Modeltowners – Gwinn (MI) High School

“Give me an M!  Give me an O! Give me a D! Give me an E! Give me an L! Give me a T! Give me another O! Give me a W! … Ah, forget it.”

Just too many damn syllables. 

Gwinn is a town of almost 1,800 right smack dab in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. You betcha, Yoopers!

Gwinn’s basically a company town, owing its existence to an iron ore mine. Sounds like the company made a special effort to make the place livable, though, hence the “model town” designation. It’s actually on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Street scene in downtown Gwinn” (Wikipedia)

The town claims 3 notable people, the most prominent being professional wrestler Mike Shaw, better known as Norman the Lunatic.

The high school’s got not quite 260 students. They do, though, field teams for all the major sports. And, yes, they do play the Ishpeming Hematites!

Totally giving up on trying to represent a model town as a mascot, the school has tried a:

• Pine tree
• Jet plane (for a former Air Force base just north of the town)
• Tiger 

And that last one explains why the current logo looks like a paw. (Heck, why not just call them the Tigers then?)

Some clever person out there, though, thought that AI might be able to come up with a solution to this thorny problem. Et voila!

I kid you not