Pre-1950 Bonfire (At that time Aggie Bonfire was located in the middle of Simpson Drill Field. Except for trucks to haul logs from cut to the field, no other powered equipment was involved.)
["the Story of Texas A&M", George Sessions Perry, McGraw-Hill, Copyright 1951, pp40]
"Yet from the standpoint of symbolic solidarity of the Corps with the football team, the pinnacle is reached just before Thanksgiving when the annual Bonfire is held.
The size and heft of the stack of wood to be burned means a lot. In the first place, a great deal of heavy rigging tackle and so on is employed to raise the center pole, the spine of the Bonfire, without which a disgraceful collapse of the pile might subsequently occur. Thereafter students set about the business of gathering fuel, which consists of almost anything inflammable this side of nitroglycerin, but is primarily constituted of wood which the students themselves have cut from land which the owners (and the college itself) wished to have cleared.
As the time draws near for the annual gridiron battle between A. and M. and the University of Texas, which as you may have heard, is the state's oldest football feud, it is also customary for the students of the University to hold a bonfire, and it is the avowed purpose of each student body to set off the other's ahead of schedule.
At Bonfire time A. and M. is actually an armed camp. All persons entering or leaving are screened at the edge of the campus by jeep-borne sentries.The campus itself is patrolled by walkie-talkie-bearing infantry, while mobile fire-fighting equipment is on hand to extinguish any premature blaze. Yet, in 1948, despite all these precautions, some University students armed with incendiaries piled into a plane, made an air attack on the A. and M. Bonfire pile and dropped their missiles. While this imaginative approach to the problem failed, the rumor was soon current that at least one Aggie had maintained steady rifle fire on the plane from the roof of his dormitory throughout the attack."..
At that time Bonfire belonged to the Fish of that year.....and it was their "privilege" to provide the grunt labor to cut, carry, and build it....as supervised by the upper classmen. (Yell leaders were in charge of the stack.) Bonfire brought all Fish together in one major collaborative effort....the largest any of them had ever been involved in.....and each class took great pride in their engineering feat. When Bonfire was lighted the Fish had been molded into one cohesive unit...and they had passed their test for admission into the Corps.
Another factoid: In 1952 a few nights before Bonfire a former student flying a navy training plane power-dived at the stack I suppose to give us guards a thrill....He pulled out too abruptly, the wings ripped off and the plane crashed where Olsen Field now stands. Wing tanks ripped off the wings and fell on the Drill Field and scared the begeezus out of a couple hundred Fish guards who thought they were being bombed. The cry went out in all dorms "TEA-SIPS ON SULLY" and the entire Corps turned out in minutes....that was one crazy night because no one had the foggiest idea what was going on....but we sure didn't go near the bombs!! (wing tanks)
