MaLinda saw an item the other day online about fish spurs.
She had never come across the term in all of the Aggie-related things we have in our house.
It did bring a chuckle to me, since it’s the first time I’ve thought about them in years, maybe decades.
I’ve included a current-day photo of fish spurs.
When I was in the Corps of Cadets at A&M, 1968-72, freshmen were required to make fish spurs for the SMU game.
You know, ride ‘em Mustangs.
That was back in the old Southwest Conference days – how I miss that conference.
In my time it was A&M, Texas, Tech, SMU, TCU, Baylor, Rice, and Arkansas.
Anyway, Aggie Corps fish would spend hours hammering bottle caps and drilling or pounding a hole in each.
Once you have the required number – it varied on the Corps outfit you were in – you would force the caps onto the coathanger wire.
You then fashioned the wire with the caps around your shoe heels to hold the spurs in place.
The tradition lives on today, except Corps fish wear them when the Aggies play Arkansas, which they did last weekend.
Fish spurs date back to the 1930s.
I remember seeing them in our house growing up since my brother (Class of ’60) had a pair.
In the week before the Arkansas game then, Corps’ juniors had to stand in their chairs at the Duncan dining hall and call “sooeee” for the pigs.
No big deal to me – it was nothing compared to pounding those bottle caps on the concrete outside of the dorm.
Those traditions are fun for me to think about, even if it’s been 55 years since I wore the spurs.
I actually held onto them over the years after A&M, but they fell out of my possession and memory along the long pathway of moving to different places in my long-ago quest to find the perfect newspaper.
