Ramada College Station/Texas A&M

Ask anyone... they all know...

by Boozoo

Ask anyone... they all know where to find the Academic Building on campus. From there you'll find the statue of Lawrence Sullivan Ross (Sully) polished bright... and the flag pole where names are placed for Silver Taps every month. Also look for Sbisa, the Fish Pond (ask about post game yell practice), the YMCA building, Kyle Field, the statue of E King Gill, the Memorial Student Center... even the Library is a cool place to visit. Oh wow there is so much to see right there on campus!

If you're into camping, you can also venture out about 20 miles to the west to Lake Somerville - it's usually a very quiet little lake. If you happen to be there on a home game football weekend, don't miss Midnight Yell. Show up Friday night at Kyle Field and you'll see fans from both teams in the stands doing Yell Practice at midnight. I doubt if any school in the world can reproduce the atmosphere our Yell Practices have :-)

If you decide to go to a game at Kyle Field, make sure you don't get tickets in the student section unless you enjoy getting sun baked for 4 hours and you don't mind standing up for the duration of the game (except for briefly at halftime).

Tour of Aggieland

by Boozoo

First thing you should know about Aggies is everyone in Texas loves to tell Aggie jokes. When we grimmace, it's not because they offend us, it's because we've heard every one there is to tell ten times over! :-)

The second thing you should know is we do NOT like "teasippers" - our affectionate name for the students and graduates of t.u. (another affectionate name for Univ. of Texas in Austin).... Oh it's all in good fun, but it sure is relentless! The best teasipper is a sacked teasipper!!!! :-)

Over on the SE corner of campus is the O&M Building. For all I know, they've renamed it after a money paying regent by now, but back then it was for Oceanography and Meteorology. I actually had one class there but I can't remember what it was because I never attended anyway :-)

I thought I should include it here because it's a very prominent part of the TAMU skyline and you'll see it's weather radar from miles away if you're driving in from the south on Highway 6. Come to think of it, I always thought the A&M skyline looked an awful lot like an urban downtown LOL

Let's venture over to the Memorial Student Center, another prominent area in student life. They used to have hotel rooms you could stay in, too, but forget about getting one on a home game weekend! In the background, you can see Rudder Tower. At the base is the campus theater, and if you look close you can make out the antennas on top of the MSC that belong to the amateur radio club (W5AC). The radio club at A&M was founded in 1912 and I believe is the oldest university ham club in existence. Oh and if you happened to see a surge in their DXCC totals between 1987 and 1990... that was my fault (NA5Z). And I have the suffering GPA to prove it! :-)

Also inside the MSC is a collection of Congressional Medals of Honor won by A&M graduates that is very humbling to walk through and look at. Remember, the MSC is a memorial to fallen Aggies, so don't forget to remove your hat when entering, and please keep off of the grass. :-)

As you venture north away from the MSC and past The Grove (outdoor movie theater), you will see Albritton Tower, which of course rings the Spirit of Aggieland after a home victory. Standing 138 feet tall, it features 49 bells that ring every 15 minutes.

Spend too much time and effort drinking, stub your toe, or just really masochistic? This is the place for you then, the AP Beutel Health Clinic. It was mostly free, but then you get what you pay for LOL Like most places on campus, this too had a nickname... Brutal Beutel. No offense intended of course :-)

In between Beutel and the MSC is the YMCA building, which has been standing since 1915. As one of the elder buildings on campus, it is of course the site for another football post-game tradition... more on that in the football page. Now the YMCA is mostly used for administrative functions... including the dreaded fiscal department.

A&M is all about traditions. There are traditions facing you everywhere you turn. Maybe that's because it started out as a military land grant college in 1876... and military folk have a natural tendancy to enforce routines and continue traditions. :-)

Seen here is a Final Review from 1920. I wasn't in the Corps at A&M, but as I recall this is the last review the cadets will march in before the seniors earn their comissions and graduate.

I'd like to give due credits for these early photographs, but I've seen them all over the web so I'm not sure who to credit?

The building you saw on the front page was the Academic building... this is the view from inside the arch. The figure in front of you is the statue of Lawrence Sullivan Ross, the flag pole beyond that is where the names are posted for Silver Taps, which is a monthly sunset ceremony with full military honors for any Aggies that may have passed in the previous month. Speaking of traditions, as I recall, off to the right of this view is a semi-famous oak where many an Aggie has proposed to his intended bride :-)

Speaking of Silver Taps.......

"Lets walk around the campus a bit...."

Zachry Engineering Center... a big boring block of a building, it is where I spent the majority of my class time. Its on the NE corner of campus... I think they like to keep engineers away from the "normal" student population. I'll never forget the day I walked by and saw "Repeal Ohm's Law!" scribbled on the sidewalk. I'm sure ONLY the engineering students thought it was funny and after being in the profession ten years, I'd have to say some things never change - we still get a lot of blank stares from our attempts at humor :-)

I know I'm going to get skinned for this, but a little bit west of Zachry is the Blocker Building where the bulk of business majors went to class when I was there. The running joke back then was that you should roll up your windows when you drove by, or they'd try to toss a diploma in your car.

Another place I spent a lot of time... although it was usually spent watching girls more than studying.... This is Sterling C Evans Library. They have an amazing periodical section and I swear it is still the biggest library I have ever been in - yet surprisingly it was missing a lot of research material you would have thought would be run of the mill for them. Hopefully they've improved on that since I left... I don't think this camera angle quite shows the way the upper stories overhang, but the resemblance the architecture of this building bears to a certain famous ship in Star Trek earned it the nickname, "Sterling C. Enterprise."

Yet another place I spent more time than I should - Sbisa Dining Hall... Sbisa was built after the first mess hall burned to the ground in 1911. They served their first meal in September, 1913. It has been expanded and renovated ever since then, with the latest renovations wrapping up within the last year. People made fun of it, but I have to defend these guys - the chow was always Grade A and had a wide variety to choose from. From the point this picture was taken, if you turn around, you'll see the Fish Pond. More on that later :-)