What Was the First Campus Mascot?
“Pioneer” Reflected the Name of the First U.S. Space Program
At the same time that the new college was coming into being, the United States was locked in the beginnings of a Cold-War-spawned Space Race with the Soviet Union. The unmanned Pioneer Space Program had begun in 1958, and the feeling of breaking new ground (literally) with the hilltop campus, and an association with President Kennedy’s “New Frontier” at the time, led to the selection of a “Pioneer” theme to represent the new college - and an astronaut as the college mascot. Early CSUH yearbooks and campus publications contain numerous references to this astronaut mascot - “Pioneer Pete” was nowhere to be seen (he seems to have been a concoction of the early 1980s, by which time the Space Race, and its soaring idealism for the future, was largely outdated).
Early campus yearbooks have several images of the original Pioneer Astronaut Mascot of the new college.