HomeMy WebLinkAboutCampus Kids, Oral History taken Feb. 18, 1998 (5)HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE
City of College Station, Texas 77840
ORAL HISTORY DATA SHEET
I hereby give and grant to the HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE, City of College
Station, Texas, for whatever purposes may be determined, the tape recordings, transcriptions, and
contents of this oral history interview. Also, permission is hereby given for any duplications of
original photos, documents, maps, etc. useful to the history project to be returned unharmed.
Interviewee releases, relinquishes and discharges CITY, its officers, agents and employees, from all
claims, demands, and causes of action of every kind and character, including the cost of defense
thereof, for any injury to, including the cost of defense thereof for any injury to, including death of,
any person, whether that person be a third person, Interviewee, or an employee of either of the
parties hereto, and any loss of or damage to property, whether the same be that either of the parties
hereto or of third parties, caused by or alleged to be caused by, arising out of, or in connection with
Interviewee provision of historical information, whether or not said claims, demands and causes of
action in whole or in part are covered by insurance.
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Interviewee agrees to and shall indemnify and hold harmless CITY, its officers, agents and
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of every kind, attorney's fees, for injury to or death of any person, or for damage to any property,
arising out of or in connection with the use of the items and information referenced aboved by
CITY, its agents, representatives, assigns, invitees, and participants under this grant. Such
indemnity shall apply where the claims, losses damages, causes of action, suits or liability arise in
whole or in part from the negligence of city.
List of photos. documents, maps, etc.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE
City of College Station, Texas 77840
ORAL HISTORY DATA SHEET
I hereby give and grant to the HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE, City of College
Station, Texas, for whatever purposes may be determined, the tape recordings, transcriptions, and
contents of this oral history interview. Also, permission is hereby given for any duplications of
original photos, documents, maps, etc. useful to the history project to be returned unharmed.
Interviewee releases, relinquishes and discharges CITY, its officers, agents and employees, from all
claims, demands, and causes of action of every kind and character, including the cost of defense
thereof, for any injury to, including the cost of defense thereof for any injury to, including death of,
any person, whether that person be a third person, Interviewee, or an employee of either of the
parties hereto, and any loss of or damage to property, whether the same be that either of the parties
hereto or of third parties, caused by or alleged to be caused by, arising out of, or in connection with
Interviewee provision of historical information, whether or not said claims, demands and causes of
action in whole or in part are covered by insurance. ��� ___-P
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INTERVIEW STATUS: Completed
In progress
Interviewee agrees to and shall indemnify and hold harmless CITY, its officers, agents and
employees, from and against any and all claims, losses, damages, causes of action, suits and liability
of every kind, attorney's fees, for injury to or death of any person, or for damage to any property,
arising out of or in connection with the use of the items and information referenced aboved by
CITY, its agents, representatives, assigns, invitees, and participants under this grant. Such
indemnity shall apply where the claims, losses damages, causes of action, suits or liability arise in
whole or in part from the negligence of city.
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I hereby give and grant to the HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE, City of College
Station, Texas, for whatever purposes may be determined, the tape recordings, transcriptions, and
contents of this oral history interview. Also, permission is hereby given for any duplications of
original photos, documents, maps, etc. useful to the history project to be returned unharmed.
Interviewee releases, relinquishes and discharges CITY, its officers, agents and employees, from all
claims, demands, and causes of action of every kind and character, including the cost of defense
thereof, for any injury to, including the cost of defense thereof for any injury to, including death of,
any person, whether that person be a third person, Interviewee, or an employee of either of the
parties hereto, and any loss of or damage to property, whether the same be that either of the parties
hereto or of third parties, caused by or alleged to be caused by, arising out of, or in connection with
Interviewee provision of historical information, whether or not said claims, demands and causes of
action in whole or in part are covered by insurance.
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Interviewee (Please print)
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HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE
City of College Station, Texas 77840
ORAL HISTORY DATA SHEET
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Name
Address
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Telephone -I 7 — q' y /- -4-f-Z q
Date of Birth JJ i R —
Place of Birth�;�G___ _
INTERVIEW STATUS: Completed i
In progress
Interviewee agrees to and shall indemnify and hold harmless CITY, its officers, agents and
employees, from and against any and all claims, losses, damages, causes of action, suits and liability
of every kind, attorney's fees, for injury to or death of any person, or for damage to any property,
arising out of or in connection with the use of the items and information referenced aboved by
CITY, its agents, representatives, assigns, invitees, and participants under this grant. Such
indemnity shall apply where the claims, losses damages, causes of action, suits or liability arise in
whole or in part from the negligence of city.
Date
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Initial
The City of College Station, Texas
Memory Lanes Oral History Project
INTERVIEW AGREEMENT
The purpose of The Historic Preservation Committee is to gather and
preserve historical documents by means of the tape - recorded interview. Tape
recordings and transcripts resulting from such interviews become part of the
archives of The City of College Station Historic Preservation Committee and
Conference Center Advisory Committee to be used for whatever purposes may
be determined.
I have read the above and voluntarily offer my portion of the interviews
with :
n (Name of Interviewee)
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In view of the scholarly value of this research material, I hereby assign rights,
title, and interest pertaining to it to The City of College Station Historic
Preservation Committee and conference nt r A s 'i ory Committee.
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A &M College Campus Kids
18 February 1998
ROOM 104
MODERATOR: Virginia Romane (VR)
INTERVIEW GROUP: Ed Gardner (EG)
Ide Trotter (IT)
Charles Campbell (CC)
Katherine Harrison Campbell (KC)
VR: This is Virginia Romane and I'm your moderator today. This is my first time to do
this and I'm so looking forward to it. So if each of you will give your name, and tell who
lived on campus and then we'll go from there.
EG: ME?
VR: Uh -huh.
EG: I lived on campus as a student. I came here in 1934 and uh I worked my way
through A&M. Married a girl that lived on campus. And uh we're still together at 57 and
1/2. 58 years. Just about all I know about myself.
VR: OK. um then we'll get back to some other questions. Things that happened to you
on campus Mr. Trotter.
IT: My name is Ide Trotter. My dad came to A&M's Agronomy department in 1936.
We moved into Clark Street, that runs right down to Kyle Field, in 1936 and when they
started moving people off the campus in `41 we moved to 211 Lee Street. Not too far
from the old consolidated school and later we moved to 4306 Old College Road, where
my parents lived until well after my dad retired. I now live in Duncanville, Texas after
having lived all around the world with Exxon.
VR: Thank you Mr. Trotter
CC: My name is Charles Campbell, Jr. I have a lot of written stuff too in case you
don't understand me or if I leave anything out.
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VR: That is wonderful
CC: My father came here in 1903 as head of the Modern Language Department. He
married my mother in 1917. My sister Peggy was born in 1919 and I was born in 1922;
we were both born in our home. The was our home here on campus right across from the
Cedar Grove. Of course there was a doctor in attendance, but we were born at home, and
that became a big thing in my childhood because we felt that we were superior to those
who had to go to the hospital to get born "right." And there always has been a great
rivalry between College Station and Bryan, so we true College Stationites kind of looked
down a little bit on the College Stationites that lived on campus but were born in Bryan.
VR: In a hospital?
CC: Right.
VR: Thank you and would you introduce your wife.
CC: Oh yes. I am sorry.
KC: You didn't introduce yourself.
