Page 4
The Battalion
Monday, November 21,1988
Spirited Ags
build bonfire,
keep tradition
One of the best known of all Ag
gie traditions, bonfire began in the
early 1900s as nothing more than a
pile of junk burned by excited stu
dents in anticipation of Varsity foot
ball games.
During November and December,
when the games usually were played,
a Fire was welcomed for the warmth
it added to the chilly night.
Building and burning a bonfire
before the University of Texas foot
ball game on Thanksgiving grad
ually became a custom, and by the
1920s it was a tradition, a former
commandant and coach at Texas
A&M wrote in a letter to the Univer
sity archives.
Frank Anderson, who saw his first
bonfire in the fall of 1920, said the
fire consisted of community trash,
tree limbs, boxes, lumber scraps and
other debris.
The outhouse that sits atop bon
fire found its beginning in this era.
One of the cadets’ favorite materials
for building bonfires was untended,
unwatched and hopefully, unoccu
pied outhouses, Anderson wrote.
Speeches and yells accompanied
the lighting of the bonfire, but the
fire usually was burned out by the
time the speeches ended.
Apparently no one considered the
early bonfires very memorable, since
the first picture of a bonfire didn’t
appear until 1928 in the Longhorn,
the A&M yearbook.
By 1935, bonfire was an estab
lished tradition, marked by the en
thusiasm of the cadets who gathered
junk to build it.
The cadets’ resourcefulness began
to bring complaints from the com
munity. On the morning after the
1935 bonfire, a very irate farmer vis
ited Anderson’s office and said the
cadets had carried off his log barn.
Because of the problems in 1935,
the building of bonfire was put un
der the commandant’s control
1936.
Cadets chopped down a grove of
dead cottonwood trees near what is
now Easterwood Airport. Texas
A&M College provided the axes,
saws and trucks.
The 1936 bonfire was the first all
log one.
This year’s bonfire will be made
possible by the combined effort of
Cadets and non-regs, on- and off-
campus students, and independents
and Greeks. Students have been at
work for more than a month in or
der to build the bonfire that rep
resents their “burning desire to beat
the hell out of t.u.”
The first cut began on Oct. 2 at a
cutsite between Carlos and Nava-
sota, and 24-hour push at stack be
gan on Nov. 11. Bonfire will be lit
Tuesday night at 8:09 p.m., and a
yell practice will follow.
Photos by Mike C. Mulvey
A redpot hoists up a chainsaw before sunset to top the trees around the first bonfire
stack.
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