There is no sand here
1927: somebody finally said it out loud, the school became Rockbeach University, and a basketball star drew the new mark.
Seventy-eight years after the Lava Dunes Academy opened on a beach with no dunes, somebody pointed out that there was no sand either.
The record does not preserve who. It is the single most satisfying unattributed remark in the school's history and it would be good to have a name for it, and there is not one. Somebody, in 1927, in a room, said out loud that the school was called Lava Dunes and the teams were called the Sandys and the beach was made of rock.
Both names went in the same year.
The Lava Dunes Academy became Rockbeach University, which is accurate, plain and has never needed defending. And the teams became the Lava Monsters — carrying the lava forward out of the school name they had just dropped, which is a very human thing to do. Nobody wanted to throw all of it away. They kept the half that was true.
Steve Alexander draws the second mark
The school needed a new seal for a new name, and it asked a student to do it. The student was Steve Alexander, and the reason the school asked him is that he was famous on campus for something else entirely: he was a basketball star.
He drew it, and then he went and had the other career.
What he left the school
Alexander became the cartoonist for the Osprey Post and was widely loved for a long time, until he passed. In his will he left Rockbeach fifteen thousand unpublished cartoons, gifted in kind.
Nobody has ever printed most of them. They are in an archive.
And most of them make fun of Alexandria.
Sit with that for a moment. A man named Alexander left this school fifteen thousand drawings, the bulk of them at the expense of Alexandria, decades before Alexandria was a rival and decades before realignment made the two schools play each other at all. They are sitting in a box. Nobody has cataloged, digitized or exhibited them.
Something from Alexander's 1927 drawing survived every subsequent redesign. The wave line running through the mark the school uses today is his, still there after a century. Whatever else changed, nobody ever removed the line he put in.
From A Book of Rockbeach History.