a&m college campus kids 18 february 1998 - about...

Oral History Project—A&M College Campus Kids—Group 1—February 18, 1998—Page# 1

A&M College Campus Kids 18 February 1998

Moderator: Charolotte Bergstad Interviewees: Elbert “Eggie” B. Reynolds (ER) (accompanied by Louise Reynolds) (LR)

Alice Scoates Garner (sister of Bill Scoates) (AG) Bill Scoates (BS) Allen Kraft (AK)

Background on Participants: ER I’m Elbert B. Reynolds, Jr. and I went by the nickname “Eggie”. AG I’m Alice Scoates Garner and I grew up and lived here all my life. I was a homemaker and my husband and I were in business. He had a store in Northgate that was called Ed Garner’s. It had originally been a bookstore then became a sporting goods store. He also had a hotel, the Sands Motel, on Texas Avenue (currently the site of the Hampton Inn) which we sold around 1985. BS I came here in 1919 from Starkville, Mississippi—Mississippi A&M <now Mississippi State University>—with my father, mother, Mary, Alice, and another family, the Martins. Mr. and Mrs. Martin had a son Johnny. He was Alice’s age, about two and a half years younger than me. Mr. Martin was an Englishman and his wife worked at Mississippi A&M as a secretary. She brought him to Starkville and they taught him how to read and write. We all came to A&M in the same car—eight of us in a big old 1919 Hupmobile. I went to Consolidated through the ninth grade and then went to Bryan High School. After that, I went to A&M, taught two years at Tarleton in Stephenville, and then went to Ames Iowa where I got a master’s degree in Agricultural Engineering in 1937 and 1938. In 1939, I came home and worked with my father until he died that year. My dad was head of the Ag engineering department and he said, “Son, you got to go back to Ames and get your master’s degree.” Now he was a graduate of Iowa State in Ames, Iowa 1910. So I went back and got my master’s degree from Iowa State. In 1938

Hupmobile1


when I went across the stage, Dr. Fralery who had been here at A&M as a registrar, and was then president of Iowa State, stopped me. We talked for 5 or 10 minutes up there. So, then I went and worked REA for three years before World War II. I was in the service in meteorology and most of the time I spent at the University of Chicago in meteorology. And one of the nice things about it is we built two instruments in those years that are still being commercially built today. Then I came back here and started testing fans for the engineering experiment station. Now this is my fifty-second year of being in the fan business. AK: Well, my name’s Allan Kraft. I lived out here three houses from Sbisa Hall on campus. I ate Christmas dinner, two different Christmases in the Sbisa Hall with the Dotips. My dad helped start A&M Consolidated School and I went the first day it opened up. After school I used to rush down to Kyle Field and I gathered the footballs for D. X. Bible, the football coach <1919-1928>. C: I would like to ask all of you how old were you when you lived on campus at A&M. ER: Well, I was born in Bryan in 1924, September the 17th, and barring the few days I lived in the hospital with my mother, I lived on the A&M campus from then until June 1942 when I went to the dormitories on campus. I entered A&M at that time. For a time I was in the army, but I didn’t change residence.

AK: When I first came here, I rode a trolley to Bryan school in the fourth grade. I lived three houses from Sbisa Hall. There was the Board of Directors home first, then Professor A. Mitchell second, and we lived in the third one. A bachelor lived on the corner where the post office is now. We ate Christmas dinner in Sbisa Hall twice. At that time, when you went to Bryan you had to go down the street about half a block or a block

from where we lived. We had to go down to the Welborn Road, and catch a streetcar to go to school in Bryan. My dad was professor of Ag Education when he came here. Dr. Bizzell was the president and Dean Kyle was head of agriculture. There was a store called Boyett’s across the street or at the end of the street on which we lived. And you had to go to that

Dana X. Bible2

Interurban Railway3


and turn left and go down to Wellborn Road to go to Bryan. They had a streetcar that ran from College to Bryan and that’s what I took when I went to school first. C: OK, Ms. Garner, how long did you live on campus? AG: My father came in 1919, and we lived on campus until 1924. My father was one of the developers of the College Park area south of the campus, and he built a house which is still standing. We moved off campus in 1924. BS: December the 17th, 1924. I remember that day. They built the house, just like it is today. Then they had to build a garage in the back of it. They had a place for two cows and another one for a bunch of chickens over here, where her house now stands, and so, when we lived on the campus, we had chickens and we had cows. C: While you lived on campus also? BS: Oh, yes. Dad said it came long after supper, we moved in and he said, “Son, Bill, we got to go get the chickens. Now these chickens have a brand new house!” C: But they didn’t want it! BS: No. We had to go up there at night. We picked them up and put them in some crates in the old model T short bed and we brought them back down there. About that time, the wind changed out of the north--it had been a real pretty night until then--and Dad said, “Son, we better throw some wood down in the cellar because I think we’re in for a storm.” And he wasn’t far from wrong. And it came a blue northern and the next morning it was real cold, but we fired up that old furnace in the basement. That’s one of the few houses that still has a basement in it. C: Tell me about the house that you lived in on campus, what was it made of. BS: It was a big old wood house, and a single floor <one story>. It was heated and dad bought a great, big old stove that kind of bellied this way, and then bellied this way, and then went up that way, and he set that up in the center of the house. Now it was kind of open in there and mother had a wood stove big as this thing <the conference table> that she brought from over in Mississippi just to cook on.

