Getting Moosed

While we were at A&M, the first women's dorms were built, although small numbers of women had been students there throughout its history. When we left in 1972, there were 14,000 students, of which 1,000 were women. And of that 1,000, most were wives or daughters of faculty or students, or unable to get a husband anywhere else on the planet. There were notable exceptions, but, in general, that meant that, for us guys, the pickin's on our campus were pretty slim.

Every weekend we could, most of us left Bryan/College Station in search of female companionship. Some of the guys had sisters, other female relatives, or even girlfriends who attended other colleges and universities around the state, who could set up one or more of us with "blind dates". Unfortunately, it was often the case that the sisters, relatives, and/or girlfriends, looked upon these situations as charitable opportunities - a way to provide dates for their girlfriends who never got asked out. And usually for good reason.

The warning bells went off when you inquired what your prospective date was like, and got answers such as, "She's got a great personality," "She's always been nice to her mother," "All the girls like her," "She makes all her own clothes," etc. The absence of any mention of her physical characteristics was a clear indication that the reporter was operating under the old adage, "If you can't say something nice about a person, don't say anything."

But we were often desperate, and usually optimistic that something good might just happen, and, besides, we were supposed to be in training to be Officers and Gentlemen. And Gentlemen don't break blind dates just because the warning bells were going off.

I don't know where the comparison of ugly women to moose came from, but that's what we called them. And the more undesirable the date, the more points we attributed to the moose's antlers. After a weekend date with a "college girl" who was too big for one to get an arm around, whose face looked like it had caught fire and had been beaten out with a wet chain, and whose conversational abilities rivaled a small soap dish, the report might be that the Ag had been moosed, by a 12-pointer. And it happened to almost all of us.

There were a couple of occasions when getting moosed was a serious possibility - the Howdy Dance, and Corps Trips. Just as A&M was historically an all-male institution, Texas Woman's University was historically an all-female institution (now, however, women make up at least 50% of the approximately 50,000 students at A&M, and there are a significant number of men at TWU). So it was natural that a social relationship would have developed between Aggies and Tessies (so-named from the original name for the school, Texas State College for Women, or TSCW). Until 1971, the freshman class of TWU held an annual dance for the fish of A&M, which was officially named the Howdy Dance. We called it "The Pig Push", and we found out later that the Tessies called it "The Goon Grab." If you got there early, the opportunities were pretty good. If you didn't, you either spent the night drinking and commiserating with your buddies, or you got moosed. Once women became a fixture on the A&M campus, male Aggies no longer needed the help of Tessies to find dates, and the Howdy Dances ceased.

Corps Trips were also high risk for getting moosed, since they featured at least three opportunities for dates - Friday night arrival parties, the football game itself, and the monster Corps bash Saturday night - and since they took place in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, the home turfs of many of our buds and their sisters, relatives, and girlfriends. See the memories write-up for Corps Trips for more.

John (Yankus) Yantis