CC: I did. I said I'm Charles Campbell; Sunny Campbell is what I'm still known as
down here. This is my wife Katherine of 47 1/2 years, Katherine Harrison Campbell and
my better half of these past 47 years. She is as interested to come hear all of this as I
have been really.
VR: We're delighted to have you both
CC: I am glad she is here.
VR: Are you a C- Catherine or a K- Katherine?
KC: K- Katherine.
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VR: Katherine. Well now I think we'd like to know something about, tell us about the
homes you lived in. You told us where they were and um who you neighbors were, what
your activities were, just give us some background on the wonderful life back then.
EG: I just lived in the dorms. In a whole bunch of dorms when we were student
workers `cause I said I'd work my way through school over there at the old Aggieland Inn
as a waiter and uh then when I married my wife I was living in Waco. After I graduated, I
got a job with Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, and they sent us around as trainees to
different places: Big Spring and Dallas and Fort Worth and Waco and that's when I
decided I wasn't getting anywhere with that so I came back and started on my masters and
then uh Mr. Holdeman ran me down and I went to work for the Fiscal office in July. And
so I bought that little sporting goods store that I had over in Northgate and uh ran that I
guess 40 years and then we built Sands Motel and then we ran that for 30 years so.
VR: You took care of lots of visitors.
CC: Lots and lots and he's still gotta lot of friends.
VR: yes, yes
EG: And when they came to a bowl game. We had two children and one of them
passed away about 6 years ago, the oldest boy and Candy, she's lived with her husband
and they have two children up here at A &M and he's a veterinarian and he has a real nice
clinic. So they're doing all right.
VR: Where do they live?
EG: They live in the Richmond - Rosenbug School District and they just right about
where that thing, that tornado hit the other day. And she was out in New York listening
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to all of it and she said I have never seen anything like it. The whole sky was real dark
red. Blood color and it scared us to death.
VR: Well it was wonderful that no one was injured
EG: Her husband was on his way home and it was after 5:00 and he had never seen hail
as big as that. He took a long time to get home that day. He stayed out of it so he
wouldn't batter his car up.
VR: Uhm. Well, you told us where. Do you know what was quality row? What was
known as Quality row in College Station?
CC: Yes, I know it sounds confusing in my mind until I talked to Bill Hensel last night.
He continued to live here from the beginning, and it was a row mostly of dean's houses
and uh -uh maybe even the president's house that runs at right angles into the road right in
front of your house. It runs West in front of Consolidated School down in areas of new
dormitories and there are homes on both sides of that street. I think this is now Joe Routt
Boulevard.
IT: No, the old presidents home is over across the Drill Field, over closer to Sbisa
Hall.
EG: The first one was over where my wife and family lived. They lived next door to
each other.
VR: I see.
EG: That's what you call Quality Road and then they moved it right across the street of
Sbisa Hall.
VR: That is one of the things that we'd like to know. Who lived on either side, who
were your neighbors, who were your friends?
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EG: Well, now she could tell you. She could tell you everyone but I don't know.
IT: Well the map they have on the back is a very good start. Its close.
VR: Now what about you Mr. Trotter? What about your neighbors?
IT: Well you asked what we did? I drove down this morning with Bill Williams from
Waxahache. We were a little late `cause he's a doctor and he had a crisis at the hospital
this morning. I moved in when I was 3 and on my fourth birthday, after we had been there
3 months, Bill attended my birthday party, How's that for long time friendship? Our
specialty was horseplay and mischief while we were on campus and it was just such a
fabulous place to grow up. We had a tremendous number of opportunities to just roam,
do whatever we thought would be fun that day. The block that we were in was East of
Clark and I forgot what it ran into. That is the block where the MSC and the Directors'
building is now. In the middle of that block. I remember that place was a place where the
Horticulture Department raised flowers and shrubs. We called it No Man's land and we
could roam from our backyard across that to the Pinverty's or the Williams or down to the
Andersons.
VR: And it was beautiful.
IT: Well, before we got to it, it was a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn kind of a growing up
environment. It was lots of fun.
VR: That's great.
IT: There were three of us that ran together, Bill Williams and a guy would love to be
here but, he lives in Boston. Jimmey Howell; his dad was the registrar. Bill's dad was
head of the Animal Husbandry Department. We were just about the same age and we
were the three Musketeers. The Aggie Band marched over the Drill Field across from
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where the MSC is now, we would go out and march with them, in fact Bill has a picture
that he brought down today that shows him with his drum majors stick when he was out
marching behind the band. That just led to one thing after another. We had also a few run
ins with campus police. They called them the KK, the campus cops.
EG: Uh huh, that is right, I remember that.
VR: Does anyone remember the Peach Orchard on the north side of the campus. I don't
know. It had significance that was but evidently it is.
IT: I tell you what I remember mostly on Northside was campus Hensel Park with the
lake for picnics.
VR: Is that from Bill Hensel's family?
EG: Yes. That was originally called the Old Scoates at Skates Lake where he did all of
his family farming.
CC: That is just north of where you had your motel.
EG: Mm mm. Well in fact some of them owned motels that was part of their property.
Yep you're right.
IT: There was a great place to catch crawfish, I remember that.
VR: How many houses would you say were located on the central campus when we
lived there? Now, and could you explain how they numbered the faculty? How it was at
that time.
CC: Well we didn't have street addresses.
IT: I thought we had a street address.
CC: Our mail came to Box 273, that was the Faculty Exchange in College Station,
Texas, in the Old Main Building.
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VR: And you were born in `22?
CC: Yes. But this picture was taken in 1921.
IT: Is that snow on the ground?
CC: That's snow.
IT: Boy that was a cold day wasn't it.
CC: Yes, we had some of those. We had so many houses, I would say maybe 30 or .. .
VR: Really. They were numbered, just numbered?
CC: I don't know.
IT: It was like a military post. Everybody's house had right down below the front
door a plate, a black paint with the name of the person in it in white paint. Just like a
military post.
VR: That's interesting.
CC: And those houses were state owned.
EG: They were original.
CC: Yeah, the story I heard was if, for instance, Mother and Daddy added a bedroom
or something to the house; as long as they had it bolted on and not nailed on, then if they
were ever required to leave the house the bolted on portions belonged to them. I guess
because it was their property. But in any event we finally moved when all the campus
houses were required to leave.
VR: Well who had obsessed your rent? How did you get to live in one of those
houses?
CC: Well, I guess it would be a hierarchy thing where you stood in the faculty
VR: I would think.
CC: As to how it was paid, I have no idea whether it came out of the professors' salary
or was paid some other way. It couldn't have been much because the salary wasn't much
in those days, but maybe by the time you got here they had put names on the streets and
numbers on the houses. I don't remember.
KC: Somebody should have known if this street had a name right there.
CC: Well, it has one now but we don't think it had one. I don't think it had one in the
1920s.
IT: I am almost positive this was Clark Street that we lived on.
CC: Clark?
IT: Yeah.
CC: You mean going down to .. .
IT: Kyle Field head one; right on down to Kyle Field.
CC: Yeah
VR: And what those roads were like in George Bush and uh what are the others- -
Wellborn Road when you were here? Were they paved?
IT: Sulfur Springs, as I recall it started off not being paved. The thing I remember
most about it they had the two well houses. You remember those two tall skinny pyramid
kind of things?