Model T Short Bed truck4


See we didn’t have gas in Bryan/College Station until 1928, so you cooked and you heated everything with wood. They’d bring in ten cords of wood and then they’d get a guy with a tractor and a saw to saw it up, and that’s what we heated the houses with. C: How many rooms were in your house? BS: There were two rooms on this side and then the hall there. It had a big bedroom down there, and then all around this corner that you can’t see here, was a screened in porch. One bathroom. C: One bathroom? We’re talking about your house on campus, right? AG: Yes. C: OK. So, did Alice and Bill, and Mary your sister all have the same bedroom? AG: Yes, we did, we shared a bedroom, and it was cold in the wintertime. BS: Their bedroom <the parents> was back there where the bathroom was. There was plenty of room to sleep in that place. C: So you had a living room and a dining room? AG: It was like we had a parlor here and another room, a living room on this side. BS: Yes, a big living room, a dining room, and a parlor. And at that end of it you had a bedroom, it was full of beds, and you had a sleeping port and it had beds all over it. C: And you had a kitchen? BS: Kitchen? Yes, it was on the side. It had a big stove and she fired that up, and that was that. She could make, believe it or not, my mother could make an angel food cake AG: It <the house> had big high ceilings, and it was cold in the wintertime, but it was cool in the summer. C: What about you Mr. Reynolds? What was your house like on campus? Was it brick? ER: It was a one story wood house. Originally it was built with no bathroom, but eventually the end of the back porch was boxed in and that made a bathroom. The address of the house was 255 Clark Street. We actually lived in a house almost on


Highway 6 on the complete west end of campus. We were there for only four years I guess. AG: Down where Cain Hall is now. ER: High ceiling house, 11-12 foot ceiling. C: Did you have any siblings Mr. Reynolds? ER: Yes, I’ve got two sisters. C: Two sisters. Just like Bill over there. Were you the oldest? ER: I was the oldest. Still am. C: What about you Mr. Kraft? What kind of a house did you live in on campus?

AK: We lived in a wooden framed house, and, it had a bathroom. It was a next to a house on the end of the street, and Boyett’s store was across the street so the street didn’t continue. It stopped right at Boyett’s store and there was a post office, a barbershop, and Boyett’s grocery store there across the end of the street that we lived on. And we lived next to a bachelor, but I can’t think of his name.

AG: Dr. Asbury. But that’s another story. BS: He was a musician. AG: He worked for the engineering experiment station. He had all kinds of hobbies. He was interested in music. He had records and he had thee pianos, didn’t he, in his house. Do you remember Dr. Asbury? <Dr. Samuel E. Asbury, assistant state chemist, Agricultural Experiment Station> ER: I remember the name, but I can’t really place Asbury himself. AG: He used to have parties. Remember whether it was Saturday night or Friday night he would have an ice water party for the campus kids. Do you remember that? BS: No, I don’t

Boyett’s Store5


AG: But he had all these records and pianos, and he’d let us come and we’d play his music and he’d tell us all about it. He wrote an opera one time about Texas history, and he had all his little stuff and he’d explain it to us and the history of it. BS: He lived up there right across from the bank. AG: Well, when they built the post office they moved his house. They moved it three times. They moved it across from where our store was. And then they moved it across up on the hill where Albertson’s was. Anyway, when he died he left everything to the University library, and I just don’t know what happened to all his pianos and music. BS: We had some. We bought a bunch of storage cabinets where he put his sheet music at that time. AG: He had pictures all over his house, even on the ceiling and in the bathroom. He was an interesting person. One time he got interested in rose bushes and he put roses on trellises higher than his house. He rode a bicycle. BS: He was good at anything he did—a very talented man. Are you asking about the brick houses? They were on Quality Row. Do you know what Quality Row is? C: That was one of my next questions. What is Quality Row? BS: It’s a road that runs from the physics building right straight south of there. AG: Throckmorton Street. BS: On the south end of that, at the very end there was a house. It was occupied by the Hayes, and later by the Winklers. Then you skip a house and you go to the Silvey house. It was brick. And then you skip a house which was Dean Puryear’s house. I called him Pea bean. Then you get up to the next one--Dr. Ball’s house. Then there was a little street in there that went back to the school (this white school that they are talking about). I think they call it the music building

Art in Home6


And then you went across the street there was another house there that was brick that Reverend Matthews lived in. Then you skipped a house and that house was the commander of the corps. His house was there. Then there was one on the corner. Now I don’t remember who lived in that one on the corner. C: Why was it called Quality Row? BS: Because all these people that lived on it. On the west side, we had this house where we lived. Next door to us, was President Walton, before he was president. Then the next house belonged to the extension service or the Ag Experiment Station. That house was kept for that purpose. C: Mr. Reynolds, you were going to say something? ER: One of the houses was occupied by the O. B. Martins. O. B. Martin, as I recall, was the director of the Ag Extension service. BS: That would be this one just north of Walton house. Everyone that had that job, had that house. That house was dedicated to them. Many of the other homes, the home we lived in, were dedicated to the Entomology Department. That’s why they called it a developing house. That’s another thing you had out here. All the departments had certain houses that they could put their people in. C: So it was mainly for the heads of the department. ES: Up here. And then Dean Bolton lived on the corner up there. And then Dr. Frapps lived across the corner next to the Guion Hall. Now that’s Quality Row. C: Dr. Ball was biology? BS: And all of them were authorities in their own right. Now there was a preacher, when we came here. You got up in the morning and you got ready to go to Sunday school, and you went to Guion Hall. And you went in there, and Dr. Reed, who was head of the poultry department, had a class of little boys down here in the corner, next to the stage. And they had other ones all over that place. C: So you even had your own Sunday school classes and everything. ES: There were no churches available - that I know of. AG: The corps marched in to church service.


