If you ask the average fan who designed the team's horn-clad helmet and original uniforms, who created the team's familiar Norseman logo, or why the Vikings wear purple and gold, you'll probably get a blank stare. As recently as two years ago, you'd probably have received the same response from the team's entire front office staff.
The answers to those questions, it turns out, were hanging on a Los Angeles cartoonist's office wall for decades. And they're now part of a permanent exhibit at the Vikings' stadium in Minneapolis.
Confused? Here's the backstory: The Vikings' first general manager was former Los Angeles Rams public relations director Bert Rose, and their first coach was former Rams quarterback Norm Van Brocklin. When it came time to create the new team's look in 1961, they turned to a prominent Los Angeles sports cartoonist named Karl Hubenthal, whom they knew from their days in L.A.
It was Hubenthal -- not a Vikings employee, not a Minnesota design firm, not the NFL Properties office -- who designed the Norseman logo and the team's original uniform set, including the distinctive horned helmet. Per Rose's instruction, Hubenthal executed the designs in purple and gold. Why those colors? Because those are the colors of the University of Washington, where Rose had attended college. So with the L.A. and Washington connections, the look of this quintessentially midwestern team had strong West Coast roots.
We know all of this because Hubenthal saved his original sketches of the uniform and logo, had them framed, and hung them on his office wall for many years. On the back of the frame he inscribed a note: "I designed the [Vikings'] uniform, helmet, and trademark logo at the request of Bert Rose, the first general manager of the new franchise, and Norm Van Brocklin, their first coach. I had known them when they were with the L.A. Rams. Rose was a U. of Washington grad, hence the purple and gold colors."
Hubenthal died in 1998. Toward the end of 2015, one of his daughters, Karen Chappell, was going through some of his old belongings and decided to ask the Vikings if they wanted to have the drawings. The timing turned out to be perfect, because the Vikes were in the final stages of building U.S. Bank Stadium, which was set to open in 2016. They were planning to include a team museum called Vikings Voyage.
"We knew right away that this was something that had to be included there," said Zachary Tarrant, the team's archive coordinator. "It was precisely the kind of thing we wanted to showcase. Not many teams have something so definitive and so tangible, all on display."
The resulting exhibit is pure eye candy for uniform fans, plus it provides a tantalizing glimpse at what might have been. Hubenthal's original design concept called for diagonally crossed stripes on the socks, evoking the leather straps or leggings worn by real Vikings. That seems like something Nike or Under Armour might come up with nowadays, but it was unheard of back in 1961. In addition, Hubenthal's original jersey design featured gold sleeve striping with a V-shaped pattern. That design element, along with the sock concept, didn't make it to the final on-field product.
It's hard to overstate what a revelation all of this is. For starters, it's extremely rare to see original uniform and logo drawings from this period. These materials are essentially the Rosetta Stone of the Vikings' visual heritage.
Moreover, while Hubenthal was an award-winning newspaper cartoonist with a long, storied career in sports graphics, his connection to the Vikings -- and the full extent of that connection -- was largely unknown until the drawings resurfaced. His Wikipedia entry makes no mention of the Vikings (although that will probably change once this article is published). A handful of serious uniform aficionados knew he had created the Norseman logo, but nobody appears to have known that he also designed the uniforms. The Vikings' original trainer and current team historian, Fred Zamberletti, who was on the sidelines for every single Vikings game from 1961 through 2011, said in a recent interview that he'd never even heard of Hubenthal.As for the story behind the team colors, the University of Washington connection has been mentioned before (there's a brief reference to it, for example, in Jim Bruton's 2011 book, "A Tradition of Purple: An Inside Look at the Minnesota Vikings"), but it doesn't seem to be widely known. In fact, a video on the Vikings' own website says purple was chosen "to make a bold statement" and because the team "needed an identity," with no mention of Bert Rose or Washington.
By now you may be wondering, "Who was this Karl Hubenthal guy?"
The short version is that Hubenthal was one of the country's leading editorial and sports cartoonists from the 1950s through the 1980s. His work was a mainstay in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and was syndicated throughout the Hearst newspaper empire. He also did a ton of sports program covers, yearbook covers, and a lot more. Based in L.A., he was a West Coast counterpart to Eastern sports cartoonists like Willard Mullin and Bill Gallo.
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