CC: That is right.
IT: That surrounded the tower and the water was atrocious, we got used to it but it
wasn't called Sulfur Springs by mistake, and everytime we had visitors who came in from
out of town to stay with us we had to go out to the F & B Station where they had a good
well and get bottles of good water to drink. You remember that?
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CC: Yeah, I remember what smelled bad - The city water (sulphuric)
IT: It didn't taste very good neither
EG: That George Bush Drive now was a dirt road going down to the old Highway 6,
new Highway 6 when I came here in `34 wasn't finished. they were working on that
going in to Navasota and uh the old the road going to the oh what do you call it up there
the road that goes down to the Highway 6 main street
IT: The one that goes out in front of the New Main Building.
EG: Main Building the old Main Building it wasn't complete
CC: Oh, well
IT: No, no he's talking about when they put Highway 6 in The campus reversed. It
had all been railroad oriented before and Old Main building faced the railroad.
CC: Westgate went to Eastgate
IT: It was the old Highway 6. Yeah, when they put Highway 6 then they put up the
new Administration Building in with all that fancy boulevard thing out in front that went
down to 6, that was just done right before we got here in 1936.
CC: We had a nice boulevard on the Westgate that at some point was paved. Well,
most of these roads were gravel early on as I remember. In fact, we used to drive up to
my grandfolks in Palestine, Tx. Every road up there was gravel then, though I guess it
was in the late '20s.
IT: About the roads. To me one of the things that was most interesting along every
street there were live oak trees Every live oak tree had at its base a little concrete pedestal
with a plaque on it. Every plaque had the name of someone who had died in WWI. Those
are all memorial trees.
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EG: And are those trees still there?
IT: I don't know. Are the plaques still there?
EG: I don't know. Haven't looked
VR: That's wonderful
CC: I bet a lot of them are still on the old drill field. Mr. Hensel was mostly responsible
for the campus.
EG: Used to tell us when they built new dorms over there that was the sheep pasture
and they moved the grave yard over there over across the railroad tracks and I'm sure that
there's not may people knows that College Station had a cemetery.
VR: Probably not.
EG: And an old cemetery. And one of the presidents of A&M is there with his marker.
VR: Do you know who that is?
EG: Well, she could tell you. One of Spike White's children is buried there and 01'
Sarge, Sarge Watkins and his daughter, Ruth are buried over there.
IT: Where is that now?
EG: Well now they call it Pugh Drive or Pugh Street. Right at the end of Pugh Street
going into the new dormitories on the left right had side over there. It's got a little
CC: Across 6?
EG: Huh?
CC: Across Highway old 6?
EG: Old 6, right.
CC: Must be South of the baseball field.
1 0
EG: If you take a left as you go across the railroad tracks you take a left on Pugh Drive
and go down there where it stops and then take a right and on the left are all those new
dormitories and its right on right hand side.
VR: It's not easy to find.
EG: And no one
VR: But it's on the corner
EG: Yes, it sure is
VR: And it is kind set back in the trees.
EG: And it is sad, really, really sad. No one takes care of it and it's just there.
VR: Maybe after the book someone will pick up on that, maybe
EG: And that's one of my wife's really peeves is not making A &M a cemetery cause I
know and we've read over a lot of people who were killed during WWII and want to be
buried in College Station and that's so sad. We've got so much land over there that they
can, could put makers for a cemetery and I think that would be great.
VR: Well uh Mr. Campbell or maybe Katherine could tell us about the social life.
When did you come down to campus to games and dances?
KC: No, I didn't. No, I was from Longview, East Texas, and I went to SMU, but I did
come down when the boys in my class came to college. That was in `43. I did come
down one weekend and everytime we would come through Hearne, we were supposed to
go back home on the train. It was snowing and the car broke down or something and we
hitchhiked to the train station to go back home. That was the only time I came down
here, but Charles and I got engaged here at Franklin's.
VR: all right tell us about that and the social life
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KC: I don't know about the social life in College Station because I was not really here
when you were.
CC: Well, I got some of this covered but my bunch, even though we dated the girls we
grew up around, it got to be more fun to go to Calvert or the Wagon Wheel in Brenham
or Hearne for dates. Of course we had no cars and in my case I would disconnect the
odometer on Dad's car and then put what I thought was the right amount of gas to get me
to Brenham and back and this went on for a couple of years until Dad's car broke down
one time and I had to call Bill Hensel. He had to come get us.
IT: Now going to Brenham is particularly suspicious.
CC: No it's the Wagon Wheel. It's a plain old Honky Tonk. I guess I was shook when
I got home being towed as Mother and Dad, of course, were out in the driveway waiting
for us. But Dad tells stories of his group of young bachelors when they wanted to have
dates. If there weren't enough faculty daughters old enough to date, they would have to
walk to Bryan and he said that was kind of a bad walk down the railroad track to get
dates.
VR: When did the interurban start to run to Bryan?
CC: I don't know.
EG: Well they had that old trolley. You remember trolley.
CC: Yeah, that was in my time but I'm talking about 1905 and 1910. My father said
that some of them finally bought a horse and buggy and they would take turns on
weekends taking the buggy. Well that's where Dad met Mother. He went to Benchley
and he had to have gone in a horse and buggy to the Henry Seal place where Mother was
coming down for a house party from Palestine. So that's where they first met and then
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they got married in '17 and Mother moved onto campus. Dad had been on campus since
1903.
IT: That was tall social cotton going out to the Seal place in Benchley that was quite a
mansion.
EG: That house stayed there for a long, long, long time.
VR: Well we do know that then there was a lot of special activity on campus and
IT: There had to be because you could not anywhere else.
VR: And the house parties and cases after the dances so can you tell us anything about
that. I mean they would really like to know about the types of parties. What formal attire
did you wear? Were there formal dinner parties at home on campus?
IT: Well there's different levels to this. That's what the parent were doing. Maybe the
kids know it, or maybe not. I still remember one of my buddies named jake Mcgee. We
had started taking dance classes and the final closing dance was going to be for the kids. I
guess we were in the 5th or 6th gradeor something like that. It was to be formal and one
of the boys, Bill Williams I think asked Jake "what's that mean, to be formal" and Jake said
it means to wear shoes. So that tells you a little something.
VR: The formality of life.
IT: Yeah, for the kids when it got to be about March they took their shoes off and did
not put them back on except for church until sometime in October as I remember it.
VR: Where did y'all go to the movies?
IT: Guion Hall.
CC: Guion Hall.
IT: There were two ways into Guion Hall
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CC: Slip in or pay.
IT: Slip in or pay. Slip in was much preferred.
CC: But then in the later years there were two theaters in Bryan. The Queen which we
called the "Bloody Bucket" and the better one which was the Palace I think.
IT: And then after that the Dixie came
CC: I don't remember that.
IT: The Dixie was next door to the Queen. The Dixie specialized in westerns and
sereals.
CC: And I remember falsifying a driver's license to get in to see a movie that reportedly
had something to do with marijuana because I had never heard anything about it before
and since we did not have any dope or anything like that on campus. Firstly, no one had
ever heard of it.
IT: The county was dry.
CC: Yeah, but that didn't mean anything.
IT: That meant you had to go to the river.