C: Oh, so everyone went to Guion Hall. And so everybody on campus. Whether you were faculty or campus kids or corps of cadets. AG: That’s right. ES: Reverend Matthews would get up there on stage and wave his hands around, and we’d all sing together. So that’s the way it went. This was a close society, here, in those days. BS: And it was coming out of a society where there wasn’t any transportation. Because many of these houses had colored people living in the back of them. They had it. I know the Hayes house, because that’s where we played in a big old loft where they kept the horses. And we played in the loft up there, climbing up there. The Hayes boys were a little older than us. And there was another boy, the Fermian boy, who was a little older. The Fermian family lived about where the Memorial Student Center is now, somewhere in that area. His mother died one evening. It must have been pretty late at night, and so the only place that you could go if you wanted to contact the outside world was to go down to where the railroad tracks crossed opposite Kyle Field. And there was a big tower in there, two or three stories tall, manned 24 hours a day. You could go up there and they could send a telegraph message. C: Didn’t you all have telephones? ES: We had telephones, but you couldn’t get out. The only way you could get out like Dr. Fermian was going to telegraph some of his relatives. He got to the top by crawling or walking up those stairs and started writing out those letters, then he dropped dead. AG: He left three children. BS: I only knew two, which was his oldest one? AG: Two girls. But you see, the campus was our playground, wasn’t it. BS: Yes it was AG: We could go anywhere on campus, we lived on campus, we just went in and out of buildings. We just had more fun; we’d just climb up on the Academic Building. We just did anything we wanted to. C: What did you do in the summer when the Corps was gone?


BS: Oh, there was plenty to do. When the Corps left, they had a regulation in the dormitories. You had to leave your room clean, but that didn’t mean the hallway was clean. So we’d go in there and gather up alarm clocks. I came home with just as many alarm clocks as I could haul, then I proceeded to tear them apart. C: Did you do things like this? Mr. Reynolds? ER: I did take clocks apart. BS: It was really an interesting thing around there. There was Prexy’s moon. C: I don’t know what that is. BS: It was on top of the Academic Building; it was shaped like a big question mark. And there was a 1500-watt lamp in there that lit up the place. During World War I, the State of Texas passed a bill that you could go to A&M for one buck. For one dollar, you could go to A&M and be registered in the dormitory which meant you had three meals and your books paid for. There were two dormitories in front of the Academic Building, on the left and the right. I don’t know if you remember those. One of them I think was named Ross Hall. All those veterans came out of World War I with an army 45 <Colt 45 sidearm>. That was standard equipment and issued overseas. They formed themselves a little club, out there in those two dormitories. You could push the screen open and you could lay that old pistol in there and take a crack at Prexy’s Moon. They knocked it out about every other night. For years I used to go up in there and look at that dome and it was full of holes. So, that was the kind of fun that went on. And they were dead serious about it. And then they’d go make a mark on the side of the wall, which was a plaster wall. You could hear them walk in the room and just tell how many times that guy knocked down Prexy’s moon. Now that’s a long shot for a forty-five. AG: Is Prexy’s moon still there? I haven’t looked in a long time. ES: I haven’t looked in a long time either, but it was there and had a 1500-watt single bulb. AG: You know we had a zoo, where they had animals, across the railroad tracks. That’s what we did on Sunday afternoons; we’d go to the zoo.

Shooting at Prexy’s Moon7

(Note that a rifle is being used)


ES: Yes, they taught us to ride horses over there. C: Ok, tell us about the Shirley. AG: That was a hotel. C: It was a two-story frame building and the first hotel on campus. And it was later called the Aggieland Inn. AG: No, It wasn’t that. They built a hotel on campus called the Aggieland Inn, but that wasn’t the Shirley Hotel. C: Ok. Why was it called the Shirley? AG: I can’t answer that, but it was the only place you could stay at that time. It was later made into some apartments, I think. C: Where did the visitors to A&M for dances and graduation stay? At the Shirley? AG: The girls came weekends; a lot of their dates would vacate their rooms and let the girls stay. BS: The Shirley wasn’t big enough. There were only about ten rooms. AG: It was the only place to stay. C: So, they would just kind of clear out one part of the dormitory let all the girls stay there? Then the guys bunked in. BS: They did that or stayed with the faculty people. When you had visitors that came they sometimes stayed in your home. C: Ok, the girls that were on campus, were they ever asked to the Corps dances by the cadets? AG: Oh yes. We lived at the Corps. C: Well I mean when you girls got older, I’m sure that there were quite a few romances on campus. AG: In my vintage, all the dances were fully chaperoned. They were all on Friday nights and we’d have a dance like the Artillery ball or something like that. Saturday nights was the Corps dance.


C: Oh so when the girls came for the weekend, there were two dances. I get that meant two dresses. AG: Yes. I can’t tell you when Aggieland Inn was built, but I know it was here in the 30’s. My husband worked his way through A&M. BS: I imagine that was built during the 30’s by the college. C: Ok, who can tell me about the fish tank? ER: On one occasion, I and two other Consolidated School Boys went to the Fish Tank, stripped all of our clothes off, and went swimming completely naked. Presently a car with two or three women that we knew drove up in an automobile, so we couldn’t quit swimming until the women drove way. On the ground near the Fish Tank A&M apparently had a rifle range, at some time in the past. On numerous occasions I picked up 30 caliber copper jacketed bullets from the ground. BS: Oh, it was a place down beyond what is now the fireman’s school. We went down there and went behind what’s called the fireman’s school. And there was a tank in there called the fish tank. And it was full of fish; I guess you could fish in it. Occasionally I was down there. Every time I was down there was when somebody had a big fish fry. They fried a bunch of fish. AG: We’d go on the 4th of July, that’s the only place you could go. C: Ok, well it said here, “Summer Picnics at the Fish Tank”, which was the swimming hole. You mean you didn’t go swimming there? AG: They did, but we weren’t allowed. AK: I did! C: Were you allowed? Did you have permission? AK: No BS: It was just fishing, it was just a tank back there, that’s all there was to it. But it was a place you could go, there’s not very many places you can go around here. Now here’s another thing, on Saturday and Sunday was a time to go camping, the whole department would go out to a place and all the kids and people and they’d have a big party out there. I remember going down on the Navasota River one time.


