Ever wonder how the Dodge brand acquired the Ram mascot?  Now that’s an interesting story, and here it is.

Like so much of Dodge lore, the Ram mascot has a fascinating history. When the Dodge Brothers Company was acquired by the Chrysler Corporation in the summer of 1928, the automaker’s identity was based largely on its founders, John and Horace Dodge, who had passed back away in 1920. But once a respectful interval had passed, Chrysler acted to close the book on the Dodge Brothers era and begin another chapter. “Brothers” was quietly dropped from the name and the corporation went to work creating a new brand image.

In 1931, the young sculptor and University of Michigan art professor Avard Tennyson Fairbanks was commissioned by Chrysler to create a distinctive new radiator ornament for Dodge cars and trucks.  A few years earlier Fairbanks had designed the mermaid mascot, officially called the Flying Lady, for the 1929 Plymouth, for which he was paid not in cash but with a brand new Chrysler Royal,  a luxurious car for an art teacher of modest means. The son of landscape painter John B. Fairbanks, Avard Fairbanks was a prolific artist. Among his many works, he created the large bronze of Abraham Lincoln that stands in Lincoln Square in Chicago.

“I took along my clay and an animal book by my friend William Hornaday and spent the next several days at their headquarters,” Fairbanks would recall years later.  “They brought in food and a couch and I went to work. I suggested a mountain lion, a tiger, a jaguar and other animals. Finally I started modeling a mountain sheep. When the engineers read that the ram was the ‘master of the trail and not afraid of even the wildest of animals,’ they became enthusiastic about the symbol.

“Walter P. Chrysler wasn’t as convinced. But I explained that anyone seeing a ram, with its big horns, would think ‘dodge.’ He looked at me, looked at the model, scratched his head and said, ‘That’s what I want – go ahead with it.’” For the Dodge commission, Fairbanks received $1,400 and a new Dodge Eight automobile.

From that point on—the original 1932 ornament is shown in top photo above—the badging on both Dodge cars and trucks employed the stylized ram imagery until 2010, when it became the exclusive symbol for Ram trucks. The Dodge and Ram brands were separated into two distinct entities, one for passenger cars and the other for trucks, as they remain today.