Growing up in College Station meant a life governed by the tides. Waves of students would roll into town each August and then recede again the following May. As the adolescent sons of members of the Texas A&M faculty, in those pre-internet days, my friends and I would eagerly await the annual spring exodus so that we could comb the dumpsters of the emptying apartment complexes for discarded girlie magazines. We’d stash them in our clubhouse, which we’d built from construction scrap salvaged from the sites of the first sorority houses.
None of the students in charge stopped us twelve-year-olds from attending the annual science fiction convention on campus, where we saw R-rated movies like The Exorcist and Flesh Gordon. The A&M campus was our amusement park—with its underground steam tunnels and unlocked rooms in Rudder Tower. We found ways to sneak onto the roof of the Memorial Student Center and gain, through rather perilous means, access to Kyle Field at night.
I arrived in College Station in 1976, as a sixth grader, when my father became a professor in A&M’s nascent nautical archaeology program. Back then, the university had more than 27,000 students—about the same number as there were residents in the city. In other words, A&M loomed over College Station like a giant maroon cloud. This made the rivalry with the University of Texas (or t.u., as we derisively called it) as much a matter of civic pride as one of gridiron bragging rights.
Both A&M and College Station suffered from insecurity. A&M was smaller, less well-known, and widely viewed as less sophisticated than its Capital City counterpart. Aggies sang about “saw[ing] Varsity’s horns off” at every game, regardless of the opponent, as if there were only one that mattered. Since UT has a famous bell tower, an Aggie donor in the eighties decided A&M should have one too. Never mind that it’s smaller, architecturally bland, and utterly unnecessary.
College Station, largely lacking in its own identity, couldn’t compete with cool, hip Austin. We had Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen, but Austin had, well, seemingly every other musician in Texas. Austin was truly weird and, as such, the antithesis of College Station, which, to the extent it had a culture, was buttoned-down, practical, and conformist.
Yet as the Aggies and the Longhorns prepare to renew their rivalry, much has changed. A&M is now the bigger school—with more than 77,000 students this year, compared with a mere 53,000 at UT. College Station’s population has also ballooned, to 125,000 residents, surpassing that of neighboring Bryan (90,000), which used to be the larger city.
For most former students, College Station remains fixed in time, according to which four-year period they called the place home. If you knew the Campus Theater, the Basement Coffeehouse, and Mr. Gatti’s (where Lovett often played on Friday nights), you were not of the same vintage as those who knew Fajita Rita’s, the Cow Hop, and the Deluxe Burger Bar. (The Dixie Chicken and Duddley’s Draw remain transgenerational touchstones.)
The histories of Texas A&M and College Station are inextricably linked. Founded in 1876, the university was located on the fields outside Bryan, where the tenured faculty lived. By the 1970s, College Station was coming into its own. The university was growing rapidly, and professors hired for expanding colleges, such as liberal arts, settled into the city’s burgeoning new subdivisions.
We, the children of the tenured, grew up when George Bush Drive was Jersey Street, the site of the Bush Presidential Library was the Swine Center (home to porcine research), and Easterwood Airport offered flights to Houston on the family-run Davis Airlines, where you could sit in the always-empty copilot seat if you asked.
Some of my father’s colleagues, who had lived all over the world, viewed College Station as a barren wasteland, but to me, having moved there from a far smaller town, in Pennsylvania, it was a bustling place, with first-run movies, competing cable systems, and overwhelming dining options—a McDonald’s and a Burger King, not to mention a fabulous establishment called Whataburger.
Our high school, A&M Consolidated, had not only the same name and colors as the university across town but also many of the same activities, including an annual bonfire. A&M burned a fifty-foot pyre of freshly cut trees before the UT game each season; Consolidated had a smaller fire, off school grounds, before the homecoming game.
Leslie Hyman, who was in the Consolidated band and is now a lawyer in San Antonio, reminded me that our band marched military-style after most other high schools switched to “show style.” We refused to change because A&M’s band, of course, marched military-style. “When a new band director came and insisted on the switch, a lot of us were very unhappy,” she said.
The drinking age then was eighteen, which meant most Aggies were legal. We high schoolers worked part-time jobs alongside college students who were happy to buy us booze and invite us to their parties. Elvin Smith, one of the first friends I made in Texas, who’s now a lawyer in Dallas, recalled sneaking into the Texas Hall of Fame, a country and western nightclub that rarely checked IDs. He’d try to pick up female college freshmen by pretending to be an Aggie. He’d claim to be a general-studies major taking some generic course like “English 101.”
Even though we had a major university in town, many of us dreamed about getting away once we graduated from high school. I entered A&M grudgingly, assuming I’d transfer somewhere else eventually. My girlfriend, whom I’d met without a dance hall ruse, was already there, and she suggested I visit the journalism department. I fell in love and wound up married to both journalism and the girl.
Granted, I’m not a typical Aggie. I never bought a class ring, I never went to Fish Camp (where incoming freshmen learn Aggie traditions), and I attended Bonfire only in middle and high school, never as an A&M student. But my ties to the university run deeper than most. A&M gave my dad—who didn’t have a four-year degree—a chance at a life-changing career that UT or most other schools wouldn’t have offered him. That, in turn, gave me opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise. At various times, A&M has been my school, my publisher, my client, my business partner, and my playground.
I’ve had my disagreements with my alma mater over the years, some of which I’ve documented, but I still bristle at the sneering condescension that some Longhorns heap on A&M and my hometown. That’s why, for me, the annual UT game wasn’t just a football contest—it was a culture clash for both the schools and their surrounding communities, a chance to beat back the holier-than-thou attitude of the tea sippers (as we call Longhorns because of their historically elitist sense of privilege).
In the years since A&M went to the SEC and UT stayed behind, the Aggies and College Station have come into their own. As the rivalry resumes, the dynamics have changed. Austin, with its high-rise cubicle farms, Tesla Gigafactory, and suburban blandness sprawling from the Domain to South Lamar, isn’t all that weird anymore. Nor is A&M the insecure college living in UT’s shadow. The Forty Acres has become, by comparison, home to a quaint little school up the road.
In College Station, A&M’s influence still dominates—my childhood home is now a student rental—but the city has grown beyond it. A few years ago, I attended a dinner at an Aggieland steakhouse with one of my oldest friends. Having lived in New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo, he’d become a bit of a foodie. He held a piece of steak aloft, looked at me, and said in approval and disbelief, “College Station. Really?” Truly fine dining, not far from what had been an empty field where we smashed up old bikes as kids.
The fields are full now, and getting fuller. College Station’s growth has a utilitarian feel. But for me, the town of my youth was much more than a place to go to school. For my family, and probably for many others, it was a place where we found our dreams. And that’s worth standing up for.
So next weekend, when the rivalry resumes, I’ll once again be cheering for the home team. Beat the hell outta t.u.