CC: Mother went to the county judge when I was 12 years old and got me a driver's
license and the reason was I had to drive my grandfather down to Ed Hrdlika's every
afternoon so he could have a beer because dad didn't want beer in the house. So she took
me out to the cemetary and taught me how to drive and got me a license at 12 so my
granddad could have a bottle of beer.
EG: That was a pretty popular place.
CC: It was.
KC: We've all heard of it.
14
IT: Well you have to. We sing about it in that song, right.
CC: Colonel Dunn, he was the band director for years and years, and years. He was
out there every afternoon.
EG: And his dog
CC: Yeah, an Airdale.
EG: It was an Airdale. He and that Airdale would go to the garbage every time.
KC: He was so interesting.
EG: But after I got here now some of them they didn't I don't think dated, danced back
then. After I got here they would have dances on Saturday nights especially in the spring
of the year. Every weekend there was a dance Friday and Saturday night and the parents
would come in and put chairs all around and sit down and watch them dance and we had
lots and lots of big bands then. Phil Harris Guylombardo. I can't remember the one we
had at our Senior Ring Dance but it costs us $25. I will never forget that.
IT: That was student oriented. You were asking about what the faculty.
VR: Yes, Yes.
IT: There was something called the campus study club that had social gatherings.
There were bridge clubs. It was a pretty social activity.
I got out some of my old pictures and one of the things I had kind of forgotten
about, if you look at this picture you will see it, a lot of these houses have a little house
out behind. There's ours right there and those were the live in servants quarters. We had
a family that lived in there. He mowed the grass and took care of that kind of stuff and
the lady did the cooking and looked after the kids. The moms were mostly gadding
gabbing about it as far as I could tell.
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CC: They had lots of teas and socials and literary clubs and of course the dances that
Ed was talking about. Most of us went, but the balls were primarily for Cadets; so as we
got older we could go to some of them.
EG: And I think we used to have some dances down in Shileo Hall down by where the
cemetery is on 1086 and it's still there.
IT: It's where Fort Shiloh the restaurant is now.
CC: Yeah, it used to be Shiloh Hall, and we used to have dances down there. We had
school dances and we all had to go to dancing classes and all that good stuff.
VR: Do you remember who was teaching dancing at that time?
CC: No.
VR: We had Andy Smith later.
IT: Yes, he was a square dancing specialist wasn't he.
VR: He taught ball room also.
IT: We went so some thing that was in Bryan up on the 2nd floor of some building
when I was taking dance. It was a big deal. The car pooled to get all the kids in there
and get them back.
VR: What did you do in the summer when the corps left. What about summer activities.
CC: We got in trouble. I got in trouble. I got caught all the time and I thought that
was really kind of a nice part of living in a small community Everybody knew everybody
else. Everybody knew whose kids were whose. Everybody told on everybody. My
mother would ask me about something I knew she couldn't know about. She tells me that
one time I said, "Mother you must think you're God," and I got spanked.
KC: Woman
16
CC: Yeah, "Woman, you think you are God."
IT: One of the big events I remember when summer arrived, the students left and all
the kids would hit in the dorms to see what was left behind.
IT: Daisy air rifles were popular. And the horse barn was full of sparrow. It just
seemed like problem so we went off on a force to clean up the sparrows over there. And
we had a real good time, but after we got home and the campus police car pulled up at our
house. Some lady had called in about us discharging our air rifles at the horse barn and
we were in big trouble.
EG: If you left you just lost your job. So best to stay here work 6 hours a day 7 days a
week. Made $15 per month.
IT: What was it you were doing there?
EG: Working at the Aggie Land Inn as waiter. If you left that job Mr. Hotard, I'll
never forget him. He gave me that job. That was the best job on campus.
KC: I could imagine.
IT: Well did you get tips?
EG: There weren't many. Mama James and Coach James, they lived there and every
morning she would eat in the coffee shop. she would eat in the dining room in there and
she would tip a dime every morning and there were three of us. Oscar Long that lives in
Waxahache, one of my roommates,
VR: Was Oscar Long from Greenville, TX?
EG: Originally yes, right
VR: That's where I'm from.
17
EG: And he'll be down here next month for our reunion and there were 3 of us and we
worked there and I'll never forget as long as I live. At noon we would open at 11:00 am
and close at 1:30 pm in the dining room and the meals were printed on a little sheet of
paper like this with what you could order. You could order 1, 2, or 3.
VR: What did you have?
EG: Well everyone of them had a piece of meat but I don't know what kind it was and
2 vegetables and a drink and that cost 40 cents.
IT: 40 cents with a 10 cent tip that was pretty big.
EG: And one day somebody I don't know. We were getting ready to close and an
army officer came in with 5 people and we got over in the corner and flipped to see who
was going to wait on them. Host and waited on them and when they left they left me a $5
tip and I'll never forget that as long as I live.
VR: You can laugh all the way to the bank.
EG: That was something $5.
IT: Talking about summertime work once you got to be in the 9th grade you could get
a job in the summer for the experiment station. They needed a lot of coolie labor to work
out in the cotton, corn, and with the entomology people. They were long hot summers
but they paid minimum wage and you could work 8 hour days sometimes get overtime. It
was a good job.
EG: I have a nephew named Don Patten that worked out there. He did that years after
I left.
VR: There was a train that came through too ?7''7 Tell us about that.
18
IT: The most important thing about the Sunshine Special train is that it came exactly at
noon on Sunday. It had this whistle everybody could recognize and every pastor that
wasn't through when that whistle blew us in big trouble.
VR: That was the 8, 12, 1, and 5 o'clock whistle?
IT: No, 8, 12, 1 & 5 was the campus powerplant whistle.
EG: and better that bugle when I grew up.
VR: Well tell us about it. I think that's interesting.
EG: Everything was Corps in 1925 or `28 when I can remember and uh, these dorms
were clustered around military walls and the cadets marched to meals and they did
everything by bugle just like an army post, from Reveille in the morning until Taps at
night. You could just hear that sound all the time coming across campus. The uh, To me
the most thrilling part of living down there was watching the Final Review at graduation
each year. We still had a horse cavalry. Lots of horses and horse drawn artillery, lots of
us, cases drawn by horses and the Generals, and the president and all the `Big Whigs"
lined up and the faculty in the bleachers along the south side of the drill fields and passed
in review. They sang all the military songs and ended up, the band would play 01' Lang's
Eye and "Home Sweet Home" and everybody cried. And it was just the most impressive
ceremony that ever took place.
VR: I imagine.
EG: Each year I really looked forward to it. And after that we started getting in
trouble, like going skinny dipping in the, you know, natatorium. Cause when the campus
sense left we just moved into everything we could get in to.
19
VR: Ha ha Well was there much rivalry between the College Station, um, families in
Bryan at that time?
EG: Oh, yeah.
IT: That's all there was It was like Texas vs. A&M, about that much rivalry. There
was a Consolidated saying "I'm a moron, I'm a moron and I will be `till I die, but I'd
rather be a moron than go to Bryan High." HAHA
VR: Love it, on
CC: When I was in 9th grade I transferred in. I spent one year at Bryan High and came
back. I didn't like it. You know you were asking about, the bugle and so on, that was still
happening in `36 when I was still living on campus. And at a certain sense, the central
point of the campus was the bugle stand which was between the railroad station and Old
Main Building and actually, there were a lot of dorms on military walk. One big dorm, I
forget the name of it.
