Does anyone remember musculature?: The lost history of Hans Husker

7 comments so far July 21, 2009 by Brandon Vogel

If you go back a ways as a Nebraska football fan, you may remember a time when Harry Husker was the predominant visual identity of the Cornhuskers. Harry was a sporting chap, a blazer-clad, button-wearing, pennant-toting fan of the Big Red with program eternally in hand.

Little is known about Harry's wife, Harrietta, but she looked like a real firecracker sporting the same red cowboy hat and carrying the same pennant as her husband while riding a giant piece of corn. In terms of rural sex appeal, Barbi Benton had nothing on Harrietta.

By 1974, however, Harry and his beautiful wife had been replaced by the brawny, overalled Herbie. Herbie had a good 25 year run before undergoing a makeover in the early aughts to become the slimmer, cell phone holster Herbie you see today. While not the Herbie of old, he does good enough and definitely beats the other two options 1) Lil' Red, or 2) no Herbie.

But there's another member of the Husker mascot family, a long lost cousin from across the pond, and I met him this weekend. Let's call him Hans.

While browsing the tables at the "largest and best-known antiques show in the country" last Saturday in Brimfield, Mass. I came across a vendor who was selling nothing but vintage pennants and buttons. Everything was immaculately organized by team/school so I found the Nebraska section and started pulling out triangles of felt.

And that's where I found this:

I always assumed that Herbie could handle himself pretty well with his fists out back of the bar if he had to but with his pudgy looks he always gave off the air of farm-strong rather than strong-strong. Not this guy, he's positively Schwarzeneggian. Look at those lats, the impossibly small waist, the defined arms that practically scoff at the notion of being contained by mere cotton. The story goes that if you caught Hans with a few beers in him--somewhere around 16 constituted a few in his heyday--he would forge a horseshoe on his anvil of a jaw just to prove he could.

The pennant pictured above was commemorating the 1985 Sugar Bowl appearance but there was another pennant with the same logo commemorating the '84 Orange Bowl. That makes Hans a relic of the Scoring Explosion era of Nebraska football which also probably explains his relatively brief tenure as a graphical element at Nebraska.
On one hand, what better iconographic representation could there be of the offensive might at Nebraska during that time than John Henry in some Husker overalls? On the other hand, he's probably too good a representation of the team that went in to that Orange Bowl as 11-point favorites, a reminder of fallibility, a Goliath who is still susceptible to David. Look at Hans, then remember that Miami game.

If possible, it makes the memory even worse but I'm still willing to profess my love for this logo. I have no idea where it comes from nor have I seen it before. Did Nebraska ever actually use this logo, or was it just something dreamed up by a bowl promoter? (After all, that's how we got Herbie.)

I don't know, so I turn it over to you the reader: if you have any information regarding the current or previous whereabouts of this man I call Hans Husker feel free to drop them in the comments below.

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