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Who is Charlie Choker?

October 26, 2008

In Aberdeen, Grays Harbor College is home to the Chokers, one of the most appropriate yet misinterpreted names in the annals of collegiate history. The Chokers are not stranglers with a homicidal bent or athletes foreordained to implode at crunch time. Instead, the Chokers and their burly mascot, Charlie Choker, are named for the rugged men who wrestled giant logs out of Northwest forests. Charlie’s full name-though seldom used-is Charlie Choker Setter.

Grays Harbor College\'s Charlie ChokerCharlie’s lineage can be traced back to the early decades of the twentieth century. As the story goes, after waking from a sound night’s sleep in the Whatcom County clink, an inventive logger named Oscar Wirkkala had an epiphany. He noticed the neat fit of the jailer’s key into the slot in the door and recognized a solution to a problem that had bedeviled loggers for some time: how to secure a cable around a log without it coming unhooked during the skidding process. Loggers had employed many patterns of hooks, all of which proved unreliable, but Wirkkala’s “choker bell” became an instant success. Soon a new job title was created: the choker setter.

Choker setters-the men who placed heavy steel cables around logs and secured the ferrule at the end of the line into the choker socket-were on the bottom rung of the logging ladder. It was one of the most physically demanding jobs every entry-level logger had to endure. The job required athleticism, endurance, and fortitude-all the hallmarks of collegiate athletics.

In 1958, Grays Harbor College opened its current campus in south Aberdeen and two years later the first wooden statue of Charlie Choker was erected. This first statue was retired in 1975 when Louis Benanto, Jr. carved the modern Charlie from a cedar log some 8-feet in diameter. Today, Charlie still greets visitors, students, and staff at the entrance to the campus, choker in hand, ready to spring into action.

Posted by Northwest Coast · Filed Under Current Issue, Perspectives