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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 3, 1982)
■ l i ;3 M>— M c <; wtn: 5Q .S cr. ^ iffii ?e place to snow ski, :ees and wear winter clothes Bundling up ikees can't avoid, omething Texans med to. others every once weather can't com- \peratures on the ample: this Dec. 1 I degrees) town the joys of and halter tops in ifamiliar with the ther, so too are we by some Texas it shin frost-bite or nside boots — but fashionable. Leg- a worn by these a cruel joke to a thing else Texans fy with. Seen on alogues, it only id wonder at why such good-looking people opt to dress in such silly outfits. But long underwear and legwarmers are staples in a Yankee wardrobe. They're vital because weather in the north is cold. Legs have been known to feel numb for weeks at a time from the freezing tempera tures. Long underwear is needed, not to warm the body in such cold weather (it's too cold for anything to warm anything up there) it just keeps a Yankee's circulation going until spring thaws. A typical northern closet is stuffed with a least a half-dozen mittens and wool caps and ski parka for every member of the family — including the family dog. The reason for all these comparisions is to warn Texans before heading north. Bundle up before going skiing, Yankee searching or visit ing in a colder climate. And remember weath er in the north shouldn't be taken as "just another Blue Norther" — those freezing tem peratures last and last and last. And if you are going north, you can forget your bathing suit — we guarantee you won't miss it. staff photo by John Ryan Susan Murray is dressed to ski. But Texans weren't wearing such chic attire this past week when the temperature reached 80. Murray, a senior aerospace engineering major, is from Houston. 15, she said, ximum of 46 sometimes said. “Only ie Purgatory •Park, Colo. ;e, she said, varies with ?n. day trip are nsportation 11 be by bus, littee is also s for spring , Colo, and both leave n March 18, lot definite le will be a ested Butte Group goes north in search of Yankees by Daniel Puckett Battalion Staff Climate. Cold Climate. Mass migrations don't hap pen without a good cause. The streets of Texas are filled with foreign cars — not just the Japanese and the German kind, but also the Michigan kind, the Illinois kind. Where did they come from? Why did they leave there? Why, when they com plain about Texas so incessant ly, don't they go home? I was a member of a group of Aggies that went north in the middle of November. We de cided to answer these questions above, once and for all. We also tackled the biggest question of our time — What is it like to be a Yankee? The place we picked to do our research was Milwaukee. In Wisconsin. On the shores of Lake Michigan. There, we felt, could be found the essence of modem Yankeedom. And the fact that a national journalists' convention was happening there had nothing to do with our decision. Honest. The first thing we noticed ab out Milwaukee in mid- November was the weather: it was cold. Not your Texas cold — freezing in the morning, warm in the afternoon — but your hopeless, oppressive, all-day- and-all-night death-in-the- streets cold. Milwaukee is right on Lake Michigan, which means it's damp; it also means the city's cursed with a howling wind that cuts right through five layers of clothing. The sun peeped out of the clouds from time to time in the three and a half days we were there; maybe three and a half times, in fact. The rest of the time it was dark and damp and cold. The sun rose late and set by 4:30 or so. The day we arrived the high was around 50 degrees: disk jockeys were ecstatic about the balminess of the day. The day we left, the low was 17 degrees and the high was 24; Milwaukeeans were thankful that “the real cold weather" hadn't arrived yet. And, of course, it ha n't snowed; 100 miles away, they were getting 14 inches of the mysterious substance (we're all from warm parts of Texas). We didn't particularly want to hang around to find out what "real cold weather" is like. Buildings Milwaukee is old; not as old as San Antonio but it got the Industrial Revolution much ear lier. That means it built tall buildings before Texas did. Unlike Texas cities, though, the skyscraper boom ended a while back. The city has very few new buildings, and most of those look like government work. Inside the public buildings, Milwaukeeans like to keep the temperature at a nice, comfort able 90 degrees. They probably do it for the same reason we keep our buildings at about 50 degrees in the summer: to re mind themselves how different the outside is from the inside. But we'd shiver outdoors and sweat indoors and then go out side and feel the perspiration turn into pre-ice. It's a wonder people don't get more pneumo nia than they do up there. Private homes are different, of course. We never entered any but people told us about them. They tend to be chilly, because heating is so expensive (more on that in a minute). We did want to see real Yank ee neighborhoods for ourselves, so we drove around town for an afternoon. We didn't cruise ev ery suburb — though by getting lost we managed to drive through quite a few — but we saw hundreds of those frame houses people built before brick was the 'in' thing. And a funny thing about some of those houses: they were wrapped in transparent plastic. The front door would have a hole cut for it, but otherwise the plastic apparently encircled the house. It looked as though the homes were encased in giant Baggies. We heard that people do that to cut down on their heating bills, the cost of home heating oil being what it is. If only we could have found out just exactly what home heating oil is ... Health Yankees give new meaning to the word “pale." Pale, down here, means less tanned than usual; even in the dead of win ter, with summer's tan long gone, we never approach the level of pallor that Yankees man age to attain. Unless, that is, we work underground. Words like “fish-belly" and “alabaster" do not convey, nor other words express, the utter whiteness of the Yanks on the street. They all have little pink spots on their cheeks, but those spots and facial hair, if any, supply all the color you get in a Caucasian Yankee face. The only people who don't look as though they've just left the crypt (continued on page 14)