The Aggie Bonfire was a long-standing annual tradition at Texas A&M University as part of the college rivalry with the University of Texas at Austin. The event symbolized Aggie students’ “burning desire to beat the hell outta t. u. \”, a derogatory nickname for Texas. In 1999, the Bonfire collapsed during construction, killing 11 students and one former student and injuring 27 others. Since 2002, a student-sponsored coalition has constructed an annual unsanctioned, off-campus \”Student Bonfire\”
About Aggie Bonfire in brief
The Aggie Bonfire was a long-standing annual tradition at Texas A&M University as part of the college rivalry with the University of Texas at Austin. The event symbolized Aggie students’ “burning desire to beat the hell outta t. u. \”, a derogatory nickname for Texas. The bonfire was traditionally lit around Thanksgiving in conjunction with festivities surrounding the annual football game. In 1999, the Bonfire collapsed during construction, killing 11 students and one former student and injuring 27 others. Since 2002, a student-sponsored coalition has constructed an annual unsanctioned, off-campus \”Student Bonfire\” in the spirit of its predecessor. The students of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, known as Aggies, burned their first bonfire on November 18, 1907, to congratulate the football team on a recent win. Early bonfires were little more than piles of trash, but the event gradually became more organized and eventually grew to an immense size, setting the world record in 1969. The Bonfire design changed in 1942 when Universal Studios, filming the movie We’ve Never Been Licked, built a bonfire as a prop for the movie. The structure used a design similar to a teepee, where all the logs rested against each other in a conical shape. The logs were placed at an angle between 23 and 30 degrees, giving it \”a tremendous vertical and horizontal resistance\”. This allowed Bonfire to grow from 25 feet tall to over 50 feet tall.
Beginning in 1952, the bonfire were constructed entirely from fresh-cut logs. In 1956, there was an attempt to plant explosives at the Bonfires, and in the late 1970s, a College Station police officer was fired after trying to ignite theBonfire. In both 1933 and 1948, students from UT rented an airplane and tried to drop fire bombs onto the stack. In one of these instances, the plane ran low on fuel and was forced to land at Easterwood Airport in College Station. In the late 1990s, students attempted to light the stack early, but no avail, and the bon fire burned as scheduled. During the 1940s, the school paper described Bonfire as \”the greatest event of the football season\”. The 1947 Corps handbook stated that \”bonfire symbolizes two things: a burning desire to beating the team from the University. of Texas,. and the undying flame of love that every loyal Aggie carries in his heart for the school\”; this was often shortened to “Bonfire” The event suffered its first fatality in 1955, when a student was struck by a swerving car. For unrelated reasons, that same year the Bon Fire was moved from Simpson Drill Field in front of the Memorial Student Center to Duncan Field, near the dorms of the Corps of Cadets. In 1957, the structure collapsed two days before Bonfire, but students worked around-the-clock to rebuild it.
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This page is based on the article Aggie Bonfire published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
