It’s ripe for a pun, don’t you think?
Orange Owl, October 1925
We’ve digitized the whole run of the Orange Owl, and you can see all the issues online in The Orange Owl Digital Collection ~ keyword searchable and available in full.
What’s the Orange Owl? It was a college humor magazine published by the Orange Owl Chapter of the Hammer and Coffin National Honorary Society at Oregon Agricultural College during the 1920s. The magazine included humorous and satirical pieces as well as cartoons and pen sketches created by students.
The first issue of the Orange Owl appeared for Junior Weekend in May 1920. In 1921-1922, the humor magazine was published by the Orange Owl Club, which became the Orange Owl Chapter of the Hammer and Coffin Society at Oregon Agricultural College (OAC) in 1922. The Orange Owl promoted creative talents among students in wit, humor, cartooning, and sketching. A broad representation of OAC students were involved in writing, editing, and publishing of the magazine. In the 1926-1927 academic year, more than 40 students contributed materials and more than 35 worked on the managerial and circulation staffs. The magazine was funded by advertising as well as subscriptions.
M. Ellwood Smith and Edwin T. Reed served as faculty advisors for the publication and were referred to in some issues as the “Shock Absorbers”.
Orange Owl, January 1925
According to the 1928 Beaver yearbook, “… the Orange Owl represents the fun and frolic of the students and shows that college life is more than a wearisome grind. It might be called the carnival representative of Oregon State”.
The Hammer and Coffin Society originated at Stanford University to promote literary and artistic talents of students as expressed in wit and humor. In the mid 1910s, the Society transformed into a national collegiate humor organization with 25 chapters.
Five or six issues were published per academic year beginning with volume 3 in 1921-1922. Most issues are 32 pages; as many as 3000 copies were printed and distributed on campus and in the Corvallis community.
The purpose of the magazine was to promote creative talent among students in humorous writing as well as cartooning and sketching. The magazines include poems, jokes, short humorous stories, satire, plays, limericks, cartoons, sketches, and colorful covers. All issues include local and national advertisements. Some material was reprinted by College Humor and other college comic magazines around the country and the Orange Owl also reprinted exchanges from college comic magazines published by other chapters of the Hammer and Coffin Society.
In 1923 and 1927, women students had full responsibility for publishing one issue of the magazine.
This collection includes 43 issues of the magazine, all of which are available online. The collection includes duplicate copies of many issues; however, one issue (volume 2, no. 3 for May 1921) is only available on microfilm and online.
Orange Owl, January 1923
