This Week in Texas History
by BARTEE HAILE
“All Hades broke loose” during halftime high-jinks at the Baylor-Texas A&M football game in Waco on Oct. 30, 1926, and by the time order was restored an Aggie cadet lay fatally injured on the playing field.
Texans too young to remember the now defunct Southwest Conference may be amazed by the intensity of the red-hot rivalries of that bygone era. Fisticuffs in the stands and out in the parking lot were commonplace, but nothing compared to that afternoon the “Battle of the Brazos” erupted into all-out war.
Although the two sides would see eye-to-eye on little else in the days that followed, they did agree on how the melee started. A makeshift “float” (a flatbed truck or a car pulling a trailer) with six Baylor coeds holding up signs with the scores of memorable Bear victories passed in front of the A&M cheering section.
The Aggies were instantly incensed. Many believed the females were, in fact, male students in drag and, if so, an insult to their manhood. Others felt the float was a repeat of a dangerous stunt two years earlier, when a “bucking” Model T came close to running over members of the A&M football team.
Their blood may have been boiling, but the angry cadets managed to keep their cool. All except three, that is, and that trio tried to stop the offending float knocking one of the Baylor women off the back of the truck or the trailer and to the ground.
“Then almost the entire Baylor student body and most of the Aggie contingent stormed simultaneously onto the field and all Hades broke loose,” freshman Bear A.T. Moses recalled for the alumni publication in a 1985 interview.
“Precisely what happened next, I could not tell, nor could anyone else, for in a moment there was a swarming crowd of hundreds in a melee,” another Baylor undergraduate told a San Antonio newspaper three days after the incident.
The Baylor freshman squad, ineligible for varsity competition back in those days, jumped at the chance to show what they were made of. Seventy-nine years had not dimmed Barney Hale’s memory of the clash with “the A&M students (with) their uniforms on.” Hale and teammates “started picking them up and throwing them over the fence.”
Meanwhile, the public address announcer provided a blow-by-blow description of the riot for older and wiser spectators, who stayed in their seats.
The free-for-fall ended only after the Aggie band began playing “The Stars Spangled Banner.” The cadets snapped to attention, and the fighting subsided.
The gridiron was cleared of the bruised and bloody combatants, and the game resumed on time. Baylor won the contest 20-9 without further incident.
Throughout the late afternoon and into the evening, the injured were treated at doctors’ clinics and hospitals around Waco. One of the few kept overnight for observation was Lt. Charles Milo Sessums, a senior Aggie cadet from Dallas. He had been knocked out by a blow to the base of skull but was conscious and coherent when admitted.
Sessums’ sudden death from a blood clot at nine o’clock the next morning sent a shockwave across Waco, College Station and the entire state of Texas. What had been a case of “boys will be boys” mischief had turned into an unimaginable tragedy.
To their credit, the Aggies stepped forward and took responsibility for their part in the mayhem. During the second half of the game, the head yell leader, as he is known at A&M, personally apologized to the Baylor cheerleaders.
Within the week, a committee of ten Aggie seniors released a public statement that said in part: “We apologize to the ladies of Baylor for this incident, because one of our traditions is that no A. and M. man has ever willingly or knowingly harmed a woman.” The student paper at Baylor rewrote that sentence to read: “…no cadet has ever willingly laid hands on a woman,” proof someone had not lost his sense of humor.
But the A&M upperclassmen refused to take the whole rap for the riot. They claimed the Baylor students were loaded for bear with a stockpile of clubs, iron rods and sawed-off two-by-fours at the ready. The Bears denied the charge saying the Aggies mistook two trunkloads of football equipment for the alleged arsenal.
In the same statement, the seniors went to great lengths to refute a rumor making the rounds. According to this presumably tall tale, a group of cadets commandeered a howitzer, loaded the cannon on a railcar and headed back to Waco by train to reduce Baylor University to rubble. Only swift action by the Texas Rangers saved the Baptist campus from destruction, or so the story still goes all these years later.
The presidents of the respective schools emerged from a ten-hour meeting on Nov. 4 with a joint statement intended to calm everybody down. It had the opposite effect at Baylor, where the student paper denounced any attempt to hold the Bears even partially to blame and began a petition drive to sever all ties between the two colleges.
The presidents did just that a month later. Baylor and Texas A&M did not compete in any sport for the next four years and did not play each other in football until 1931.
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