Behold the oddities of Aggie in this vintage 1981 article

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As an Aggie myself, I can tell you that the people in the photographs on this and the following pages are all being Aggies. None of them are faking it. Nobody can fake being an Aggie. It has to come naturally to you, which is just another way of saying that Aggies are born, not made. You can develop and strengthen your innate Aggieness, as these cadets are doing. That’s the reason they’re at A&M

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Which doesn’t mean they aren’t looking for a regular college education, too. Nobody ever went to A&M who didn’t already know he needed to get smarter. If you came out of a Texas high school with any pretensions at all, you went someplace else: if you had social pretensions you went to SMU; intellectual pretensions, to Rice; spiritual pretensions, to Baylor; or if you had an arrogant bent in no special direction you went to t.u., the place in Austin with the Day-Glo tower. All these schools are designed to encourage your illusions, to make you believe you’re something you’re not. Aggies have no illusions. 

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Bad bull: Since 1974 women (‘‘Waggies’’) have been allowed in the corps of cadets, and many Aggies resent it. This Waggie has the rank to make the cadets “get down and push’’ for her. Whatever they think, to her it’s good bull.

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Since then the Aggie reputation has grown into something just shy of mythical—as large and colorful as the Texas imagination, as unique and unpredictable. The Aggie of the jokes is the terminal bumpkin: outclassed in any company, over his head in every situation, blissfully gullible, relentlessly horny. He is easy to please, slow to catch on. Sort of like Steve Martin playing John Wayne, except bigger and X-rated.

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Imagine the burden of living up to a reputation like that. It isn’t easy, I promise you. We’re somehow expected to behave in uniquely ridiculous ways, totally uncalled-for ways, in absurd and obscene and laughable ways. Texans everywhere are depending on us. It’s a never-ending challenge, a challenge we Aggies are born to meet. But we’re trained for it during our four years at A&M. These photographs all show important Aggie rituals or traditions—quadding, whipping out, catching butterflies, watching the bonfire, and the rest. To all you t.u. graduates and Rice intellectuals and SMU beauty queens and Baylor saints, these rites of Aggiedom may look just like what you thought Aggies would do. 

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But to Aggies, all this looks normal. Campus legend, honored by repetition to each incoming class, is that these rituals help bring the cadets together, form bonds of camaraderie and spirit that will never be broken. Maybe they do, or maybe they do something else entirely. I just know that they are the crucible of Aggiedom. Beyond that I can’t say. I’m an Aggie. To be an Aggie is not to wonder why.

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“Squeeze, Ags!’’ These yell leaders are—yes, it’s true—squeezing their privates in order to share pain with the team onthe football field. Nobody knows who first came up with this idea, but it’s never caught on with anyone but Aggies.

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These fish (freshman cadets) are ‘catching butterflies’’ with their fingertips during an exhausting crap-out—a physical discipline imposed by upperclassmen. Unruly fish who get out of line get crapped out. So do fish who stay in line.

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Quadding: Stripped to his shorts, a cadet has barrels of water poured on his crotch from a second-story window.

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A good bull crap-out: a crap-out with the edge taken off. At a crap-out, upperclassmen yell; here they’re laughing.

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