Vintage South Carolina Gamecocks Decal 🐓 1960s NOS Great Western Enterprises Water-Transfer Sticker

What's the Legend Behind the South Carolina Gamecock? 🐓 A Vintage GO S.C. Gamecocks Water-Transfer Decal, Unused in Its Glassine Envelope

Size: 4" x 3" ~ Little to no wear.

Before stadium superstores, showing your colors meant a decal, a sink full of water and thirty careful seconds. This one never got its soak. It's a water-transfer decal of a fighting gamecock in red and black with yellow talons, wings flared and tail feathers curling like flame, with GO and S.C. in red block capitals beside it and Gamecocks in heavy black script underneath, all inside a thin red border on a cream ground. It's still on its paper and still in its little serrated glassine envelope, and every one I have is unused.

Turn it over and the directions are printed right on the back: dip it in water for about 30 seconds, very cold water may make the lacquer brittle, squeegee the bubbles out with a pencil or the edge of a card, and - my favorite - if applied on cars, do not place on windshield or where it might impair driver's vision. Then the company: GREAT WESTERN ENTERPRISES, Box 602, Rapid City, S. D. 57701, INSIDE OR OUTSIDE APPLICATION, SEND $1.00 FOR COMPLETE LIST. That five-digit ZIP is the clock. ZIP codes started on July 1, 1963, so this decal was printed after that.

🐓 The legend behind the gamecock

Old-timers around Columbia will tell you the nickname didn't come from a marketing meeting - it came from a battlefield. The story handed down for generations holds that the Revolutionary War general Thomas Sumter earned the name the Fighting Gamecock from the British, who found him impossible to run off no matter how many times they thought they'd beaten him. Legend says it was the British officer Banastre Tarleton himself who likened Sumter's relentless, scrappy style to a fighting cock that would not stay down. Whatever was really said, the name stuck to Sumter.

It stuck to the university in 1900, when The State newspaper in Columbia first called the football team the Gamecocks, after Sumter. The garnet and black go back even further, to November 1895, when the family of J. William Flinn gave the team a banner in those colors. The Clemson game started in 1896 and was played every year from 1909 through 2019.

🏈 ACC, then on its own

South Carolina was a founding member of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953 and pulled out on June 30, 1971, played as an independent and then in the Metro Conference, and joined the Southeastern Conference in 1991. The ZIP code only says after 1963, so this decal could have ridden a station wagon in the last ACC years or in the independent years that followed.

🗻 A decal from the Black Hills

The funny part is where it came from. Great Western Enterprises worked out of a post office box in Rapid City, South Dakota, the gateway to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore - a long way from Columbia. Their decals turn up for all kinds of places, from Yellowstone to Illinois, California and the Sears Tower, all on this same printed backing, and the same Box 602 sold a self-sticking college emblem line in a header bag at 49 cents. So you sent your dollar to South Dakota for the complete list and picked your school or your state from it.

🐓 About these

They're 4 by 3 inches. Keep one in its envelope in a shadow box, put it in your Gamecocks case beside the programs and pennants, or soak it and put it on a window, the way they meant you to - just not the windshield. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Great Western's GO S.C. decal again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.