100 years ago, the Spartans were born in the LSJ. Well, the ‘Spartons’. Close enough.
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One-hundred years ago this week, back when sports writers had the audacity to give a team its name and spellcheck didn’t exist, the Michigan State “Spartons” were born. And, days later, the Spartans.
As anniversaries go for nicknames, this is a big one. Exactly 100 years ago Thursday — April 2, 1926 — the first mention of Michigan State as the “Spartons” appeared in the Lansing State Journal, giving Michigan State’s baseball team a new nickname after losing at Fort Benning in Georgia.
“Spartons Outhit Service Team But Fail to Make Clouts Count for Runs …” the subhead began.
Then, in the second sentence in the opening paragraph: “The Spartons from the north were forced to bow to Uncle Sam’s Boys here Thursday …”
Out of nowhere, Michigan State had a never-before-used nickname, randomly in a story on the sports cover, Page 34. No byline. Just “special to the Lansing State Journal.” Dateline: Fort Benning, Ga.
As the story behind the story goes, this was the work of Lansing State Journal sports editor George S. Alderton, who served in that role from 1923 to 1962. Michigan State had moved on from its previous nickname, “Aggies”, getting set to adopt “Staters”, a moniker chosen in a contest from student suggestions.
“And that didn’t ring right with me at all,” Alderton said during a 1993 interview, which appeared in Jack Seibold’s Spartan Sports Encyclopedia. “In fact, I never did use the name ‘Staters.’
As the baseball team headed down south, Alderton said he asked one of the players, catcher Perry Fremont, if he would send him a short story after each game. Fremont used the nickname “Aggies” in the write-up he sent to Alderton.
“Right then, I thought, we have to have a better name than that,” Alderton said.
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Alderton called the head of publicity at Michigan State, who’d run the contest with students, and asked if he could see the entries other than “Staters.”
“And so I went out and looked through them and came across the name Spartans — instantly it rang with me,” Alderton told Seibold, two years before his death in 1995. “That was a good one. There were no other Spartans that I knew of in this part of the country. So I inserted the name Spartans in the baseball story and I spelled it just as I had come to know it, with an ‘O’ — Sparton — like the radio made in Jackson at the time.”
In 1926, stories and advertisements in the State Journal about “Sparton” radios — made in nearby Jackson — were everywhere.
After two days of spelling it “Spartons”, a Michigan State history professor notified Alderton that he was spelling Spartans incorrectly. Ten days later, on April 13, 1926, he penned this column lede:
“Out of a clear sky a nick name has descended upon the Michigan State college athletic camp. ‘Spartans’ is the sobriquet (meaning nickname) that will, as long as this writer can successfully wrestle this typewriter, or until he is convinced otherwise, be attached the wearers of the Green and White in the field of sports competition. Inasmuch as our southern correspondents chose to christen the baseball team as ‘Spartans’, the good work may as well go on.”
Alderton continued to make the case from there.
There is reporting that Alderton had his eye on the name "Spartans" a bit earlier, getting the idea from friend Stephen Scofes, who ran a restaurant in Lansing with his brothers.
In a 2018 story by former LSJ columnist Judy Putnam, Stephen's son George said his father told him that Alderton came in for breakfast to discuss the Michigan State team names being suggested in the contest. Stephen, born near Sparta, Greece, reminded Alderton that he had already sent him a letter suggesting the name Spartans.
FROM 2018: Putnam: MSU Staters? How Greek immigrants inspired the nickname Spartans
However Alderton came to it, he fell in love with it.
What began as a one-man crusade (also proposed by an unnamed student and a friend) — has, a century later, become an identity.
Lansing State Journal sports writers have had some luck getting nicknames to stick. Fred Stabley Jr. stuck the name “Magic” between Earvin and Johnson in the lede of the story of Everett’s win over Jackson Parkside in the Jan. 25, 1975 edition of the LSJ.
There can’t be many newspapers that have gone 2-for-2 quite like that.
Who's due for a nickname?
Contact Graham Couch at [email protected]. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: How the Michigan State Spartans got their name 100 years ago