Thirty years after he last donned the costume of the University of Iowa’s mascot, David Ausberger still has a connection to Herky the Hawk.

The black and gold vanity plate reads “XHERKY” and many of the residents of Jefferson, Iowa—where Ausberger grew up and now farms—call him Herky. At a meeting of the Iowa Soybean Association, he was introduced to famed Iowa quarterback Chuck Long as a former Herky from Long’s playing days at Kinnick Stadium.

“Whether I identify with it, it identifies with me,” says Ausberger, 52, a 1988 UI graduate. “It’s very much a hand-in-hand relationship.”

Though he grew up just 40 miles from Ames and Iowa State University, Ausberger says after one visit to the ISU campus he knew it wasn’t the place for him. Instead, he enrolled at Iowa without ever visiting campus, intent on studying journalism.

In 1984, Ausberger joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, which was then located across Burge Residence Hall. At the time, the fraternity was the keeper of the Herky costume, which a member created in the 1950s and started wearing to games.

“For a guy who was 160 pounds and 5-foot-10, that was probably the only way I was going to get on the basketball court or football field,” Ausberger says.

Ausberger says his fraternity treated being Herky like an apprenticeship. Beginners would start by visiting children in hospitals or going to preschools. As Herkys progressed, they’d get opportunities to reach a wider audience, such as football and basketball games, Ausberger says.

One season, Ausberger traveled with the football team to the Kickoff Classic in New Jersey. The Hawkeyes ended the season at the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, California, which Ausberger also attended.

“I went coast to coast,” he says.

Being Herky presented its share of challenges, though. Ausberger says the men of the fraternity house weren’t always the best about washing the costume, and during football games with cold temperatures, the tunnel in Kinnick Stadium where Ausberger changed out of the costume was “the coldest place on campus.”

There was also a lot of responsibility.

“Your job wasn’t to stand around and watch the game, it was to react to the crowd and cheer on the Hawks,” Ausberger says. “A lot of it was knowing what the rules of the game were, the situation, watching the crowd, listening to the crowd, and reacting to what was going on.”

In addition to being a big responsibility, Herky was a great conversation starter and one that helped Ausberger come out of his shell in college. A self-described wallflower, Ausberger says being Herky taught him to be less shy and “put myself out there.”

His mascot work also led Ausberger to new academic interests. After graduation from Iowa with a degree in journalism, he went on to study sports administration at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. That led to an internship in Atlanta with a group that successfully lobbied for the city to host the 1994 Super Bowl and the 1996 Summer Olympics.

“Here’s a kid from a town of 4,000 to 5,000 people rubbing elbows with Magic Johnson and professional football players,” Ausberger says.

Ausberger says he traces those experiences back to the UI and Herky.

After a few years in Atlanta, Ausberger says his dad ran for a local office in Iowa and needed help on the farm. Intent on staying for “a little while,” Ausberger never left and continues to farm near Jefferson.

With the demands of farming, Ausberger says getting back to Iowa football games is a little difficult. However, he says his met some of the recent Herkys—the mascot program is now run by the university as part of the UI Athletics Department Spirit Squad program—and has been impressed with what he’s seen.

“They’ve really got a good group,” he says. “They’ve got a different costume, it’s much more mobile. The people that do it are professional, They take it seriously.”

Ausberger’s son will be attending Iowa this fall and he suspects his daughter will be looking at Iowa in a few years too.

“We’re going to be eating up a lot of miles between Jefferson and Iowa City for the next few years,” he says. “I’m looking forward to it.”