Excerpted from "All about Bill,"by Dave Senay. It appeared in Universitas (a Saint Louis University publication) in the autumn of 1983.

Writer and historian Dorothy Jean Ray traced the Billiken to Florence Pretz, a Missouri art teacher and illustrator, who patented her "design for an image," but not the name "Billiken." Ray concludes that the name was adopted by the distributors of the likeness, the Billiken Company of Chicago. In 1909 the Billiken was manufactured as a bank and statuette followed by dolls the next year. At the same time the Times Publishing Company (Seattle) sold small Billikens as a publicity stunt for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.

The meaning of the Billiken, "The god of things as they ought to be," according to Ray is a corruption of a line from Kipling's L'Envoi: "Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!"

It is in this setting that the Billiken likeness was turned into basque dolls, clay incense burners, marshmallow candies, metal banks, hatpins, watchfobs, pickle forks, belt buckles, auto hood ornaments, salt and pepper shakers and glass bottles. The Billiken was the rage for about six months. By 1912, the Billiken and its three kinds of luck, good, better and best, were memories --memories for all except the loyal fans of Saint Louis University who to this day may wonder how their teams were named after this little bullet-headed creature of the pixie ears, grinning mouth and rotund belly.

It is generally conceded that the coach of the SLU football team, John Bender, sometime between 1910 and 1911, at the height of Billimania, became associated with Bill through the efforts of two St. Louis sportswriters. There are, however, several different versions of how that occurred.

One version appears in a 1946 obituary that speaks of the death of Billy Gunn (say the name quickly...coincidence?) who owned a drug store close to SLU. Gunn, a short, bespectacled man with a lively wit, was friend and confident to SLU players and coaches. Said the obituary, "Gunn gave the St. Louis University athletic teams their nicknames. Coach Bender . . . walked into Mr. Gunn's drugstore one afternoon and was greeted by the proprietor with: 'Bender, you're a real Billiken!' Billy O'Connor a noted sportswriter, who was there, took up the name for Bender and eventually the university teams became known as the Billikens."

During a 1953 dinner honoring "the two men most responsible for the nickname 'Billiken' being associated with St. Louis University . . . Mr. Charles Z. McNamara and Mr. William O'Connor," a different story was told. "One afternoon at practice," the story goes, "as McNamara and O'Connor looked on . . . Bender was all smiles. . . .Bender's broad grin and squinty eyes so impressed O'Connor that he exclaimed: 'Why Bender's a regular Billiken!'"

"McNamara later drew a cartoon of Bender in the form of a Billiken and posted it in a drugstore window near the practice field. Members of the football team soon became known as 'Bender's Billikens'."

One last point on Billiken luck. To buy a Billiken doll gave the buyer luck. To have one given to you, better luck. But the best luck was to be had if the Billiken was stolen! Let's just say we stole the Billiken from a world that forgot too soon about the "god of things as they ought to be."