Thursday, March 08, 2007

MSU or Uof M, what gives?

This posting is because I was challenged on what I said in an older posting "My Bear Killer": It was a gun posting about my Colt single action frontier scout .22 LR and in it I said "When I was off to college at Montana State University at Missoula, my Colt went with me." Then today I got a comment from Kerry who said "Just a technicality...but MSU is and always has been Montana State University in Bozeman. It is the rival school of University of Montana in Missoula. Because we are rivals we are a little sensitive about the common mix up". I sat in front of my computer screen trying to figure that out for a while and so I Googled Montana State University and it was obvious that MSU was in Bozeman Montana, not Missoula where I went to school. I went to school there 45 years ago and memories do fade and maybe I am getting the early stages of "Old Timers" disease just like my wife is always saying. I know 45 years is a long time but... So I went searching for my yearbook and there it was, right on the cover "Sentinel '62 Montana State University Missoula", on page 11 was The MSU-MSC Game at Bozeman. I was there as I took the pictures as yearbook photographer. The photo's were Extchrome taken with a 4x5 Graflex 'Press' camera. They were the first large format color photos I had taken as each slide was very expensive. MSU (Missoula) lost by one point to MSC (Bozeman). I was vindicated but what happened. We were the proud MSU GRIZZLES of the old Skyline Conference and someone came along and took all of that away and gave Missoula a different name, University of Montana. I remember a basketball game when our center, Steve Lowry battled "Bill the Hill McGill from Utah" in a classic basketball game. Is that gone also? They took Bozeman's name, MSC, away and gave them another name. Both MSU and MSC probably did something to tick off the state legislature and they then showed them by changing their name. Who became MSC if MSC was changed to MSU? Back in the "Old Days" State Legislatures worried about having three or four types of schools of higher learning spread across their state: State Teachers College; State College which held the Agricultural College; a University for a broader based education; a forth type would be a school of mines. Maybe that explains it. If you know what happened how about dropping me a comment.

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