EG: Bizzel
CC: Yeah, that was right over here. And there were a couple of them down here. The
bugler would get out and he had this little megaphone type thing. It was right in the
middle of that, little sort of traffic circle there, by the old YMCA building. He would blow
that bugle in all directions every bugle call.
EG: Was it right next to the, right across from the YMCA?
CC: Yeah, across from the YMCA.
IT: The hardest work I ever did in my life was one night I worked setting pins in a
bowling alley in the last night of school. And they kept that thing open till 2 or 3 in the
20
morning. Then boys kept bowling I think. I got about 5 cents a line and I couldn't even
drag myself home.
EG: You had to set her up?
CC: Yeah, I used to do that, too.
IT: Setting those pins dangerous, hard work
VR: When the bands would come on campus did they have to ? ?? hall
EG: That's what SIBSA hall, the mess hall.
IT: We called them Sibsa, Sibsa hall.
EG: Ring ceremony, everything took place at Sibsa
CC: That is right. They'd move out those tables and it became a big hall room.
VR: Did any of your families to move on down attend A &M when it was open to the
females?
IT: My wife wasn't able to come. Her mother is the first woman ever enrolled in
A &M for a degree completion program. It happened this way. Mr. Heaton was the
registrar and she was a teacher and had been going summers
VR: and her name was?
IT: Her name was Stella Haupt, H- A- U -P -T.
VR: Oh, yes
IT: Her husband was a professor of electrical engineering and ran the AC network
calculator over there. And when General Rudder had finally worked it out to bring
women in everybody knew it was coming. I don't remember if it was in January or the
regular fall semester. Mr. Heaton talking to Mr. Haupt said I know Stella has been taking
courses and so on and we wonder if she would come over here this afternoon and be the
21
first one to register because he didn't want the one that showed up to be some young lady
primarily intereste in finding a husband. I can't even remember which year it was.
EG: Was is after `48?
IT: It was in the sixties wasn't it? I can't, be sure when it was
VR: I don't have a date on that.
IT: But anyhow, what he didn't want was some little bright eyed bushy tailed gal that
was coming at 8 am to marry an Aggie. I mean, here it was a lady, a professors wife,
unable to get her masters degree cause she couldn't go away in the summertime. She
could go to Huntsville some. So she would be the first to register and that would show
why A &M was letting women in.
VR: It couldn't have happened to a better person.
IT: You're right. And another distinction that family has, when Mrs.Haupt's son -in-
law, Don Ellis, who was an All -SWC quarterback at A&M was in the Air Force in
Vietnam, his wife Mrs. Haupt's daughter, Remi was back here, for the year. And she got
a master's degree in education and then their daughter came through and got a degree.
And so they were the first three generations of women, grandmother, mother, daughter to
graduate from A &M.
VR: That's wonderful.
EG: Well I'll tell you about my wife.
VR: Well, please do
EG: Her father was head of the agriculture and engineering department
VR: What was her maiden name?
EG: Scoates
22
IT: Yeah.
EG: And in `33 the state cut all those school teachers wages 25% and they had, they
had to live on that. And so, he had three children and all 3 of them. Oldest one was a
boy, youngest 2 were girls in `33 they let eleven girls go to school here. And we still have
a picture of the eleven girls went to school here that year. But that was, they let `em go
one year only. Then they went on in to TWU or then it was CIA, later it went to TWU.
VR: Well, who was the president of the university at that time?
EG: Walton
VR: T.O. Walton
EG: T.O. Walton
VR: Now your wife is here today now isn't she?
EG: Huh?
VR: your wife here today?
EG: Yeah!
VR: Yeah, I saw her out there lately 999999
EG: She a lot and her brother is still here and he can tell you more.
IT: Okay now is she the one that used to live out on College View?
EG: Well
IT: Yeah, ok they were neighbors of the Haupt's when they moved out there.
EG: They lived next door tot he Walton's on campus until he built a house he and ??
and Mr. Lancaster and another one, got together and what they call it uh,
VR: Southside development
23
EG: Southside development company and he built a house over there right across the
street on down from Bush Drive
IT: Ok, yeah.
EG: building house in 1924 so they built that and moved on off the campus down there
IT: And real near where they had the lake
EG: Yeah.
IT: Before they discovered mosquitoes they had to drain the lake.
EG: Well that's what Gilbert said.
IT: Yeah
EG: But he sure did and uh Dr. what is his name?
VR: Clark, Dr. Clark
EG: R.B. Clark I believe it was his wife got on that dam over there and said he wasn't
gonna tear that down and he did.
VR: With a butcher knife she said, they had to get a sheriff to talk her off the dam.
EG: That's right. Anyway I guess they were the first girls they ever let go that many
VR: Was Margret Duncan one of those girls?
EG: That is right.
CC: My mother was probably the first woman teacher at A &M.
VR: Which one are you?
CC: Right here because Dad went to Switzerland and Germany to do some post
graduate work. He had a Sabbatical year; so Mother taught all his classes for one year.
I'd say that would have been about 1920 or '21 somewhere around there. They always let
girls go to summer school.
24
EG: That's right.
CC: Way back
EG: That's right
CC: When, I know my sister went. Later on her daughter went. We only had eleven
grades and no junior high school. I thought we had the finest elementary and high school
teachers of any community anywhere and it was mostly because teachers were either
wives in or family members of the faculty. And you mention Ethel Walton. He was one
of those teachers, Henrietta Doak was one, Carolyn Mitchell was, and Mrs. C.C. Spencer.
I will remember all four of those teachers as long as I live because they were so good.
Regardless of your attitude or the effort you made, you learned. The only person that had
a problem in college was Betty Jane Winkler. That was not because of her brainpower or
education, she was our valedictorian. She just went to t.u. and had so much fun she didn't
go to class or make her grades.
IT: You know a little bit later that was nearly another generation. I remember that
your talking about every generation in school
VR: Name on the back
CC: Yeah, they're named on the back.
EG: I didn't see the names on the back. You can still see Sunny in there. Sunny hasn't
changed.
CC: Yeah they have. His mother and dad and my sister Peggy and me, when I think I
was about 1 year old. Those are all dated on the back.
Your family moved off of campus, did you move out in.. .
CC: Johnny Jones, Bill Hensel and me (picture).
25
EG: You were talking about Dr. Williams a while ago, Bill.
CC: Bill.
EG: Is he in Waxahachie?
IT: Yeah, he is here today.
CC: I haven't seen him in 30 years. I'd like to see him.
IT: At the railroad station. One of the wagons they used to haul the bonfire, while
hauling logs on the wagons.
EG: We tore down the house
VR: Wonderful
EG: And we tore that thing down and finally the school made us, every student. Now
it's University Drive, and it was dirt roads. It was a dirt road long after I bought that
store. I'd get out there and I'd sell fireworks, and fireworks 1 2 3 4 5 and they'd shoot 3
feet in the air. It was maybe about `38.
IT: It was the 4th of July. Remember that?
EG: That's right
VR: There is one thing I would love to tell her... If you know about the zoo, there was
a zoo on campus.
What, a zoo?
VR: A zoo. Do you remember that?
CC: I have vague memories of by the old Creamery where they made the ice cream.
IT: It must have been gone in `36. I don't remember it all. There was a Dr. Hessey
who was a professor of Geology who was a bachelor and he was the scout master of
26
Troop 102, which was sort of a campus group. And we met in the old museum.
