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I guess now I’m officially an old fart. I participated in the Aggie Band reunion. It was interesting to see how I compared to the “real” old farts. This weekend was the Corps reunion – 125 years old (the Band only goes back to 1894). They did a presentation and some various events around campus – it was pretty cool.

Also this weekend, and perhaps more significantly, at the football game A&M did a little stunt called “Red, White and Blue Out”. A little history – a few years ago (1998) seems we kept not only getting beat by Nebraska (where they breed their football players big apparently) but we kept getting annihilated by them. Everyone did – they had an undefeated record stretching back a year or so. So someone came up with idea to do “Maroon Out” – since the Nebraska game that year was at Kyle Field the idea was to print out tons of maroon T-shirts with “Maroon Out” on them (maroon and white are the A&M colors) and sell them as cheaply as possible – $5 (barely covering the $4+ price of printing the shirt) with the hopes of the football players’ spirits being encouraged by seeing so much maroon in the stands and the opposing team being scared by the strong showing. When the Aggies won the game 28-21 the Maroon Out concept was given most of the credit. For that game 31,000 shirts were sold to the crowd of 68,000+ (remember that most A&M fans already own a maroon shirt of some sort). Now each year a game is designated the “Maroon Out” game (this year it’s Notre Dame, next weekend), but there’s always a ton of these shirts at the game.

In wake of the WTC incident someone came up with a concept to do “Red White and Blue Out” – only this time to infest the three different decks of Kyle Field – third (top) deck was red, second (middle) deck was white, first (bottom) deck was blue. And as you can see from this picture the effort was not only successful, but was an amazing success – 70,000 shirts were sold to the 82,601 people at the game. The section of khaki on the first deck is the Corps of Cadets and the splotches of orange on the other side of that deck are Oklahoma fans, but the second and third decks especially were more or less perfect in their participation. The $150,000 profit from the $5 shirt sales will go to the relief efforts.

The “USA” is being spelled out by the Aggie Band and somewhere in that cluster of maroon people on the top of the field is me – that’s the Reunion Band and we had just left the field after playing “The Noble Men of Kyle”. All in all it was pretty cool and it’s futher evidence that I’m involved in something that will never die.