History
Palmer High School is located at 301 North Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs. The present building was built by the Works Progress Administration under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940.
In 1945, a Native American student, Don Willis, designed Eaglebeak, a caricature of a fictitious Indian chieftain and the teams became the Terrors. In 1985 a local political hopeful criticized the mascot as racist, making Palmer one of the very first cases of controversy over a Native American mascot in the United States. Despite the fact that the politician, having lost the election, later publicly apologized to the student body and retracted the charge of racism, the damage was done and Eaglebeak was not to return. In the following years, Palmer experimented with a variety of mascots, to include a two-month flirtation with the Tasmanian devil from Warner Brothers, which nearly led to a lawsuit.
In the early 1990s the high school chose an eagle as its mascot, naming it "Eaglebeak", but without the historical background of the original.
Read more about this topic: General William J. Palmer High School
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