C: Was this every weekend you had parties or picnics? BS: Somebody did. C: Different departments would have them in the summer months? BS: Yes they did. Chiggers and ticks were bad. So round up all the kids, and all you boys go over here to so and so, and all you girls you go over here to so and so. And they’d have a bunch of supper. You can go out there get a hold of your pants and get yourself fully dusted <presumably with an insecticide powder>. Then you’d go play. Well that was standard procedure. C: Do you remember doing stuff like that Mr. Reynolds? What are some of your memories of living on campus? ER: The bulk of my memories on living on campus were playing with two or three other campus boys that I got to know quite well, and we did things like ride bicycles around. Sometimes we’d play hide-and-seek. We would hide and play around all the neighbors’ houses and nobody minded at all. C: Did you play marbles? ER: Some. And I recall distinctly that there was an old steam locomotive located somewhere on the A&M campus. I can’t recall now just where it was, but it was a lot of fun to go up in that thing and look at it and pull all the levers, and so forth. It was a workable steam locomotive. I don’t know why it was on campus, but it was there. <It was scrapped for metal during World War II.> And then the Ag Engineering Department had a great big room that had a whole bunch of agriculture machines in it. Tractors, harvesters, and so forth. And I can recall that Duke Thorton and William Albert Bilsing, everybody called him Bo, but we’d go up there and play on the machinery and nobody minded. C: Do you remember doing other things on campus besides riding your bicycles? ER: Well, but the boys and I would play Leap Frog and jump over each other’s backs. AG: On Sunday afternoons the band would play, at a bandstand by where the fountain is now. So campus people would just go sit on the grass and listen to the band.

Band Concert8


C: It was a more leisurely time that you lived in. BS: It was. Before they got the bandstand, we had the air dome, and then they had another one around the same area. This air dome was directly South of what’s now All Faiths Chapel and you would walk into it and there were benches and they just kept going higher and higher off the ground. And they had screens. The screen was here and you walked inside on either side of the screen, and you had to turn around and look at it. Well, my sister here and my other sister they didn’t like some of the programs that they were putting on--swashbuckling ship things where they caught people. C: Now these were plays? BS: No, these were movies. And so daddy and mother would sit on the front row right here. And the screen was up back here. And if they were doing something terrible, we’d all go out the front door. And dad sat there and when it got good, well he’d give us a high sign, and we’d go back in. AG: These were silent movies now. BS: These were silent movies. Now they replaced it later on with… AG: Assembly Hall <Guion Hall>. BS: Assembly Hall. It had floor and then it had a balcony all the way around the outside of it and they had a screen for movies. One of the people around here was Dr. Richey. He was head of the Civil Engineering Department, I had classes with him later on. His wife was had to be wheeled in a wheel chair, so he’d park her at the end of the center section. Then he’d clear walk to the middle of that place, and he was bald. I mean real bald. Sitting there with that movie flickering like that, his head just shone like a light. And that was the target for all the peanuts. Nobody would sit within three or four seats of him. AG: The Corps boys all wanted to sit on the balcony and buy peanuts. BS: They would throw them off that balcony. C: So you had peanuts at the movies then.

1930’s Concert in Guion Hall9


BS: Oh yes, all he had to do was just reach down in the chairs. He had all that he wanted to eat. C: So he was on to their game? BS: Oh yes, he was a real nice fellow. I enjoyed him, and matter of fact, I worked for him. And he gave me the first job I ever had at A&M. That was 70 years ago. AG: But you know the campus kids could go anywhere. We could go in the Assembly Hall, we could go down to the Stadium, we could go to the iron bleachers, but we would just go over there and crawl up on the bleachers, and watch the ball game or whatever track meet was going on. C: I’m sure there were a lot of things for you to do, really. When you stop to think about it. With interacting with the Corps, especially. At least watching them. AG: We did a lot for entertainment. C: What about the Queen Theater in Bryan? Did anybody go there? BS: Oh yes, The Queen and The Palace and the Queen and there was another one, the Dixie. AG: They were all right there together. C: How much did it cost to get in? BS: I don’t remember. AG: Back in the 30’s, it cost a dime. ER: Well the three Bryan theaters that I remember were the Palace, the Queen, and the New Dixie. BS: There were three of them right together. Not very far apart. C: So there was none on campus, or near campus? Or up in Northgate at all? AG: If they had anything, it was at the Assembly Hall. They had all kinds of things there.

