Corinne Stremmel – Editor-in-Chief
One might ask themselves from time to time, “what even is a Gustie?” Well, we don’t know either. It’s been made pretty evident by the other Minnesota private liberal arts schools what a Tommie is, an insignificant worm, an Ole, the Norwegian adaptation of a Potato Olé, a Johnnie, probably something inappropriate, a Cobber, sounds like an STI—I know there are more, but do they really matter?
So what even is a Gusite? Well, we know for sure that it’s not any of the above. To find out more, we sent our interns, Ralph and Barbara, out with our investigative team to get to the bottom of this mystery. After weeks of searching in compost bins and even digging up the old Shakespeare pit, the interns came back empty handed.
“We found a variety of banana peels and old Gus Bucks since no one really knows how to use those things, and the Shakespeare pit had Much Ado About Nothing” said Ralph. *Note, Ralph was later fired for making such a pun in front of the entire Wookly staff. We are a no tolerance pun establishment since 1920.
We were getting down to the wire on this one. It was Tuesday night and this article was due the next day, so our investigative team pulled an all-nighter fueled by chocky milk and Godfather’s pizza as per request of the interns. Finally, we pulled out a dusty Gustie artifact that has since been lost to the life and times of graduating classes before us, The Gustie Rouser.
The call of the Gustie goes something like this:
“Come on you Gusties, Fight on, Fight on. Shout out the battle cry of victory. Come on you Gusties fight to the end, fight on for dear old G – A – C. Gusties will shine tonight, Gusties will shine, Gusties will shine tonight, Gusties will shine. Beat ‘em, bust ‘em, that’s our custom, Gusties will shine!”
Immediately after finding this artifact, we sent our investigative team to The crustavian Wookly lab to analyze each part of this call of the Gustie.
Extrapolating from the first lyric, “Come on you Gusties, Fight on Fight on,” our team speculated that a Gustie might be some violent creature with this so-called fighting. Violence isn’t the vibe, so our investigative team continued its forensic analysis.
“Shout out the battle cry of victory. Come on you Gusties fight to the end” sounded equally concerning. Is a Gustie some type of loud, competitive creature? A few experts agree with these findings, calling such species of Gustie a Fraternious Boyious.
Feeling slightly icked, the team then moved on to “Fight on for dear old G—A—C.” So it can spell. An intelligent creature nonetheless, yet only managing to spell one nonsensical word. What’s a GAC? That’s for the next issue.
“Gusties will shine tonight, Gusties will shine, Gusties will shine tonight, Gusties will shine.” Okay, we get it. They’re shiny, so shiny in fact that we had to purchase Wookly-approved eye protection for the interns in order to avoid a lawsuit whilst reading the Rouser.
“We were nearly blinded just by that lyric,” Barbara confessed. “We’re thinking a Gustie is definitely a shiny object, possibly a spoon or another metal object. We’re still waiting on swab samples from the document to see if there are any remnants of glitter, sparkles, and the like.”
The violence continued with the concluding line, “Beat ‘em, bust ‘em, that’s our custom, Gusties will shine!” The team remained pretty skeptical of the whole thing wondering how could such a creature be lurking around on campus unnoticed despite its loud and shiny characteristics.
Could a Gustie be something completely different? Perhaps invisible too? Then, this morning as our team was scrambling to finish this article in time, a gust of wind managed to blow away the majority of our data. Fortunately, the wind got us thinking.
“We had heard many speculations over the years that the gust in Gustie referred to the wind, but none of our data pointed to such a conclusion. Plus, the lion mascot doesn’t seem to fit the windy, Gustie brand,” Barbara said.
“Yeah if you told me that a Gustie was a species of big cat instead of a gust of wind, I would have said that you were lion, ”Ralph said. *Note, The Crustavian Wookly will no longer be using evidence gathered from Ralph due to his obscene use of puns in this investigation.
After hours of frustration, too many slices of Godfather’s pizza, and firing one of our unpaid interns, the investigative team decided to pack up.
Naturally, we had to adhere to a deadline and decided to turn in an unfinished investigative report, so if you ask yourself while passing some Gustavus-branded signage “What even is a Gustie?”—the world may never know.