For decades, a tall ship sailing the high seas has been the proud logo of Summit’s Argo Community High School, home of the Argonauts.
But now a vocal group of alumni fear their beloved ship could be sunk by a new foe — a Spartan-like character carrying a sword and a flag that was recently unveiled as a potential new logo for the school.
Angry graduates have ripped the logo on Facebook and railed against it during a meeting at the school last month, saying they weren’t consulted by school administrators before the logo was revealed. Nearly 250 people have signed an online petition titled “Save Our Ship.”
Perhaps most important, more than a few alumni have said the new character looks like a cousin of the Spartan logo at Oak Lawn Community High School, one of Argo’s rivals.
“Nobody from the alumni side has asked for this, and everybody I’ve talked to is furious,” said Ron Leffler, who graduated from Argo in 1981.
Taken aback by the withering criticism from alumni, school officials say the new logo was only meant to supplement, not replace, the venerable ship. In an effort to quell the controversy, the school board is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a measure that would declare the ship the one and only symbol of Argo, officials said.
“I don’t know how this got inflamed, but the logo was never going to be changed,” said Bill Parra, a member of the school board. “My wife is an Argonaut. I’m an Argonaut. Our kids are Argonauts. The ship is embedded in us.”
Despite assurances from several board members that the ship will remain the school’s logo, some alumni said they remain skeptical and are encouraging other graduates to attend Wednesday’s meeting in support of the ship.
The idea to develop an alternative logo began about a year ago as an effort to drum up school spirit, Argo officials said.
The school accepted proposals for new designs at no cost — including logos drawn by art students at Chicago-area colleges — and posted six of them online, where anyone could vote for their favorite over a span of several months, officials said.
The new logo began to appear on some school materials this year, but its presence became widely known to alumni when new signs topped with the logo were placed outside the school the day before homecoming.
The signs represented a double insult to many alumni — besides sporting the new logo, they also were red instead of Argo’s traditional shade of maroon.
The signs have since been taken down to be repainted and have the new logo swapped out for the ship, but the damage was done.
Alumni took to Facebook to express their outrage, ridiculing the new logo and comparing it to Marvin the Martian while begging administrators not to “sink the ship.”
Several graduates said they weren’t aware of the online voting and felt the school sprang the new logo on them.
“That’s what got people in an uproar, because it was never brought to anyone’s attention,” said Vickie McAlpine, the school’s registrar and a 1983 graduate. “With something as important as this to the alumni, we feel that we should have been involved. We were just snubbed.”
Argo officials acknowledged that some graduates were not aware of the voting and assumed the ship was being replaced when they learned of the new logo.
“We weren’t trying to sneak anything past anybody or change the history of Argo,” said Terrence Pappas, the school board’s president. “The new logo was always meant as a supplement for students to use on T-shirts and things like that, to be a little different than what we’ve always done.”
The new logo is nowhere to be seen outside the school now. Maroon banners with the ship logo flutter from utility poles outside the building, and the ship still adorns the football field’s scoreboard and a huge exterior wall of the fieldhouse.
That’s how it should stay, said Nicholas Caprio, a school board member.
“I can assure you — the ship is not going away,” he said.
Twitter @ryanthaggerty
