Ancient History... or so it seems...

Ancient History... is really a matter of perspective... 

Sure, there's the dictionary definition, but all the more often we tend to use our own perspective as our working definition... and sometimes ancient history can be as recent as only a few years...

It's funny that younger students think "this is how it's always been" and I think "when the heck did they start doing this?"... so I figured a retrospective might be in order...

photo courtesy of:
www.aggiecampusology.com

When I started at Texas A&M...


Bonfire was held on Duncan Field behind the Quad and it always burned the week of Thanksgiving for the t.u. game... during the Fall Semester you could sign up for Bonfire Buddies and exchange small gifts with your buddy up until the t.u. game

West Campus consisted of green pastures grazed by Aggie cows which produced some fine milk which went into Aggie ice cream which could be bought at the creamery in front of the Commons

The best place to get a burger was The Cowhop, and you ordered a Cow Pie and Fries... best hole in the wall place to eat... ever

Cars could actually drive through campus... all the way through

There were no parking garages on campus, and if you weren't an upperclassman you parked in the surface lots across the railroad tracks... and buses didn't go there

Blinn, in Bryan, did not exist, and there was no feeder school for A&M... there was no automatic admission for the top 10%... and I got into A&M with a 1000 SAT score

No one... absolutely no one... ever put pennies on Sully's boots in order to gain favor before tests

There was an actual 12th Man Kickoff Return Team during football games thanks to Coach Jackie Sherrill

There was no Rec Center, the outside swimming pool was right next to Kyle Field, and the north end of Kyle Field only had one deck

Everyone walking across campus would look at other people, and carry on conversations, because there were no earbuds, because there were no ipods

There were no cell phones... so when you walked into class people actually talked to each other because there was no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to check and there was no one to text since texting didn't exist yet

  photo courtesy of:
www.aggiecampusology.com

Reveille IV retired and Reveille V was installed 

To have cash for a Friday night date you would cash a check at the front desk of the hotel in the MSC... ATMs were new technology and locations were rare

You could have a TV in your dorm room, but there were no DVD players in existence, VCRs were brand new technology and very rare to find

Microwaves were banned in the dorm room as well as every other kind of cooking device... you might cook hot dogs in your coffee maker and make a grilled cheese sandwich with your iron though if you were desperate

Ancient History... is really a matter of perspective... 

The current students are forming their own version of Ancient History... in a few years they'll come back and they will begin to say "back in my day"... and someday they'll tell their own kids the stories, and their own kids won't believe them, because their own kids don't understand Ancient History yet... they don't have the perspective...