What makes a lion "Nittany," anyway? According to the Penn State website, before 1904, the school didn't even have a mascot, save for a work mule named "Old Coaly" that helped in construction ...

Writing under a pen name, Mason urged his fellow Penn Staters to adopt the “Old Nittany Mountain Lion” as the school’s mascot. In an essay, he wrote: Mountain lions had been extinct in the ...

In 1907, and with the university still without a mascot, Mason and a group of his fellow students founded The Lemon, the university’s first humor magazine. Writing under a pen name, Mason urged his ...