Remember the old museum?
CC: Yeah.
IT: Had a mummy in it. It was a scary place. It was really great to be old enough, to
join the scouts, because Dr. Hessey would always go out on field trips, dig things up, like
a geologist. He would get you out of school to help dig. Good deal for him, good deal
for us, like camping.
EG: His name was what?
IT: Hessey
EG: I guess that was after I'd gone.
IT: It must have been `44. Before I was a boy scout.
CC: The biggest character on campus had to have been Dr. Asbury.
IT': Oh, yeah.
CC: He is an old bachelor, I'm not sure if he was in engineering or an English
professor.
IT: He was an English Professor.
CC: Anyway, his living room contained either 2 or 3 pianos and boxes and boxes and
boxes of music and pictures on every wall of the house and every ceiling in the house.
There wasn't a spare piece of house that wasn't covered with some kind of painting or
picture or photo including the bathroom and all the ceilings.
IT: But, a lot of things you couldn't see because they were stacked and stacked with
books.
27
CC: And then he got into climbing roses and I think he got into these telephone poles
with lattices and the roses would climb `till you couldn't see the house. About 30 feet in
the air.
VR: And where was he?
CC: He was over by Northgate.
EG: Across from a building there. He later moved up on a hill and there is nothing
there now.
IT: Relocating him was a big issue, do you remember that?
VR: And what department was he in?
IT: He was an English professor
EG: I don't know what he was, but he had roses, and pianos, and when I was even in
school, he would come up there everyday and take a bath at the Aggieland Inn.
CC: And he rode a bicycle. Yeah, and he rode a bicycle even when he was 78.
EG: Years old he rode a bicycle.
CC: That's right, when he was up there.
EG: I never learned to drive
VR: I think those pianos were Steinways.
EG: Right, all of them were.
VR: I wonder what happened to them.
EG: He gave a party every so often with the campus kids and they'd serve tea, hot tea
or water. One or the other.
CC: Mrs. Mayo who lived on the main campus with her son was Tommy Mayo. He
was in the English department, but he was an old bachelor. And Jean Benz, the daughter
28
of Major Benz, she was a real campus character. She got a little far ahead on her times,
and one time Mrs. Mayo went up to Jean and said, "Jean darling, I know you would just
love one of these cookies." And her reply was, "You're god damned right I would."
IT: Was she ever invited back?
CC: Yes. Another time her folks were having a dinner party.. .
VR: That's a piece I would like to know about.
CC: All these people were downstairs having drinks and having dinner. They all looked
up and there was Jean at the top of the stairs holding her pajamas which were dripping
wet, and she looked down to her mother and daddy and said, "You or you or some other
damn fool, lifted the toilet lid up and I fell in!" And one other story about her, she was
accused of pestering a neighbor's cat and she was asked, "Did you do anything to that
cat ?" She kept saying no and it kept going on and on and finally she said, "Well, I damned
near twisted its tail off."
VR: Now was this the Benz that was the Benz school of design?
CC: No, that was Buddy Benz. This was the Benz of the military that just came and
went like military people do.
IT: You know there is a lady here with the name Adcock. Her dad was a major before
the war, yeah, I remember them.
VR: This was Jean Benz?
EG: He was tough. I had him in the military one time.
IT: Does anyone remember Square Root Jackson?
CC: Oh, yeah! I had to get a tutor to get through summer school. Not calculus but
trigonometry.
29
IT: Do y'all know why he was called Square Root Jackson? He passed the square
root of his class.
EG: Yeah, that's about right.
CC: And he had that kind of haircut. He rode about on a bicycle.
VR: And his houseshoes, fuzzy houseshoes. I remember him wearing fuzzy
houseshoes, riding his bicycle. I remember seeing him on Jersey. He lived on Fairview.
EG: On the corner. Is that house still there? I think so.
VR: Can you tell us anything else that is real pertinent about these and delightful?
IT: Is some of this pertinent that we covered?
VR: What about the health facility on campus at the time?
EG: What?
VR: Health. Did they always have that?
CC: As far as I know, in fact. There was a campus hospital over by the old Aggieland
Inn on the Northside.
IT: We never made use of it. Faculty had to take care of themselves.
CC: Well, we didn't have air conditioning. We didn't know any better. It didn't bother
us, I guess. I remember when we got an attic fan, we thought we were just in hog heaven.
IT: I remember the very first air conditioner that came to the campus in about 1947 or
1948. But Lu's dad, Professor Haupt, he was a professor of electrical engineering and the
Westinghouse company came up with a very complicated gadget called the AC network
calculator you could use to simulate power grids. Professor Haupt went up to
Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, learned all about how to use it, and the college in cooperation
with companies, bought one, brought it down here and set it up. It had to be in an air
30
conditioned room, so up on the second floor of Bolton hall they air conditioned a great big
room for the calculator and for all these people from the utility company who came down
here to do their studies they had a big conference room that was air conditioned as well as
Professor Haupt's office. The president of the University didn't even have an air
conditioned office, but Professor haupt did. That really impressed me.
VR: That's interesting. What did you do also about football games and football guests.
Weren't they housed mostly in the homestead?
IT: Well, a lot of girls were.
CC: Mother and Dad had friends. It was an annual affair to come and have lunch or
dinner. They usually came from Austin or Houston and they went home that night.
IT: I know dances would go on so a lot of the girls would stay.
CC: Well, I'm sure they did, some stayed at our house.
IT: My dad always had a few students that he was particularly close to, and those
would be the ones whose dates would be invited to stay at our house. My brother and I
hated that, we got kicked out of bed.
CC: We didn't have any locks on the doors and we used to have iceboxes and we
would buy ice in blocks, 25 or 50 pounds. And you put the ice sign (weight) in the
window and the man would shoulder the ice and bring it in the house, open the icebox and
put the ice in the box and leave. That's just the way things were then.
EG: Remember who he was?
CC: No. Do you?
EG: No, I can't, but the wife can. I wish she was in here. She could tell you a lot. She
won't talk unless you ask her, she's not a talker.
31
IT: You know about the things that we have opened up. Do you remember back in
the '30's when the depression hit, there were all of those hobos that came into town on
the trains and showing up at the houses of us that were so close to the railroad stations.
Those guys were always coming over panhandling for food.
CC: They would mark your house if they got a good meal.
KC: This is much later than all the campus in `43, I guess, but when I came down for
the dance, they let us stay in a dorm and they'd move a lot of the boys out.
CC: That's right.
KC: And they'd have to all double up together.
EG: We'd have to clean up that dorm real good. It had to be the best cleaned like we
have first been there. And I lived with Bill Armstead. Then he was in vet school.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** *End of Tape 1 Side B**** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * **
EG: She's still Mrs. W.A. Penberthy.
IT: I'll tell you Walley has no excuse for not coming back. He could have killed two
birds with one stone.
VR: One of you mentioned was that the quarters for the help, the live in help and who
kept the grounds and who did the lawn and so forth.
EG: I can give you that students
32
VR: That's what I figured.
IT: After the war came, depending on the year, all the people who were live in help
got war jobs and never came back. So it was a new era after the war. That was when the
students started doing more of it.
