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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 13, 1984)
RENT AIT AGGIE SERVICES Mother’s Helpers..Party Help Shopping Service..Yard Work .irom Babysitting to Bartenders.. Owned and Operated by an Aggie mom & daughter CAROL 6* LIZ MANTZANO 11 lO B-Spring Loop, C.S. 846-8634 Page 4/The BattalionAThursday, September 13, 1984 Kyle Field plants tailored to years By DALE SMITH Reporter Bacardi Rum 8 ° c Light or Dark $0" Liter Clear Springs 190° Grain Alcohol 15. 99 1.75 Liter “Great For Punches” Smirnoff so Vodka $A" 750 ml Seagram 7 8 ° c American Blended Old Milwaukee Beer 6-12oz cans $1 99 ARE JUST BEHIND OUR DOOR AT 1503 University Dr. <gg(gS.LEYS> Where there is always something on special! No credit cards on sale items please Kyle Field’s south endzone has re ceived a new look every football sea son since the late 1960s. From the stands you can read, 1876 TEXAS AGGIES 1984, embroidered in the endzone’s colorful plants. Bill Vitopil, assistant director of grounds maintenance, said the plant beds were built when astroturf re placed grass on the playing field. Vitopil said the plants are green and bronze variety Alternathera plants. The bronze plants are used for the letters and numerals and the green plants are used in the back ground. “When the temperature is in the 50s, it’ll make the bronze variety al most a maroon — the green back ground turns to a yellow tint,” he said. The beds are planted every year about mid-June, Vitopil said. “Before planting, we till the bed, rake and smooth out, mark and lay out the letters with string,” he said. “We put the bronze in the letters and green around them.” Five to seven days before a home game a crew shears the tops and edges of the plants so they can easily be read from the stands, he said. The message in the plants vir tually remains the same every year, Vitopil said. The only thing that really changes is the new date each year. Vitopil said the plant beds were designed by Dr. Robert Rucker, the land architect at the time and cur rently a professor emeritus in horti culture. Rucker, Class of ’38, said he was asked by the Board of Regents in 1967 to come back to A&M. The re gents wanted someone to give the campus more beauty, he said. During the 1930s, flowers dotted the campus, he said. But after the war began, other interests occupied everyone’s time and the plants weren’t properly taken care of, he said. Rucker believes it is essential to beautify academic environments with plants. “In a planned environment such as the campus, attention to details must be given,” he said. “Because without perfection of details, there cannot be perfection of the whole. It’s subtle, but very important to the total educational process. “The reason why the ground maintenance deptartment tries to have colorful flowers at every season of the year, is a basic desire that ev ery student attending A&M should have a daily exposure to beauty.” Rucker said that since his retire ment seven years ago, he is pleased with the work of the ground mainte nance deptartment. “I couldn’t be happier with the job of the department,” he said. Many fans may not have noticed the dot, dot, dot, dash (...-) after 1876 TEXAS AGGIES 1984, or know that in Morse Code it means “V for Victory,” he said. Around town Anthropology Society presents lecture The TAMU Anthropology Society will sponsor a lecture and slide presentation, “A Sunken 17th Century City; Port Royal, Ja maica,” tonight at 7 p.m. in 301 Bolton. Dr. D.L. Hamilton, assistant professor in The Department on Anthropology, is an expert in the conservation of archaeological materials from underwater sites and is the director of the Port Royal Jamaica Project. Port Royal is a unique archaeological site because two-thirds of the city sunk into Kingston Harbour in a matter of minutes during an earthquake. Casino Pictures can be picked up now People who ordered pictures from last spring’s Casino Night ' :k f can pick them up now. Students who lived on-campus last semester should contact their dorm president or RHA delegate. Students who lived off-campus, come by the RHA office, 215 Pavilion. Big Event job requests being accepted Job requests are now being accepted from the Bryan-College Sta tion community for projects for the Big Event, a four-hour