Queen Theater in Bryan10


BS: There was a campus theater that was opened much later than that. I think it was probably opened before World War II. C: What kind of refreshments could you get at the movies? AG: Peanuts BS: Peanuts, and then soda pop. We had soda water, one of the best soda waters we had in those old days came on the market here a few years ago and until they changed it to the more modem things, it was just like it used to be. But now you can’t, C: It wasn’t creme soda was it? BS: No, there was some creme color, but I forget what the name of that is. It cost a nickel. It was a lot of money back then. AG: There was a swimming pool in the basement in the YMCA. My mother wouldn’t let us go. C: You didn’t get to go swimming? BS: I went swimming and I got sick in the basement. There were no chemicals to ensure the purity of the water. It’s been covered over now AG: The youngest Frapps boy was my age and he got pneumonia and died. C: I know there was a Frapps that lived on Walton Drive. BS: Yes, I played with him. He was a little bit younger than I, but not too much. I remembered when he died. AG: He died when we were in the 2nd grade I think. BS: And then the Bilsing’s lost one of their boys. C: Okay, I’m going to jog your memory. It says, “Explain experiences doing these things, roller-skating, riding horses, bowling, theatrical productions, swimming in the Downs Natatorium, was that at the Y or was that later? ER: Later. C: Water fights between the south side kids and the north side kids on campus, playing cap pistols at Guion Hall in the dark, mud fights in the plant nursery, riding down Kyle


Field ramp on a tricycle, playing inside the Bugle stand, outside the YMCA, playing in the Assembly Hall across from the YMCA, does that jog anybody’s memories? ER: Well I played in a fashion in the Assembly Hall. I remember throwing the empty peanut hulls all over the place. C: Did you ever play cap pistols at Guion Hall? ER: I can’t recall any Guion Hall, but I know we played cap pistols all over the campus. C: What about roller-skating? ER: I didn’t roller-skate, but now the bicycles and leap frogging deal, that was Henry Gilcrest, Bo Bilsing, Neal Reeves, and Duke Thorton. We all did the leap frogging. C: What about the water fights between the south side kids and the north side kids on campus? Do you remember that? What was the distinction between the north side and south side kids? AG: We didn’t have any. ER: I’m not aware of any division either. BS: There was no division as far as I know. There was a row of houses from the power plant north in there, where a number of the people who worked for the college lived. And there was a boy who lived there, and he had something wrong with his leg and many times he had to have it worked on at least once every year or two and I haven’t heard from him in a long time. Then there was another man out there and he would blow the whistle at eight o’clock, noon, one o’clock, and 5 o’clock. Then there was that old steam whistle over at the power plant. C: Why was it blown at those times? AG: To show it was 8 o’clock 5 o’clock … BS: And when he’d get sick they wouldn’t blow the whistle. AG: If there were a fire, they’d blow the fire whistle. BS: Oh yes, for fire protection the college was divided into four zones, and they blew the whistle then they blew it to tell which zone it was in. C: How could you tell?


AG: One, two three, or four. BS: The corps had fire companies and if you were on the fire detail, I don’t know how you got on it, but they were students, I’ve seen them drop their books and go. I remember when the Latty’s house burned. The Latty’s house was west of the Memorial Student Center, in the center, between that and the street. They had been papering the house south of it and they had a real high wind and in those days you had to have a place to cut the paper up. Some of it was up under the Latty’s house. The house had a little hallway in the center of it, and she walked across that thing once and smelled smoke and it started to sink in. She called the fire department and the only thing lost out of that house was a kind of a thing that had doors on it and stuff that was in that hallway. They recovered everything out of that house. Because the cadets just ran through the house picking up everything. C: How wonderful! A bunch of volunteers. ER: I can recall hearing a whistle when something was on fire, but I had no recollection at all of how the number of whistles indicated the fire’s location. I just don’t know anything about that. C: OK. How did you and your family receive mail and phone messages? AG: Well, we had telephones of course, and a post office. We had a post office in what they call the academic building that was the faculty post office. Later we had the post office on the railroad tracks--that was back in the thirties before they built the one at Northgate. BS: We had excellent service because you had two trains in the daytime and two trains at night. One train went north and you got the other, came south and the local trains and then in the night. They would use the same technique, but they dropped all that mail off right there. They had a mail car on the train and they were sorting mail all the time they were in transit. You could mail a letter and it would be in Chicago the next afternoon, I did it. AG: No house delivery though.

Disembarking from the train11


C: Did everybody go to the post office? BS: Yes. C: What was the Sunbeam Special? BS: That was a high-speed train. You have to go back to the Morril Act of 1862. It set up all of the Land Grant state universities, and one of the requirements was that the trains had to stop. Normally the trains stopped here, but when they got to the stream liner, they didn’t want to stop. But they got told real quick they had to stop at College Station and the next stop was Ennis. Then Houston, College Station, Ennis. AG: That was the only places they’d stop. That was the fast train. Of course, it wasn’t all that fast, but we called it fast train. BS: Well it made it made Dallas in three hours. Those engines would run up to 100 miles and hour, but they couldn’t do it. The engineers said that the track here, about five or six miles, was the best track around and it would run 100 miles an hour. They said it was the best there was. The track manager’s son worked in the post office. AG: And that’s another thing we for entertainment. Watch the trains come in... BS: Oh yes, you had one come in at ten o’clock, you had one at two o’clock, and you had freight trains, everyday. C: Well, when all did you go to school? BS: Oh, we went to school, just went during regular hours. AG: School was on the campus, it was a consolidated school. C: And that’s consolidated’s meaning? AG: They brought kids from Wellborn and different places around. BS: But it was not in legal terms. It was not a consolidated high school. A&M wouldn’t let everyone come. They furnished the building and so forth. We had various areas around the college like the one on the north and south sides. I don’t remember the boundaries of them at all. But that’s how I got to go to Bryan High School because my mother decided that she wanted to run for school board.