CC: Our live in, Leelah, was wonderful as far as we were concerned. She did
everything. She babysat, she cleaned, she washed, she cooked. Everything in return for a
little house she was furnished in the back and for a very few dollars a week. And she had
kind of a boyfriend, because Mother asked Leelah, "Leelah, did I see a man in your room
last night ?" She said, "Mrs. Campbell, I'm not married but I ain't no old maid." One
night, Mother and Dad went out, leaving us in Leelah's care. The next morning, the sheriff
came out looking for Leelah and he said, "Mrs. Campbell, Leelah was chasing another girl
on the hospital steps last night, and cut her up pretty bad." And Mother said, "She
couldn't have done that because she was babysitting with my children." And the man said,
"Well, I'm sorry but I'm gonna have to call Leelah." He said, "Leelah, did you have any
trouble last night ?" "No," said Leelah. He said, "Did you chase someone to the
hospital ?" She said, "Yes, sir. I went out to the room to get something and she was
talking bad about me and I just chased her and cut her up a little. The kids were asleep.
They didn't even know I was gone."
IT: That was in the era when people told the truth wasn't it.
EG: You were talking about labor, they did clean the dormitory, too.
VR: Oh, really.
EG: They cleaned the dorms, not the rooms. Just the halls and the showers and things
like that.
33
VR: Who was it that did this?
EG: The students. Tucian Morgan was one of the overseers in my area. Tucian's
dead.
CC: I knew Jimmy was. ..One thing about the students when we were still on campus.
Mother and Dad were in town at the movie and Peggy and I and my grandfather were at
the house and the house caught fire, and College Station had a volunteer fire department.
IT: Is this still the house across the road?
CC: Yep. Across the road. Of course, they came and a bunch of cadets came. They
helped move a lot of stuff out of the house, they pulled Mother's baby grand piano to the
front door, and there it burned as they didn't know to break off the three legs and carry it
out. That's when we went to stay at the Aggieland Inn in the early 30's, while they rebuilt
the house.
IT: That must have been the most excitement for the fire department for years and
years and years.
EG: It was a little motel. Do you remember seeing it?
VR: The Aggieland Inn, yes I do.
EG: Well, you know it had about 30 rooms and everybody wanted those rooms at
certain times of the year.
VR: Just like the guest rooms on campus.
CC: As kids, we loved staying there, we'd go down to the dining room and be treated
like big folks, or guests.
IT: Thinking about the fire department, one of the big things was the bonfire because
the bonfire was right over there in the drill field and those sparks would go whichever way
34
the wind was blowing and the fire department was always out and ready to go the night of
bonfire, remember that?
EG: They were worrying about bonfire.
IT: The fire seemed monstrous to me as a kid, 4,5,6 &7.
EG: Railroad ties, telephone poles, outhouses and mostly stuff like that, anything that
the students could bring up on those mail carts, those old wagons.
VR: Well, do you think students now will look back on their era and seem as excited as
you?
IT: No way.
VR: I don't think so either.
IT: I can compare notes with my daughters to see what they went through. The
feelings are totally different.
CC: Students were awfully clever and creative, though on April Fool's Day, they always
raised Cain all over the campus. One thing, when the Streamliner went through, they
would go down there and take a big brush and stick it in the paint and just hold the brush
and streak the train as it rushed through town. It let the train paint itself. Of course, they
stopped that. I thought it was very creative. And the time they planted "Beat t.u." in the
rye grass over in Austin, and it came up bright green and all this dead Bermuda grass,
Austin couldn't get it out, it was just a lot of neat things.
EG: Well, they did that over here, too.
CC: Well yeah, but we thought of it first.
IT: Well I'll tell you one thing, Baylor never stole our bear. My freshman year we
stole the Baylor bear. But that's not campus kids stuff.
35
VR: Well this has been so interesting. Is there anything anyone would like to add to
this that we haven't covered? I'm sure there is much we haven't covered. It is absolutely
delightful to have you fellows.
IT: One of the things that seemed interesting to me was I guess 2 things: 1. How well
the teachers taught 2. How well the students did.
If you look around some of the kids that grew up on this campus and see what they did in
life, it is really impressing. This guy Jimmy Howell, his dad was the registrar, he wound
up being Senior Vice President of The Bank in Boston. Big man in the Boston area.
Professor Foreakev was an electrical engineering professor. His son Larry went on to
become the dean of the Havard business school, recently died of Alzheimer's. A lot did
extremely well. Henry Gilcrest is on the list here. He formed a big law firm in Dallas, one
of the powerhouse law firms in Dallas.
VR: The oil, the energy people?
IT: The CEO' S
KC: The one thing I brag about Charles is that I'm very proud he was born at A &M.
This is a real rare person because he was born on campus of A &M and he said now don't
say it like that. It sounds like I was born on the ground.
IT: Was there a vet in attendance?
CC: RB Ehlinger, M.D. He was about the only one around this neck of the woods.
EG: I hear the wife talking about him a lot.
CC: I remember Dean Kyle said one time, he said, "Son," this was summertime, we
were talking about no shoes, "you just tell Margaret to leave you alone, you take some
36
paper sacks and rubberbands and put them around your feet and you won't have to wash
them all summer."
IT: You know they were talking about the Quality row Dean Shephardson who was
really a heavy hitter on the campus, he didn't live on the corner, he lived by the football
field.
CC: At a school fair one time, he left me his drawing ticket for a turkey, and that turkey
was as big as I was. I had to carry that turkey all the way to his house. He gave me a
dime tip!
IT: Dean Kyle himself lived across campus over by president's house, across from the
drill field just down from the president's house.
VR: I don't know if the other groups been as fortunate as we have to have so much
input, but we've certainly enjoyed it. It will be valuable in the book.
CC: Do you live in Waxahachie?
IT: No, we live in Duncanville.
EG: Started YMCA at Northgate and corner where camera drug store then Lipskin was
right across the street two drugstores. Both would deliver medicine. Had pharmacies in
each one of them.
CC: I worked one summer there for Dr. Lipscomb. I worked six days a week for a
whole summer and made forty -five dollars a month or twelve cents an hour.
EG: Pete Smith was his pharmacist.
CC: They had curb service and these kids would drive up and they would want cherry
coke, lime coke, lemon coke, every kind of coke.
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IT: Do they still have that yell about sweet cherry phosphate here? I wonder how
many kids know what sweet cherry phosphate is. Two doors down from Lipscomb's
pharmacy was Opersteny's grocery store. Talk about lifestyle on campus, mom didn't do
much, but she did call Mr. Opersteny and order groceries. He would deliver them.
CC: Lou Patranella had a store on the southside of campus.
IT: He used to have Easter egg hunts, Patranellas Easter egg hunt, remember?
CC: No, but I remember Patranella's grocery store..
IT: Joyce Patranella lives in College Station now. Her nmarried name is Birdwell.
EG: Her daughters' brothers were on the basketball team. Chris Opersten lives in
Bryan. Lou Patranella and Charlie Opersteny had a store together around the corner.
VR: Bill Lancester thought the first four books of the new testament were Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and Charlie.
CC: Y'all see this old building here? This is the old animal husbandry pavilion. One
summer I was bored and I threw some rocks into a few of those windows and D.W.
Williams caught me which was good, so I had to sweep the arena out every weekend for
about two months until that paid for about five or six windows.
IT: I thought it had a dirt floor.
CC: It had seats though, I was sweeping the seats.
IT: Do you remember the pet shows? All the kids brought their pets and they had a
pet show in the A H pavilion. That was a big event of the year.
