Joe Barton: “the University of Texas and Texas A&M have been playing football for over 100 years. It is one of the most intense…”

“the University of Texas and Texas A&M have been playing football for over 100 years. It is one of the most intense athletic rivalries in the Lone Star State. In 1909, students at Texas A&M began a tradition that we now call bonfire. They went out and gathered old packing crates and pallets and trash and limbs from the community and built a bonfire to testify to their undying commitment to beat the University of Texas in the annual Thanksgiving football game. By the mid 1940s, what had been basically an exercise in getting some logs and some trash and had grown into quite an operation, and the 2 years that I worked on bonfire in 1968 and 1969, the stack, the height of the bonfire reached 109 feet. It is not unusual today for a bonfire at Texas A&M before the University of Texas football game to weigh over 2 million pounds, to have 5,000 to 7,000 logs and to be in the 70-foot to 80-foot range. Because of some accidents and concerns about environmental issues beginning in the 1980s, the administration at Texas A&M put a limitation on the number of logs, the height of the stack, the diameter of the stack. This past November, I believe, on November the 18th, two days before the game, the bonfire collapsed, killing 12 students and injuring 27 others, a terrible, terrible tragedy by any definition.”