Crimson and Gold Connection; Chris Kelly

Welcome to the Crimson and Gold Connection. My name is Dustin Triburn. Today we have one of our fairly frequent guests, Mr. Chris Kelly. He is the Associate Vice President of University Marketing and Communications here at Pittsburgh State University. Welcome, Chris. Thank you for having me, Dustin. Hey, we have a, I understand we have a new addition to the Pitt State family and know you and Miss Kelly. I don't, Mrs. Kelly, don't have a new baby, new bundle at home. No, no. This is, this is something a little bit more of a drive for us if we want to see the new addition. This is a new gorilla. Yes. Baby gorilla in the Fort Worth Zoo, born in December, the Fort Worth Zoo happened to put out an online contest in the beginning of this year that said, hey, we want to help us name our new baby gorilla. Now, this baby's gorilla, this baby gorilla's parents were greasy was his mom and then Elmo, his dad in the zoo thought it would be fun to give four options and really let the public vote on it. Now, one of the options was Gus. So you can imagine what happened next. Yeah. Well, Augustus is what I've read, but Gus for short, of course.

Well, yeah, we like to say Gus, Augustus. Oh, it was the, and actually Augustus is the honor of Gus McCray, who's a character in Lonesome Dove, filmed there in Fort Worth. So, so the options were Augustus Mosy, which means first born in Swahili, Grover, because of course his dad is Elmo, and then Davey was the third in honor of Davey Crocket there in the Alamo. So you can see, yes, a very Texas oriented names, but one of our alums, it actually came to us. So, on alum, heard a blip about it on the radio in Fort Worth. That's where he heard about this. And he said, wow, I think that we can get some gorillas associated with this and to help Gus become the official name. He reached out to Brett Dalton, our social media director and said, hey, just wanted to let you know maybe our fans would like this. We think it would be neat. And so our department in marketing and communication with Brett, he popped it out on Facebook and said, hey, here's the online poll. Gus is one of the names we thought gorillas could help us get Gus to first.

And at the time, the name Gus was actually trailing. In third place, the voting had been going on for a while and was just a few days from closing. In fact, it trailed by about 500 votes. Once that alert went out to Gorilla Nation, 24 hours later, Gus was in the lead and ended up winning by over 800 votes. I believe Grover, as I always said, was in the lead to see you. Texas Christian University, as I read, they were really pushing the same way Pitt State started into it. But once once we got hold of it, well, yes. Once Gorilla Nation learned that we could actually have a baby Gus, boy, there was no stopping. And people from across the nation got on and began to vote. And now we have a beautiful little baby Gus Gorilla in the Fort Worth Zoo. He is so vote-ogenic. He's already made USA today. He's been on CNN. And excitingly, we're actually having a Gorilla gathering of alumni. We're going to have a private viewing with baby Gus coming up on the 17th. Oh, very cool. Now, will our own Gus the Gorilla be there? Yes. Gus is making

the trip down there. Now, we've had to work with the zoo. Okay, we're going to bring Gus. Can we bring Gus to see Gus? Though we know confusion. And they said, no, we're going to work that out. So we're excited to be down there at Fort Worth. And this will actually be our very first alumni gathering in the city of Fort Worth ever. And I just think it's fantastic that it was all brought together by Gus Gorilla. Yeah. Well, hopefully when you guys leave and come back home, you don't leave the wrong Gus and the zoo. I think we'll bring the right one back. I hope so. Yes, it's been very good. You know, the great thing about this whole process was it showed the connection that our alumni and students have to this university. And we didn't know if it would go over. We didn't know what people would think. And to be quite honest with you at the time, we were a little worried that Fort Worth, the zoo, might be a little irritated with us, that we had in a way hijack their online poll and kind of taken over their naming rights from, you know, it's Kansas. Yeah. Coming in down to Texas, but they have been fantastic to work with.

They've helped us so much. And they love the attention. They said that they have seen more pit state people in their shirts going down to see baby Gus. And we've seen photos all over social media. So we're excited to go down there and really excited to what our alumni were able to do with the new little baby Gus in Fort Worth. Oh, absolutely. It sounds like a fun time to go down there and see this. I mean, and obviously it's going to be a great draw for, you know, we have alumni all over the nation, all over the world. So obviously there will be more people from Texas and the more four state area probably heading down to Texas now. So yeah, they're going to love having pit state come down and see little baby Gus. It was it was one of the top destinations over spring break. We were surprised how many of our students over spring break took the drive down there so they could get a photo with Gus. And when we looked at the numbers, it really was a little surprising to us that the Dallas Fort Worth area is the second largest location of alumni in the nation outside of the immediate Fort State area. Oh, wow. So we've got nearly 600 gorillas, 601 now with baby Gus down there in the Dallas Fort Worth area. So we're really excited

to have that. And it was wonderful to see the the school spirit, the passion people have for their gorillas and and and baby Gus is just so cute. So it's just a great thing all around. Well, that's great. I've actually seen pictures online and and I have a little two-year-old son. They actually kind of resemble each other. Well, he's very close to he's teething right now, just like, you know, you would expect. So now how old is baby Gus now? He was born. I believe December 5th. Okay. So he is about seven months old now. So so he was he was already born just unnamed before just named. Yeah. And so they thought it would be an interesting way to to garner interest in and to see what was going on and and they chose the name the names themselves. And and really it was just I just think it was meant to be that we happened to have an alum who happened to hear the story on the radio. Senate to us we put it out on Facebook and on social media and the response was immediate within 24 hours. The name had jumped from third all the way

to first and it never looked back. That's the power of pit state there, man. It is. It is. When you combine our alumni, their love for the school with the power of social media, you get a great media presence in Fort Worth. Well, excellent. So are there are we're going to be trying to name anything else in the future? Maybe Gus is a own. If we're going to sponsor Chikita Banana or something like that in the future, that'd be that'd be awesome to me. You know what? I'm in marketing. So everything's on the table. Let me tell you it was if we can do it and the media attention we received in Dallas, Fort Worth from this and you know really throughout the Midwest who is great. So if there's an opportunity, we're looking for it. Very good. Very good. Well, in a course, we do have the grill gathering and depending on when we air this crimson and gold connection a few times a week. So depending on when you hear this, it may have already happened, but that that is happening. Yeah, February, February of Friday, June 17th, we're going to have our gathering down there. It's actually a full pit state day at the zoo. So the zoo has worked with us.

They've been amazing hosts. We're able to have a discounted ticket to get into the zoo that day and then after the zoo closes to the general public, we'll actually be able to have alumni go in for a private, private viewing with Gus and his mom Gracie and then a full dinner at the crocodile cafe. We're going to give a university update and have an animal show there afterwards. So it's really going to be a fun night for gorillas of all ages and we hope we have a great turnout right now over a hundred alumni. I've already signed up for the trip. All right. Well, sounds great. Hey, Chris, thank you so much. And if you do go down there to the grill gathering, be sure you wear your pit state gear and see baby Gus say hi, take a picture. Chris, thank you so much for coming in for the Crimson and Gold connection today. We'll probably be seeing you in the future. Thank you so much. Very good. Thanks, Dustin.