Kevin,

You mixed up responses concerning “Toots”.  Mine was the one that mentioned cars.   If I recall correctly, there was a story in the local paper (Mining Gazette), probably between late 1962 through 1965,  explaining the origin of “Toots”.   There may have been a picture in the paper about it as well.   That may be the most authoritative reference on “Toots”.

Joe Kantor, Class of 66’ and 68’, Geology

Sorry, Joe! Sometimes my cutting and pasting doesn’t go so well.

Pass along to Kevin,

TOOTS,Stands for Tech Out Of Town Students.It is not toot it is Toots.

Fred Sherriff class of 1965

I’m convinced that we can get a Keweenaw dictionary going, and this should be the textbook case for proper grammar. It’s a term not to be used in the singular!

Don’t mean to beat the Toot thing to death, but from 1963 to 1968, the locals called us Toots and we called ourselves Toots because engineers drive trains. No offense was taken, sort of like the term, Cheese Heads, of Wisconsin, that I became one of after graduation.

There was a freshman slogan:  “Six months ago I couldn’t even spell ENGANEER, and now I are one.”  I remember seeing it on t-shirts even.

No one mentioned that the Toots also had a term of endearment for the locals, “local Makis” or “local Maks”, because of the prevalence of the last name. No offense was intended: and I ended up marrying a local Mak.

Jerry Myers, Green Bay
BSBA 1968

Kevin, After transferring from Northern to Tech in 1950, having earned  my “School money” as a laborer at the Mather B mine. I  also was known as a Toot. and was told that was because we were students at the Institute.

G.Backes .M.E. 1953

Probably too late for the compendium (never! –Kevin), but …

TOOTs:

Two definitions were popular during my years at Da Tech, as others have noted.  The first is Tech Out of Towner, which my “local” classmates assured me was the genuine origin.  The second was confusion by the locals between those who drove railroad trains and Tech students’ desired careers, which seemed rather dubious.  Quick summary: Two forms of condescension.

Copper Country Limited:

As I approached graduation from high school and was considering Da Tech, a recurrent theme was the distance from Muskegon to Houghton and how to cope with that.  I postulated an approach out of my interests in Great Lakes shipping and railroading: take the Grand Trunk Western carferry to Milwaukee and then the Copper Country Limited to Tech.  Never happened.  The CCL was gone by my freshman year.

Karl Lahm, P.E., 1973 EE
Kevin,

Thought it was interesting that today I just received this email giving me an opportunity to play locomotive “engineer”.  Maybe they’ll even allow a tug on the chain to make it go “toot”. [email was for a “Hands on the Throttle Experience” sponsored by the Steam Railroading Institute in Owosso, MI]

I was at Tech from the Fall of 1966 until graduation in June 1970.  I was lucky enough to meet a beautiful female Tech freshman at the beginning of my Sophomore year and we were married prior to my Senior year.  My wife also happens to be from Hancock, so she qualifies as a full fledged ”local”.  She and her friends always referred to Tech students as Toots.  Matter of fact, when she was in high school, one of their pastimes was to jump in the car to drive through Tech campus.  They called it going on a “Toot run”.  And we always called the locals “Local Maki’s”.

And it was understood that Toots got the name because engineers drive trains and they go toot. And Local Maki’s got their name for 2 reasons.  Maki is a common Finnish name, as are many locals, and it’s English translation is “hill”, which is appropriate with Houghton & Hancock located on steep hills.

Camiel Thorrez
BSME 1970

When I was at Da Tech we had nicknames for many of the majors:

ChemEs were Pipe Fitters
E Es were Sparkies
Geo’s were Rock Lickers
Foresters were Twigs
And the Civils were Mortar Forkers.

Dave Plumeau ’76

I’m cutting out this list and keeping it next to my computer. I think we can make the news articles here much more interesting! Wait, what do you mean I’m not allowed to do news anymore?
Kevin, I read through your article about the term Toots in the Alumni Newsletter.  I graduated in 1970 and my recollection is that Toot stood for “Tech Out of Town” but no one was ever really sure of how the term originated.  We referred to each other as Toots without any sense of shame or embarassment whatsoever.  I don’t doubt that locals used the term as well, but I can’t recall any incident where a local used it in a derogatory fashion.  Most locals seemed to either love us or hate us at that time.