Those old men over there, Czechs and Germans, didn’t want a woman for school board. At that time in the state law, if you did not have a high school in your district, you could transfer anywhere you wanted to. So my mother transferred me to Bryan High School as well as my two sisters when they came of age. C: Where was the grade school on campus? BS: It was at what they call the music hall now. It was the white looking building built about 1922, I think. And that was a near tragedy as far as anything on the campus is concerned, because one day the ceiling, which was concrete and cement plaster on metal tiles attached to the ceiling, fell in on the whole second grade. AG: No third. BS: You were there? Your sister, where was she? AG: She must have been in the third. BS: Third grade which was next to me? I was in the fourth grade and I remember when that thing fell. The teacher realized something was wrong. She didn’t know what was wrong. So she organized the whole group and took them outside. AG: She did say the ceiling’s falling and they had windows all the way around and the ones closest to the window jumped out the window. BS: Two of the little boys jumped out. Nobody was killed. It put that whole ceiling on the floor. If she hadn’t taken those out we could have been killed. AG: They had a cloakroom; you know where you hang your coats. She said, “The ceiling’s falling, get outta here,” or some such words and so we ran to the cloakroom and out the hall everybody got out. C: Mr. Reynolds, did you go to school on campus? ER: Yes, I did. It was the two story framed building and it was kind of stucco both inside and out. And the old wooden floors were oiled. I don’t think it was engine oil from all the wheels, but it had an oil finish on it. Of course if we wiped a piece of paper or a white handkerchief on it, it came off black. The high school that I went to the first two years I think was Phifer hall on campus. It was a condemned dormitory two story and the brick walls and started to spread outward


that’s why it was condemned. The college used it as a store room but then the school system, the consolidated school system, asked if they could use that building for a high school, so they put great big long steel rods end to end on it and side to side of it and put steel plates on the outside and these steel rods were threaded so they just squeezed the building back together. But even at that, there was a crack of about three inches between the brick wall and the wooden flooring of the second story of this old dormitory. But it was safe enough because it couldn’t spread any further. But then, after at the end of my sophomore year, the new wooden building was built off campus. C: Where we are right now? ER: Called Oakwood, yes. AG: Right over here, where they tore that building down last year. C: The middle school, my understanding is that the College Station Conference Center, where we are now, used to be.... AG: …the junior high school. They built the high school, what used to be the old building, that they tore down. C: So you didn’t go to high school here, but you went through the grade school here. OK. Let me ask you this. There was a resolution adopted in 1939 that stated that on or before September 1, of 1941 all campus residences must be vacated and not be rented again. Explain what your family did at this time. AG: Of course, we were off campus. C: You were already off the campus. What about you Mr. Reynolds? ER: We got the message that we would have to move off of the campus. My parents built a house in what’s now S. Oakwood and my recollection is that they bought the lot before the edict that everybody had to move off the campus. So they started on the house - I guess it was the spring of 1941, and the house was essentially complete. C: They were to move off? ER: Yes, in Jan 1942. AG: I know where that house is. That’s that house that sits kind of katty-corner across the corner right down here.


ER: I think we moved into it in January of 1941 because Pearl Harbor day came on December 7, 1941. So we had just occupied the house for almost a year when World War II started for us. C: OK, So is this the house here? ER: Yes. C: 200 Pershing. OK. Yours was 101 Pershing? AG: No. It was on Dexter, you know where the Lancaster’s live? C: You say your house is on Dexter? AG: It’s the third two story off of George Bush. C: Who can tell me about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s visit to the campus in 1937? You were here, I know you were here. ER: I was here. Well, I recall that I got the message that he was going to be here and our neighbors across the street, the S. A. McMillians, were asked to use their car along with other people for conveying the presidential party. They were chosen because they had a Buick in place of a Chevrolet and I’m not kidding about that either. C: Why was that I wonder? ER: Well, bigger cars are nicer than smaller ones I guess. And I do recall being in the Kyle Field Stadium and the open car that the President was in drove past very, very slowly and I could see him down there in the back seat and that was all that I remember about it. C: Were you in high school in 1937? ER: I don’t think so. C: Maybe you weren’t. ER: Maybe not.

President Roosevelt’s visit to Texas A&M12


C: Let’s see, when did you say you moved into the dormitory? In 1942? So you would be eighth or ninth grade at the time. ER: I guess so. C: And both of you were gone by then, weren’t you. Well, you were still living here. AG: I was away at school. BS: In ‘37? I was teaching at John Tarleton. AG: I was at Denton, I went to school my first year at A&M - that was the year they let girls go. C: Because you were a campus kid? AG: No. Because I was a daughter of a professor. BS: That was another story there. How many others were there? AG: Eleven of us. BS: Eleven girls. The appropriations from the legislature had run out; they were appropriated before the crash came, so the salaries were pretty good. It wasn’t bad. I think it was $4000 a year and then the next biennium we had was terrible. There was a crush on getting any funds at all and so the legislature (it was enacted in the legislature) that girls with proper credentials could go to A&M. C: One year. AG: Just one year. BS: Yes, and my two sisters did. There were nine others. Are there any of them living here? AG: Margaret Mirns. BS: Margaret Duncan Mirns AG: There were eleven of us, and at that time the Battalion was a magazine. It came out once a month and on the centerfold of the October magazine, it showed our picture. Eleven girls. I’ve got it framed.