CC: I don't remember.
IT: That's the first thing I remember about my wife, she was the cute little girl with a
big collie dog and always won the prize. Her folks raised registered collies.
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CC: We had a legendary dog named Lucky. It was a big mixed breed dog and had a
lengthy rope about this big around and about twenty feet long. And that dog would get
on one end of that rope, and two, three, four, five of us kids would get on the other end
and that dog would drag us all over the yard.
IT: There is one thing I wanted to ask you about. Do you remember airouts? They
would get all the freshman and run them out of the dorms and chase them and whip them.
EG: Was that when you were here?
IT: Not while I was here as a student, but they did it while I was living there on the
campus. And we would hear these things outside. They would hide in the shrubs at our
house and some sophomore would find them and get after them. It was pretty tough.
EG: About twelve o'clock at night.
IT: The only thing that we had that was close to an airout was when they were trying
to get rid of the board and whenever the word was out that they were coming to inspect,
everybody that had a bruised bottom had to take off. That's the closest thing we had to
that.
CC: That's more A &M than campus, every summer in the campus, they use to have a
big 4H meeting here and brought in all the children from the rural area all over the state.
VR: Still do.
CC: Cadets that were in summer school were pretty bad. In fact I went out to see what
happened one time and they picked me up too, then they realized I was a faculty child, so
they just let me stay and watch. But some of the things they did to these poor kids, it was
pretty scary, it was kinda bad, but never physically harmful.
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EG: They bring their things over there in the park right across from where G Rollie
White is. Bring your blankets and things stayed there a whole week. A lot of them did
4H groups.
IT: Campus life entertainment. Do you remember chinaberry fights? Chinaberry
fights, we had chinaberry trees and they made wonderful ammunition several months of
the year.
CC: Do you remember rubber guns?
IT: Yes.
CC: We'd cut these innertubes in strips like this long wooden gun and take one end of
the rubber and put it in back for tension and then have like a clotheshanger and let that
thing go like a bullet.
KC: Clothespin
CC: Clothespin
IT: Another thing we had by our house was a Catalpa tree which had big long beans
on it which you could use like a sword.
CC: Bill Hensel and I had a tree house in back of his house, a blackberry tree, it was
kind of like a fort. Also, on his place we use to go across campus and get a ten cent
hamburger and 5 cent Nehi and climb in the treehouse and have lunch.
IT: Now Nancy Reynolds who is here today lived next door to us and out behind their
servants quarters was a came patch all the way to No- Man's -Land. Norman's land or his
hole where he raided all of his out there and it seemed to me this little kid get in there and
wouldn't see him, he's hiding.
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CC: Later on they built tennis courts, first courts, first clay courts, the interior was a
block from where I lived except cutting in all those backyards or no man's land. They put
eight clay, it wasn't clay, kinda like white Caleche tennis courts, and one of the first
summer jobs I had was watering and lining and rolling and marking those tennis courts.
EG: Those were across from the old swimming pool.
CC: Yeah! That's where it was.
VR: What were they available for?
CC: They were primarily for campus cadets. It was Mr. Hensel who was in charge of
their maintenance.
IT: You weren't there yet.
CC: Not in twenty -two but in twenty -five.
IT: There's a great campus picture from thirty -six that's on the wall at Tom's
Barbecue of the triangle. I don't know where they got it but it shows just as I remember.
EG: Jon Paul Abbott was one of the instructors. We use to call him a jelly.
IT: Dean J.P., you mentioned him in
EG: In English.
IT: Remember "Bloody" Morgan? S.S. "Bloody" Morgan.
CC: Dr. Oliver Ball, the botanist. He was quite a character, but then there's another
that lived up, someone mentioned his name on the other side of Morgans, Dr. Mark
Francis.
IT: Did his folks ever live on campus?
CC: Yeah, but I don't remember where.
IT: Doak!
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EG: Doak!
IT: He was head of biology.
EG: Doak lived.. .
CC: He lived over here. (looking at pictures)
EG: He lived with Dr. Hensel. Well, I could tell you about the
doctors about Morgan and his wife.
IT: Geizekie's had those big trees out front. That's the Hensel's house. This is the
William's and this is the McCullogh's.
CC: I could tell you about people like that.
EG: I could tell you why.
IT: One time the Williams.. .
EG: And most of the professors at night mostly. I could walk into
Dean Kyle's office and Dr. Walton went dove hunting with both of them. We had a
celebration and Mrs. Kyle, when we got married we had a little celebration.
VR: Ha! Ha! Ha!
EG: She was some woman.
IT: About 1930.
CC: There was an old doctor that lived up there facing the drill field that was so deaf;
he was head of the veterinary med school; Dr. Mark Francis.
VR: Was he a dean, he was a dean, wasn't he?
EG: No, his wife loved horses.
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CC: What was his name? He was deaf as a post. I remember to this day she would yell
at him and he would just look at her and say, "I can't hear a damn word you say, honey. I
can't hear a damn word you say."
VR: Who was that, that liked horses.
EG: She oughta remember who he was.
CC: Somebody named, um, Bill Hensel will remember cause we were talking about it
last night.
EG: You could have remembered if you heard the name.
CC: Oh yeah! I would instantly.
IT: What you need to do is find a old campus' phonebook that would really ring a lot
of bells. I wonder if anybody's got one. What about archives? They would have a lot of
that stuff.
VR: We have I think a 1937 telephone book. It's just three or four pages.
EG: I can remember 1937 a week before we played Texas over here we had a real
snowstorm. About six inches was Sunday before we played them on Thursday, and we
just had a time on the old drill field Thursday there wasn't a drop of snow except for in the
corners. That was one of the most beautiful days I saw and all that snow covered
everything four or five days before that.
IT: Right after the war there was a big snowstorm. There was no more gas rashioning
and I had my driver's license and my folks had moved from Missouri and they had chains.
Nobody else knew what chains were. And we had a old `39 Ford which they let me drive
and it was the only vehicle, it seemed to me, that would get around in town for about a
day.
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EG: Put the chains on
IT: Yeah, put the chains on
EG: Well that was a must earlier if you didn't have chains.
IT: No because the roads were muddy.
EG: Well there wasn't any pavement.
CC: Well I'm not gonna remember that doctor's name but -
EG: Well I could tell you if I see with my wife.
IT: I'm gonna guess with a P.
VR: Was it Marstellar?
CC: No.
VR: He was the one across campus. "Mr. Marstellar do you have a will ?" He said,
"No." And he said, "Well, you need to get a will." And he said, "Are you married Mr.
Marstellar?" He said, "No." And then he said, "Well, then you need to find a wife."
CC: Wasn't Jack Marsh a contemporary of yours?
IT: That's a real familiar name but -
EG: His office is in the old main building going out highway six. I think it's the system
building. Back in those days it was called the Fiscal building. That's where the Fiscal
office and registor's office was.
CC: I always thought the neatest office on campus was the third floor and the middle
window of the old main looked down on Sul Ross.
EG: Who's this?
CC: My dad. His office was there as long as I can remember.
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IT: Ah, that makes me think about my dad's office in the Ag building. Do you
remember the Horticulture show they use to have in the fall?
EG: Oh yeah.
IT: That was a big deal.
CC: Yeah.
IT: It was getting close to Christmas.
EG: I worked around that concession.
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