Meet the Woman Who Gave Great Danes to the University at Albany

September 5 — Kathleen Fox knows a good coast when she sees one.

That’s why the retired social researcher and full-time watercolorist spends her time in Maine these days.

Just like the waves that break on these granite shores, she puts it all on canvas.

Yeah: nice ribs, she knows.

However, she can’t necessarily say the same about the Great Danes, the dogs that trained her in the fight, so to speak.

This did not, however, stop her from submitting her project.

“I never really thought about it,” she said.

“I just handed it back and before I knew it, I had won. Twenty-five dollars. That was a lot of money for a college student in 1965.”

Almost $250 in fact, in today’s currency, adjusted for inflation.

Anyway, it all happened all those years ago at the University at Albany, whose Great Danes football team comes to Morgantown Saturday for a 6 p.m. game with the WVU Mountaineers at Milan Puskar Stadium.

Of Socrates and Security Blitzes The Albany Great Danes are the Great Danes—because Kathy Earle said they were.

Or rather, they suggested that they should be.

The upstate New York school, founded in 1844 as a teachers’ academy, had always fielded athletic teams, with generally respectable results on the field.

That’s especially true for the current iteration of the Great Danes, who won 11 games last season.

Pre-Dane, however, said teams were excluded from the mascot department.

In fact, the University at Albany didn’t even have one for more than a century, according to the school’s media relations office.

And the one that was initially in place during Fox’s undergraduate years was perhaps a little esoteric to the whole affair.

From 1948 until Fox’s time, the school had competed under the nickname “Pedagogues” — “Peds,” for short — which was borrowed from “pedagogy,” the literal meaning of arts education, given the school’s mission.

Pedagogy is of course also the cornerstone of the Socratic method.

The inventor of this method, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, although an expert in logic, was still a little hesitant when it came to tracking down that outside linebacker on third-and-14 who wasn’t fooled by the fake screen at all.

Albany’s mascot at the time, as the media office reported, wasn’t helping the cause.

He was the “Pedguin,” a kind of Petri dish, a Pop Warner penguin transformed, for example, into an Arctic fowl that read the classics — when he wasn’t bogged down in the middle of two days of reading in August.

Walking the dog It is clearly time for an upgrade, the school said.

A competition has been launched. Who could come up with the best idea for a new mascot?

Fox only knew it was getting an upgrade in 1963. That’s when she first laid eyes on the University at Albany campus.

She attended Cornell and went to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert there.

The folk trio was at the height of its glory.

For her, the answer was not in the wind, but in the greenery and the school buildings.

“I immediately fell in love with the place. I was transferred.”

Then came the contest that made her somewhat famous two years later.

Fox was thinking of the nobler aspects of the Great Dane, a breed that began as a hardy boar hunter in Germany.

Never mind that by the time of Fox’s first foray into Albany, giant dogs had long since had their evolutionary tails wagged to form a new breed of lovable, goofy pets – and were thus represented as such in popular culture.

Marmaduke, for example, had already been in comics for 10 years.

Astro had just finished his first appearance on “The Jetsons,” a prime-time cartoon that would rerun for decades.

Scooby-Doo would make its debut six years later on Saturday morning television.

Fox, as we said, was evoking the original canine character of the Great Dane, as opposed to the comic strip character that would come later.

“He has a proud bearing and an imposing stature,” she noted in her article. “He is clean, graceful and proud.”

The media-savvy student, who was studying journalism at Albany, also said “Danes” would be impactful, both in headlines and in the text written by sportswriters covering the game.

“It seems quick and alert,” she added.

Albany, Little by Little Meanwhile, she was alert in the Albany classroom.

So much so that she earned her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees there.

Fox became a professor and researcher, while leading outreach agencies addressing the emotional health of indigenous people in New York and Maine.

Today, she writes children’s books under her maiden name, Earle, but she is best known, as has been said, as a painter in Maine—where her vibrant watercolors, which have won numerous awards for their whimsy, go far beyond the dark imagination of another creative type who lives there, Stephen King.

There are lighthouses and seascapes.

And the little boy learns to be a lobster fisherman and the old lady writes a tune on the violin.

There’s the Ernest Hemingway-like fisherman and a bemused Edgar Allen Poe – perhaps a reference to King after all – with a raven perched atop his head.

Visit kathleenafox.com for links to her other social media pages, as well as galleries of her work.

“The University at Albany has been good to me,” she said.

In return, she has been good to her alma mater, which has 17,000 students, nine schools and colleges, 50 undergraduate programs and 125 graduate degrees.

Fox regularly donates dollars to the school that has been a part of his life and times for 61 years.

“I get really excited every time I get an envelope from New York with a Great Dane on it.”