Two bolts of cloth, and why we wear black and white
A game in two days, a shop with fuchsia and green in stock, and the 1936 decision that stuck.
Jeff Hive was athletic director of this school from 1898 to 1932. Thirty-four years in the chair. Nobody has held it as long since and nobody is going to; the job now turns over faster than that twice.
He is remembered for one afternoon.
In 1901 a local high school called, wanting a game in two days. Hive said yes, as an athletic director with nothing else on the calendar says yes, and then discovered the second thing, which is that he had no uniforms. So he walked into the local clothmaker's shop and asked what was in stock.
What was in stock was fuchsia and green.
Not chosen. Not shortlisted against alternatives, not tested against the school's existing identity, which did not exist, not discussed with anybody. They were the only two bolts in the shop and there was a game on Saturday. Hive took them, and those were the colors of this institution for the next thirty-five years.
The academy had existed for fifty-two years by then and had no athletic colors, for the excellent reason that it had no athletics to put them on. A keepers' school does not need a palette. The moment it acquired a football fixture it acquired an identity, and the identity came from a shopkeeper's inventory on a Thursday.
Black and white
In 1936 the fuchsia and green went.
The archive is thin on why, which is itself informative — there is no manifesto, no board minute anybody has produced, no designer's name attached. The colors simply stop. What replaces them is black and white, and black and white is what this school has worn every day since.
It is the correct answer. It is, in fact, the only correct answer this institution has ever arrived at about its own appearance, and it arrived at it by looking down. The beach is black rock. The water coming over it is white. A school named Rockbeach, founded on the collision between those two things, wears the collision.
Ninety years on it still looks right, which is more than can be said for most decisions made in 1936.
And yet. Within a generation the fuchsia and green had become the thing people asked for, and they have not stopped asking in ninety years. The throwback is the most-requested item the team store does not sell. Every long-tenured fan knows the story of the two bolts of cloth.
From A Book of Rockbeach History.