Margaret Mims wanted a copy of it and I told her to go to the Archives and they said they didn’t have that picture. So I may be the only one that’s got it. AG: That was the only year they’d let us go. Of course nobody wanted girls here anyway. So they don’t like to talk about it I guess. BS: Women could come to summer sessions. Now there was one other woman who completed her degree, but they would not give her the sheepskin, and that was Mrs. Marsletta, Dean Marsletta. Vet medicine. They never gave her the certificate although she had everything in place. AG: They wouldn’t let me go into the former students until ’72, after the first girl graduated. C: And you really are a former student aren’t you? AG: I belong, I wanted to belong, but they wouldn’t let me. They didn’t want any girls. C: How about that! Well, you can’t blame them since it’s supposed to be an all boys school, military school. It’s a shame though that the girls that wanted to, being family members, faculty members, that they didn’t allow them to go to school. AG: Even our daughter back in the 60’s couldn’t. C: Let me ask you, what special times do you remember being a campus kid? ER: Well, I really counted myself fortunate for being a campus kid because I could play over the whole campus and, as I mentioned before, I had access to all the buildings. I could go up and ask people questions. Professor Reed was head of the Poultry Husbandry department and for some reason or another I got the idea I’d like some pet chickens. So I consulted Professor Reed and he arranged to get me some little Bantam Seabright chickens. And I had two or three other chickens that were other breeds, I forget what they were, but anyway my dad built an enclosed pen for them, you know, chicken wire around sides as well as over the top so they couldn’t get out. This was in the backyard and so for some years I had those things and at night during the winter, it would get real cold. I had little bushel baskets to put the chickens in that had a little lid on it and so, by being on the campus, I had access to people who were knowledgeable about other things. C: Did you consider yourself fortunate being a campus kid while being a campus kid, or has it been in your later years?


ER: Well, mostly in the later years, I guess, but I really was aware of the fact that I did have access to both things and people that were not available to the public at large. Specifically, after the nice, new swimming pool was built adjacent to the gym I guess it must have been about 1933 or something like that, I could go along with my parents as faculty. There were several of our good friends in Bryan who were kind of offended that they couldn’t go in there because it was a public building paid for by taxpayers. But they couldn’t, and I could, and I appreciated that. AG: We grew up in a special environment. Educators were all around us and we were aware of that. I think it was pretty special. Children nowadays don’t have that atmosphere. C: It would be interesting, with all of the campus kids, to see how many of them did become educators. AG: I think quite a few of them did. T. O. Walton became a doctor. Jackson went to MIT. He went up there and you know quite of them had that background. BS: I taught two years and I know enough that I can’t come back down to the level of the student I’m trying to teach. We were talking about that, one thing my mother and my father did. Mother tried to get me to play a piano. It was just mechanical. So dad came up and said, “If you’ll go down to the Agricultural Engineering department on Saturday morning and help them you’ll get out of that.” So for years I went down to the Ag. Engineering department and worked for the professor down there. I had already been there with Fred Jones and all the engines. I saw engines there that you never knew existed, including one built in 1922 with an eight-cylinder engine. This was purely voluntary. C: Voluntary? Did you have a part time job? BS: I did. In 1928, my dad came to me and said, “Do you want to take these civil engineering students in the summer time to survey a line from the farm tanks, all the way out to the river?”

This was for the road in the railroad and so I had to take them onto a one-ton International flatbed and hauled them out. They’d tell me when they wanted to get off and sometimes we went all the way up the river. Then I had to go back to Sbisa Hall and get two huge boxes filled with food. And I went out there somewhere and figured out where about they were and then I delivered the food. One day I went up there and I rang a church bell and all the people round out there came out to church. But they came over


there and we fed them too. That’s where I got to know Dr. Richey, we called him Cue-ball Richey because his hair. C: That’s the guy that had the peanuts thrown at him. BS: Yes, and so I went out there and I was treated just like any other employee. At the end of the day I’d went out there and gathered them up and took them back. That went on all summer. From 1928, I think I ran it for about four or five years. C: How much did you get paid? BS: It wasn’t much. I didn’t really want to get paid. I was interested in just driving that old truck. I remember the roadrunners. C: The roadrunners? BS: We used to follow them and the boys would be standing up on the back of that cab and say “Skipper, speed up a little bit and see if he can fly.” Sure enough, they would run down the road, and if you got too close to them, they would fly. All the kids called me Skipper.

AG: Something you haven’t mentioned is the cemetery. C: I did know about the cemetery. AG: Nobody knows about the cemetery. We lived across as he said, on Throckmorton Street. The last house across the street. Vacant space and it was the sheep pasture. But in the sheep pasture was the cemetery. And the campus kids would play in the cemetery. C: Who was buried in the cemetery? AG: One of the Presidents of A&M. Foster. But when they built the corps dorms in the ‘30’s they moved the cemetery and I can tell you where the cemetery is. You’d be ashamed of it. I’m ashamed of it. C: Where is it? AG: If you go down Marion-Pugh Drive, it dead-ends. You turn on that gravel road right there on that corner is the cemetery. And President Foster was buried there, and some friends that we know. There was an old Sergeant on campus. Sergeant Watkins. He’s buried there and his daughter Ruth is buried there and several children.


AG: They moved it. I guess they did. I was away at school that year. That’s been one of my soapboxes all these years that they should do something about our cemetery. I think A&M should have a cemetery. Arlington National has a cemetery. Why can’t we? BS: They’ve got a number of people out there. AG: But I think it’s a shame President Foster is buried there and stuck off there in the weeds. Nobody takes care of it. AG: I just came home from school and I knew that they’d moved the cemetery so they could build the corps dorms. I talked about it a lot but don’t seem to get anywhere. C: Maybe you just aren’t talking to the right people. AG: Well when McKenzie was on the board, he was interested in it and he pursued it for a while but he wasn’t getting anywhere either. He wanted to be buried there. But you hear all the time about people that want to come back and be buried. It was interesting to me when they said the Bush’s could be buried at the Bush Library. They had to get permission from the state. But they already have a secretary in state property, so I couldn’t understand why they... C: Maybe nobody really knows that the cemetery is still there. BS: Oh, they keep it up. Not very well. C: Well, let’s regress a little bit. I would imagine that all the roads, streets or whatever you want to call them on campus, when you all were there were dirt roads? Were there any paved roads? AG: No BS: There were some paved roads. Mainly in front of the Academic Building and Military Walk. You know where Military Walk is? You’ve got to realize that at that point in time, A&M College faced west. You faced toward the railroad. There was no, the back end; you couldn’t get out of.