service project. Student organizations wishing to volunteer their group are encouraged to pledge. Deadlines for both job requests and organiza tion pledges are Nov. 1. Contact Mark Maniha at 696-5930. Register now for Junior Flag Football The College Station Parks and Recreation Department is spon soring a Junior Flag Football League for children between the ages of 7 and 12. Registration will be at the Parks and Recreation Office, 1000 Krenek l ap Road, through Friday. For further information contact the College Station Parks and Recreation Department at 764- 3773. Scientists analyze horses’ speed University News Service Texas A&M animal scientists are developing a new method of mea suring a horse’s worth — or genetic capacity — by measuring its average speed during a race rather than computing the value based on the horse’s earnings. Dr. Nat Kieffer and doctoral stu dent James Pounds point out that while Olympic runners have im proved their speed for a mile-long race by over 1 3 seconds in the last 30 years, horses are falling behind. Since 1896 the winning time of the Kentucky Derby has improved by only 8.18 seconds, or by just about a iecond per decade, Kieffer said. The 1980 Derby winner was only three seconds faster than the 1932 champion, while ‘the Olympic time for the 1,500-meter run was re duced by more than 12 seconds dur ing the same period. “Men and women don’t get mar ried because they think they’re going to produce fast offspring, whereas we have been selecting for speed in thoroughbred horses for the last 300 years,” he said. Kieffer said the speed in the American Triple Crown races, in cluding the Derby, Belmont and Preakness in which top horses an nually compete, has plateaued and has tended to decrease over the last decade since Secretariat broke the two-minute record for the 10 Fur long (1 1/4 miles) race in 1973. He suggests the method of select ing horses based on earnings rather than on speed might be one reason horses haven’t gotten much faster. “If two horses run the same race and the horse which comes in second does so only by a nose, he might get less than half the earnings of the first place winner, or $50,000 vs. $125,000,” Kieffer said. “The sec ond place horse actually might be a faster horse, but if you look at the earnings, you’d assume the winner is twice as good, which really isn’t the case.” The horse specialists f rom Texas A&M’s College of Agriculture are developing criteria for measuring the horse’s genetic capacity, or the speed he is capable of achieving, based on the average speed per fur long, particularly from the begin ning of the top of the stretch to the end of a race. “This is a much more objective way of measuring a horse’s genetic capacity or genetic variation be cause, after all, we measure speed by minutes and seconds, not by dol lars,” Kieffer said. Keiffer explained the final stretch of the race is particularly important be cause that’s when the race is won. The strategy in horse races is similar to that in human races, he said, in that the leading horses tend to star grouped together until that las stretch. For this reason horses gen erally don’t run their maximum speed during a race. “Then the one with the mos ‘kick,’ or the one who has the mos energy left in the last stretch, usually pulls ahead and wins,” he said. Kieffer said another reason horse speed may not have improved over the years is that training methods are virtually the same whereas hu man training is much differentthan it was even a decade ago. “Training is as important an in gredient as breeding," he said “There is nothing you can do to make a horse run faster than his ge netic capacity, hut there are a lot of things you can do to make him run slower.” SHOW YOUR FOLKS HOW SMART YOU ARE BLOOD SAMPLE - $5.00 - We are conducting a serum survey for next winter’s Flu Study and will take up to 3000 blood samples. For information and to give a sample come see the Flu Fighters at: COMMONS LOUNGE - Mon-Fri, Sept 10-14. MEDICAL SCIENCES BUILDING, Rm 162 - Mon-Tues, Sept 10-11. BEUTEL HEALTH CENTEB, Rm 002 - Wed-Fri, Sept 12-14. 9:30 AM-5 PM (4 PM Friday) 9:30 AM-5PM 9:30-4 PM Help Stamp Out Flu- Dr. John Quarles 845-1358 The Mongolian House "The Restaurant Everyone's Talking About" ALL YOU CAN EAT! 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