Traveler appears at all USC home football games in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as well as many other outdoor events, including numerous Rose Parades.

On November 6, 2013, the costumed version of Tommy and Traveler were introduced for men's and women's basketball games.

[1] Traveler was introduced in the autumn of 1962, during the USC Trojans football team's home opener at the Coliseum, against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.

To dress Saukko as a Trojan warrior, USC used its connections to the film industry to procure the costume worn by Charlton Heston in Ben Hur two years earlier.

The name was believed to have been inspired by the gray horse Traveller, ridden by Civil War Confederate general Robert E. Lee,[2] In August 2017 concerns that the horse's name had a connection to Lee led to further research, which revealed that the first Traveler was acquired with his name, spelled with one L, in 1958 after he had become unreliable as a movie horse.