Military Walk, 192813


AG: We did have when we came here. There were iron gates at the west gate and they closed them at night, didn’t they? BS: Yes, iron gates at the north and west. C: Was there a fence around campus? BS: Oh, yes. AG: Big old beautiful iron gates that closed then. I don’t know whether they took those down but I often wondered what they did with them. C: I never realized that they had a fence around A&M. AG: Apparently it really wasn’t. BS: Well when it gets over the back end, it’s just an ordinary fence. AG: There wasn’t any down on the south. BS: That was the veterinary end of it. They also landed some airplanes in there. Mostly there were cattle in that the veterinary people used. C: I’ve got a question for you. It’s not on my list of questions, but what were the polo field and golf courses then, were they just open fields? BS: That was where they kept animals for veterinary medicine program. AG: The horses. BS: The veterinary department was down there where the civil engineering people were that was built in ‘34. <Located in Francis Hall, built in 1913> C: Oh, so the veterinary college was not the original. BS: No, they were not there originally. Those white looking buildings down there on the corner were built in 1934, same time Ag Engineering was built. It’s an interesting story, it really is. The original land grant for the college was in East Texas so the people, the lumbering interests, got together and said well, we’re going to put this in West Texas. So the legislature, in all of its wisdom, took that grant and gave it to West Texas. All of that in there was supposed to be for the University. Well in 1933, A&M and the University of Texas were going to get six million dollars. They were


going to place it so they would get the interest back for six million dollar A&M wanted two million of that and they were successful. And at that point in time in 1933 they started building. They turned the college around because in 1934 is when they built Highway 6. AG: That was an old gravel road. C: I thought Highway 6 had been there as long as the college. BS: It was built in ’34. And they turned the college around and two faced it. And the Systems building cost $400,000. C: So the college up until 1934 faced west, toward the railroad tracks? BS: That’s correct. AK: I have a question I want to ask Brother Scoates, did he ever live on the end of Quality Row? BS: Yes, I did. Last house. I have a picture in here AK: I thought so. AG: Something I think is interesting is how you pronounce Sbisa. ER: I would say Sss-Beeza. AG: There you are, he says it right. Nobody says it that way. Everybody says Sa-bisa. ER: Well I didn’t know it was right, I just did it. AG: But you just never hear anybody say it right. Mr. Sbisa was head of the dining hall. I remember Mr. Sbisa. He had white hair and a long white goatee. That was before Mr. Duncan. ER: I referred to it as the mess hall anyway. BS: One of the things interesting about Sbisa Hall when I went to school. They marched into that thing in company front. Do you know what I mean by company front? All the way across. C: Oh, so they were one great big long line.


BS: No, they were abreast. I don’t know how wide it was. Two companies wide or something and there’d be one behind the other. And they marched into Sbisa Hall and by time the last one came in the first one would be out. Remember that? ER: I remember marching in; I have no recollection who left first. I just walked in and ate. C: Were you children allowed to eat in mess halls? BS: No, nobody was allowed to take anything out there. ER: Maybe I ought to make my statement a bit more specific. When I was a student at A&M, I marched into the mess hall, but not as a campus brat, no. AG: There was no place to eat on the campus. You ate at home because there was no food service, except at the Aggieland Inn. C: Well where did the corps eat then? AG: They ate at the mess hall. BS: They formed up three times a day, in company front, all the way down military walk and out that way towards the tracks. C: What did you all do about bonfire? Did you help or did you just watch? Of course it wasn’t as organized as it is now. BS: The corps was the main part of it. There were people in the corps that actually worked in the mess hall. AG: You were talking about Bonfire. Bonfire was in front of where the MSC is, on Simpson Field. BS: Early bonfires were on what is now called Simpson Field. We called it the drill field. It was just a bunch of junk, or boxes, except that they had to have an outhouse on it. And some farmer would miss his outhouse every time. So the college got so they’d pay for this.

1928 Bonfire14


ER: I know what I remember about the outhouse on top - they always had a sign, Commandment’s Office, on the door is all I remember.

A&M College Campus Kids Memory Lane Oral History Project

Sponsored by the Historic Preservation Committee and

the Conference Center Advisory Committee of the City of College Station, Texas

February 18, 1998

Edited by Louis Hodges, July 2008. <Editor’s notes in angle brackets> Photo Credits: 1 Hupmobile, 19202, http://www.goantiques.com/scripts/images,id,774009.html 2Dana X. Bible, http://www.mackbrown-texasfootball.com/image_lib/bible_dx_150x180.jpg 3Project Hold Archives 4http://www.seriouswheels.com/1800-1919/1918-Ford-Model-T-Truck.htm 5Project Hold Archives 6Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University, #5219 7Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University 8Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University, #5344 9Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University, #5434 10http://www.houstonarchitecture.info/haif/index.php?showtopic=5763 11Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University, #5343 12Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University 13Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University 14Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M University, #954

a&m college campus kids 18 february 1998 - about...

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