Beatrice dropping Orangemen? Say it's not true!
One of Nebraska's most iconic nicknames was once under attack.
Beatrice flirted with a nickname change in the 1940s, maybe more than once. In December of 1943, the Beatrice Times reported that unnamed people at Beatrice High were considering a nickname change from the Orangemen.
The Orangemen name was likely less than twenty years old at the time. The earliest mentions of “Beatrice Orangemen” were in state newspapers all in 1924. Before that the “Orangemen” only appears in conjunction with Irish politics and the formation of Northern Ireland.
(Give me a second to educate myself on Wikipedia.)
The original Orangemen were named to honor the Dutch-born Protestant king William of Orange, who defeated Catholic king James II in the Williamite–Jacobite War (1689–1691). The order was re-established in the late 1800s by the British loyalists of the Ulster Counties in northern Ireland. They were instrumental in the partition of Ireland, which created Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom in 1920.
Four years later, Beatrice High School started calling its athletes the Orangemen. I find multiple instances of Beatrice using the name from the fall of 1924, but before that, it only appears in 1920 papers in conjunction with Northern Ireland.
The first attempt to change the name happened in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It is mentioned during the 1943-44 controversy, but I can’t find any mentions at the time. In that earlier era, the Beatrice papers say, there was a movement to change the name to Homesteaders in honor of the Homestead National Historical Park just west of the city. The newspapermen claim that Homesteaders was eventually rejected for being too long.
Ironically, the 1943 call to change the name listed the difficulty of working Orangemen into snappy cheers and fan songs as the primary reason for the change. No alternative names are mentioned in the newspaper accounts.
The controversy disappeared almost as quickly as it came. The first mentions were in December 1943, and by January 1944, the announcement that Orangemen was here to stay appeared.
Interestingly, when Northern Ireland descended into the Troubles of the late 20th Century beginning in 1969, I could never find the use of the nickname questioned in Beatrice during that quarter-century of violence even though the Orangemen of Ulster again became prominent in world events, and not always in flattering ways.
This may be neither here nor there, but I did some quick demographic searches and found that the percentage of Catholics in Beatrice (around 8%) was only about half of many comparable communities (Crete, Falls City, Hastings) and less than one-third of others (Grand Island, Kearney, Norfolk). Beatrice did have a Catholic high school, St. Joseph, until the 1970s, but I wonder if it is a coincidence that the Orangeman name appeared in a community with those numbers?
One more note. In the article that says Beatrice Orangemen will stay, they mention a cheer developed by a student from a recent popular film. The cheer/song is “Buckle Down, Winsocki” from the movie Best Foot Forward (starring a young Lucille Ball!). Check out “Buckle Down, Winsocki” here; you can hear how ‘Beatrice Orangemen” might fit the rhythm. If you want to see the entire trailer and check out the 1941 Technicolor, it is here.