fish Spurs

The late 1960's was the heyday of the Southwest Athletic Conference. There were intense rivalries between the schools and football teams of this association of mostly Texan schools. The fiercest rivalry, of course, was between A&M and tu, but there were lesser rivalries, such as between A&M and SMU. Since Aggies were fundamentally farmers, and since the mascot of SMU was a horse, it was only natural that for the week preceding that game, CT fish would have to wear spurs as a part of their uniform.

And not the store-bought kind of spurs, but spurs hand-made from coat hangers, with rowels made from flattened bottle caps. The Sunday prior to the A&M-SMU game saw hundreds of fish out in the quad, pounding bottle caps, punching holes in their centers, and bending coat hangers. The coat hangers had to be bent just so, to keep the spurs attached to the shoes, without doing permanent damage to the required spit-shine. Since Heaven's Eleven was an engineering outfit, it was pretty much guaranteed that the attachment scheme would include a blousing band. And since fish are fiercely loyal to their outfit, it would be only natural that the number of "rowels" on a fish's spurs bear some relation to the outfit number. In our case, we wore eleven rowels, painted Air Force blue.

For the rest of the week, the quad had a unique sound - in addition to the sounds of taps on military shoes and senior boots, there was the jingle of fish spurs.

I still have mine.

John (Yankus) Yantis