Purdue Pete flipped his lid. Literally. In 1983, Purdue’s athletic mascot took off the boxy hat he had worn at a jaunty angle atop his raven hair for two decades and donned a new skimmer — a construction hard hat. Manly, yes. But what spawned Pete’s millinery makeover? 

Edward L. Neufer (A’59) had a light bulb illuminate over his head — an idea for a new Pete hat. During the 1970s to 1980s, Neufer was on the board and executive committee of the Purdue Alumni Association, and in 1982, he was elected president. He owned Safety Equipment and Supply Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a distributor of safety products including — you guessed it — hard hats. 

“Thinking that Purdue is one of the major engineering schools with a building construction management department, I came up with the idea that Pete’s block hat should be replaced with a symbolic hard hat,” Neufer says. “One of my major suppliers furnished me with a gold hard hat embossed on the front with a black block P.” 

Neufer marketed his hard hats as spirit wear. They sold for $7.50 each at University Bookstore, Purdue concession stands, and fraternities. He gave hard hats to Purdue notables like President Arthur G. Hansen, WBAA announcer John DeCamp, Purdue Alumni Executive Director Joe Rudolph, Coach Gene Keady, and Athletic Director
George King. 

In a 1979 thank-you letter to Neufer, President Hansen wrote of his hard hat, “I may even wear it at faculty meetings in times of stress! And it will be excellent cover if we have any rainy football Saturdays.” 

Then in 1982, Richard (Dick) P. Thornton, assistant athletic director for the John Purdue Club, was on a committee to design a new fiberglass Purdue Pete mascot head, the sixth iteration of Pete’s mug since it began as a crude papier-mâché creation in 1963. Thornton and Neufer brainstormed ideas about Pete’s new look, deciding that the original square cap would go by the wayside and a hard hat would be the new Pete topper.

In a letter to Neufer, Thornton wrote, “Received the hard hats today, and we’re ready to design one for Pete.” 

Thornton also wrote Neufer about another idea, “We’re trying to animate Pete, and one idea is to have puffs of smoke come from his ears when called for. This is your area of expertise, so get the brain churning, please.”

Thornton proposed that a small CO2 extinguisher be placed inside Pete’s head and piped to the ears. The student wearing the Pete head would activate the extinguisher, and white clouds would billow forth. 

“I did not pursue what Dick was talking about,” Neufer says. “It probably would have been sort of cute.” 

Perhaps one day another Boilermaker can engineer steam to emit from just under the brim of Neufer’s brainchild, Pete’s hard hat.