Pecan Races

At A&M in the late 1960s, there were 14,000 men, and about 1,000 women. Most of the women fit into one of two categories: wives or daughters of faculty or students, or too ugly to find a husband anywhere else on the planet. As a result, most Aggies left the campus on weekends. Those that didn't were fish, who usually couldn't leave, and upper classmen who couldn't afford to leave. When we were fish, we had a large contingent of juniors and seniors who fit the latter description.

Those upper classmen had two major sources of entertainment during the weekends - beer, and fish (in that order). The usual scenario was for a group of two or more juniors or seniors to consume large quantities of alcoholic beverages, then stagger back to the dorm well after midnight, but not drunk enough to pass out (yet). With the one or two remaining functional brain cells between them, an idea would form: "Let's wake up some fish and have some fun with them!"

One of the favorite ways our upper classmen had of "having fun with the fish" was to hold pecan races in the stairwells. The dorms in the quad at A&M have four floors, with stairwells about a quarter of the way from each end of the building. There were two flights of stairs between each floor. So it would be a reasonable challenge for a fish, freshly wakened, to hustle down four floors of stairs, with two 90-degree turns per floor, competing against another fish using the other stairwell. Reasonable to someone sober. To someone a few molecules of alcohol short of blotto, though, it wasn't enough of a challenge.

To increase the degree of difficulty, a pecan was placed on the top stair of each stairwell, and the fish were directed to strip. At the signal to start, each fish would have to squat down and pick up the pecan with his "cheeks", without using his hands. When he had secured the pecan, he hobbled down the stairs. If the pecan came out, the fish had to bring it back to the top floor's first step, and start over. Sometimes, in order to win, a fish who successfully made it to the bottom with the pecan had to then eat the pecan (if this variant was being used, sometimes a fish would deliberately lose the race). Those who got to experience this "fun" more than once, developed the ability to go down stairs moving only the parts of their legs below the knees.

Depending on the whim of the upper classman, either the winning fish got some reward, or the losing fish got some kind of punishment (as if being hauled out of bed and subjected to the indignities of a pecan race wasn't punishment enough!). If the reward consisted of some kind of privileges to be granted the next day or week, the winning fish was wise to get the details in writing - after the hangover wore off, sometimes the upper classman had no recollection of the races, much less the winner's promised award.

John (Yankus) Yantis

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Yes, I remember fondly the thrill of the competition. I also remember how we fish always seemed to find a way to get revenge without being caught doing so. The pecan races offer a good case in point.

Invariably the upperclassmen got the muchies while we were enterrtaining them with our agility. One would order the fish to make some popcorn. We didn't nuke it back then - we made it in honest-to-goodness popcorn poppers. But when it was finished popping we added a twist. One of us, maybe even several of us for variety, would... uh....well... dribble a bit of urine in there and then shake it up really well. They never caught on and pecan racing was never the drag you might expect.

TE Schoolcraft