Kevin – Really enjoyed all the emails regarding the definition and usage of TOOT.  It was in use during my 4 years at Tech, but my son (who graduated in 92/94) said it was not in use when he was there.

Does the Pep Band still play the Copper Country Anthem (Blue Skirt Waltz, I think) before the start of the 3rd period at hockey games?

John Decator, Class of 69

Thanks much for the message, John. The Blue Skirt Waltz is alive and well in the second intermission. I give bonus points to the remote-controlled blimp pilot who gets the little thing to sway above the ice. That’s some flying talent.
Hi Kevin,

That was an interesting and entertaining set of replies to the question of the origin and application of the term ‘toots’ in last week’s issue of the alumni news. Too bad that not a single one of them is correct.

So let me fill you in on the one and only true story that explains how we out of town students came to be called ‘toots’. Incidentally, it was only male students who were referred to as ‘toots’. None of the then 12 female students enrolled at Michigan Tech., no matter their home town, were ever called ‘toots’. They may have been called a lot of other things, but never ‘toots’, because, as you shall soon learn, it wouldn’t make any sense to call them toots.

It was in the Fall quarter of 1950 that a certain male student, who shall forever remain nameless, traveled all the way from Chicago to Houghton on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad’s Copper Country Limited in just over the scheduled time of 14 hours. Time wise, it was a long journey. It began in the late afternoon at the Union Station in Chicago and ended midmorning the next day in Houghton. The train featured a Pullman sleeping car, but being a starving student, as our intrepid traveler was, he had to settle for a coach seat with hot coffee and sandwiches for sale by a vendor who boarded the train at the Pembine junction with the Soo line.

If you are used to traveling by air from O’Hare to the Houghton County airport, you might be inclined to think traveling by train in a coach seat overnight from Chicago to Houghton on the Copper Country Limited must have been as uncomfortable as it was boring. As a generalization you would be absolutely correct. However, in the particular case at hand you would be totally wrong. For you see, when the train made its first stop in Milwaukee, less than 100 miles north of Chicago, a young lady with naturally blonde hair and pale blue eyes boarded the train and took the only vacant coach seat directly beside the nameless traveler this story is all about.

As you might expect, it wasn’t long before the two of them, the lovely 19 year old blonde girl and the 22 year old male student, struck up a conversation that lasted all through the night and into the morning of the next day until the train arrived at the station in Houghton. The length and conviviality of their conversation should put an end forever to the false accusation that all Scandinavians take seriously the ancient proverb, silentium est aurum, or silence is golden.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest I’ll return to the main narrative of this story by telling you that before the two newly acquainted young people parted company on the station platform, he headed for his dorm room at Douglass Houghton Hall and she on her way home to Dollar Bay, the soon to be engineer summoned up the courage to invite his new found companion to accompany him on the next Friday evening to see a movie at the Kerridge theatre in Hancock.

Eyes alight and smiling brightly, the young lady of interest in this story replied in her ever so charming Michigan upper peninsula accent, “Yah sure, an you betcha, but don’t forget to come by my house early to toot me out so my father knows who I hang by.” And so it was with all the young ladies in the Copper Country, and yes, even some not so young, if you came from someplace south of L’Anse, north of Copper Harbor, east of Keweenaw Bay or west of Ontonagon, and you invited a person of the opposite sex to join you to take in a movie, you had to be prepared to go by her house early to toot her out so her father would know who she hanged by.

And that, Kevin, is the true story of how we out of town Michigan Tech Students in the 1950’s and earlier came to be known as ‘toots’. If the term has currently fallen out of general use, it must be that a universal change in moral values has taken place in the Copper Country during the past several decades so that the young ladies of today no longer care whether or not their fathers know who it is they are hanging by when they go off to see a movie with a Michigan Tech. toot.

Donald R Johnson, Met. Eng., 1953

Now THAT is an education! Why did I bother with my doctorate? Thanks for the story, Don!