1958-59 Boys' Ice Hockey Team
Only in the early 1950s did Winchester High School sports teams start to regularly use a mascot, initially more often “Indians” than “Sachems.” The Aberjona first used “Sachems” for boys’ basketball in the 1953-54 school year, but “Indians” for football and ice hockey. Only in the 1956-57 school year did it refer to all sports teams as the “Sachems.” The Winchester Star continued to use “Indians” for the football team until the 1959-60 school year.25 In the 1954-55 school year an Indian started to appear on some of the athletic uniforms, with a consistent use of the same image - an Indian wrapped in a blanket, with a single feather in the back of his headband - in the 1957-58 school year. In advance of the 1958-59 school year the Star advertised in its pages items printed with this same Winchester Sachem mascot for the back-to-school supplies that it sold at its Church Street offices. Unfortunately not enough evidence exists to discover why, first, the shift toward the use of Indian mascots occurred in the early 1950s and, second, the full use of the “Sachem” by the 1959 school season.26
Winchester High School went through several representations of the “Sachem” mascot over the years. None accurately represented the Pawtucket, Massachusett, or Pennacock peoples and rather represented stereotypical caricatures of Plains Indians with headdresses, war paint, feathers, tomahawks, and peace pipes.27 Students would dress up occasionally as “Sachems” or Indians at sporting and other school and town events, and most uniforms would have either the word “Sachem” or a depiction of an Indian on it. From 1977, after high school student Simon Donovan (Class of '78) designed a new logo for the Sachem, most representations reproduced that version. Many other youth sports teams in Winchester used the logo and “Sachem” name as well in these decades.
Winchester High School's logo from 1977 to 2020
As shown in 1955's The Aberjona, the description of the 1954 football team reveals the interchangeable nature of team's names at this time, referring to the players as the "Sachems," "Indians," and "Red and Black."