parcel removed from the bustle of the city, Moore platted the community of Brooklyn on Portage Bay. An Easterner, it seemed fitting that a community across a body of water from the city that was initially settled as New York Alki would be called Brooklyn. The name still lives on in one of the University District’s principal streets.

The young neighborhood would remain Brooklyn until 1919 when it became the University District. And 1919 was the same year that the Sun Dodger emerged as mascot. Across the country, the other Brooklyn had a somewhat famous baseball team that had been dubbed the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers early in the 2oth century.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

From one Brooklyn to another, one group of residents dodged the trolley car while the other dodged the sun. The allusion to the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers by the humor magazine stuck for a couple of years when a student body vote officially named the University of Washington the Sun Dodgers. The poor boosterism appeared to doom Sunny the Sun Dodger, though, and the regal husky was summarily adopted.

I’m sort of astonished the connection has never been made. It’s right there, still present in the neighborhood’s street names. The realization, made while spending too much time reading neighborhood histories and looking at historic maps, was a fun one. Go Dawgs!