Colorado University Athletics
Remembering Ralphie's First Folsom Field Run
October 17, 2015 | Football, Neill Woelk
BOULDER — The way Bill Lowery remembers it, the very first time the very first Ralphie ever ran across Folsom Field, she did so at the direct orders of former Buff greats Hale Irwin and Dick Anderson.
Well, sort of.
Lowery, who attended CU from 1965 to 1967, is back in Boulder this weekend to take in CU's Homecoming festivities. A member of the first group of Ralphie's handlers, he stopped by Folsom Field late Friday afternoon to watch Ralphie V's current handlers put her through her paces in preparation for Saturday night's Homecoming game vs. Arizona.
Been to lots of practices in my career, but watching Ralphie run is one of the best pic.twitter.com/y9ic7PVXku
— Neill Woelk (@NeillWoelk) October 17, 2015
“The whole thing got started in 1965,” he said. “I was part of freshman group called 'Silver and Gold.' We were talking about how Colorado didn't have a live mascot. I was from Texas, and most of the Southwest Conference schools had live mascots and some of the Big Eight schools had them, too. I said we ought to have a live buffalo, and that's what you get for volunteering — they made me chairman of the buffalo committee.”
After some searching — and with the help of Lowery's father — the group acquired a buffalo calf from a ranch in eastern Colorado. Then came the process of finding a place to keep her, building a trailer to transport her and negotiating the bureaucratic red tape that inevitably accompanies such an endeavor.
“We finally got everything worked out,” Lowery said. “By the next year, we'd been working with her and took her to a game.”
But once they got Ralphie to the game, they weren't exactly sure how the rest of the plan was supposed to unfold. They had her in the northeast corner of the stadium (the same spot where she still starts her run) and were studying their options when an athletic department official told them to put their plans on hold.
“He came down and told us, 'Don't take that buffalo out on the field until I get Coach (Eddie) Crowder's permission. I'll come back and tell you when it's OK,'” Lowery remembers. “Well, he never showed back up and then all of a sudden the team is standing there.”
And that, according to Lowery, is when things got a little helter-skelter.
“We're standing down there with the buffalo, waiting for the OK, and the players are standing there right behind us,” he said. “The captains were Dick Anderson and Hale Irwin. Hale Irwin takes one look at us and says, 'Get that animal out of our way.'
“We looked at each other and we say, 'Yessir.' And then we took off.”
The good news was that Ralphie wasn't yet full grown, weighing “only” about 700 pounds.
The bad news was she hadn't really practiced her stadium run very often.
As in never.
“She takes off and veers toward this girl who is helping hold one of those big paper banners the players run through,” Lowery said. “She doesn't want to run through the banner, so she goes off to the side and flattens this poor girl. We couldn't get her slowed down. Then there's this Kansas State halfback kind of jogging across the field. We start hollering at him to get out of the way. He looks up — and I'm betting that guy never ran faster in his life.”
The handlers (one of whom, Lowery said, was actually wearing a harness that was strapped to Ralphie) finally got her slowed down at the opposite end of the stadium. They were then able to slowly work their way back to their starting point on the track that still circled Folsom Field.
“What I really remember is the crowd went wild,” Lowery said. “The guy from the athletic department came back and wanted to know why we didn't wait for him to give us the OK, and we told him we didn't have any choice — but we were pretty sure the athletic department wasn't going to stop it after that. The crowd loved it.”
Ralphie made several more appearances that season, but according to official CU accounts, it wasn't until 1967 that the team began the tradition of following directly behind en route to the bench before the game. Crowder thought it would be a good way to energize the crowd, and the tradition of Ralphie running a loop around the field began in the 1967 Homecoming game against Oklahoma State.
Lowery, though, wasn't around for that event, as he transferred to Texas Tech to be closer to home. That year, the Buffs earned a berth to the Bluebonnet Bowl, and when Ralphie made the trip to the bowl game with the Buffs, Lowery met his old friends in Houston for a reunion there — and made one more run with Ralphie.
Friday afternoon, Lowery marveled at Ralphie's trailer and the gear worn by the current handlers.
“We didn't have any of that,” he laughed. “We had jeans and most of us wore boots.”
Lowery, who now lives in Vernon, Texas, also chuckled at the current training sessions.
“We kept her at Green Meadows riding stable,” he said, “and they had about 200 acres out there. We'd take her out and run her around the pasture in the morning before games to tire her out a little before we took her to the stadium.”
As for how Ralphie got her name, Lowery's account differs slightly from others.
“They had a contest, and there were some people who wanted to name the buffalo after the senior class president, whose name was Ralph,” Lowery said. “But then when we pointed out she was a girl, we decided we'd better go with Ralphie. To tell you the truth, we never thought it would stick … but I guess everybody kind of liked it.”
Some accounts insist that the original handlers didn't know Ralphie was a female. But Lowery said they knew from the beginning because the rancher from whom they acquired the original buffalo made it clear they did not want a buffalo bull.
“He told us it would get too big and be too hard to handle,” he said. “That's why we went with a female.”
And that, according to Lowery, is no bull.
Contact: Neill.Woelk@Colorado.edu
