( I think I posted something like this already, about a year ago )
ASS partial History I thought the club was older than 30 years. My memory is very fuzzy, but I thought there were newsletters that go back to 73 ish? Somewhere, in my storage building, I have at least 2 original copies of a Guano newsletter, from the 70's, although I haven't seen it in 10 years. ( they had sort of a psychedelic theme back then ) There are active Texas cavers now, who attended A&M prior to 73 and may have been caving while in college. Charles Fromen and Jim McLane, I think. Also, I think a few others like maybe Bill Russell once attended classes in College Station. John Brooks was definitely an Aggie Caver and he should be able to tell you about the club around 1981 ish. Is Alan Montemayor still around? He was in the club in the late 70's. I think everyone gives Alicia and John Gale credit for getting the club recognized by the caving community. To the best of my knowledge there was no ASS in the year 1983, although there may have been students actively caving then. Ashley Glennon got the school to re-recognize the club in 1984. Ashley was very good at getting girls to come to ASS meetings and go on our trips. ( Ashley was the son of Bob Glennon- an old DFW caver. Ashley is rumored to still be involved in caving in Kentucky? ) Jim Mueller was the president of the club from 84 thru 86 and he is now a professor of lizards at Tarleton State. Tim Jones took over after that for several years and he has some sort of computer business in Austin. ( Tim made several trips to the Sierra Madres backcountry to do ridgewalking ) Mary Kay Manning was one of the clubs most active members from 84 thru 86 and she has been a park ranger at Big Bend for 20 years. She has won many rope-climbing awards, right? A New Zealand caver named Stewart ram-rodded the club in the late 80's, before finishing his masters and returning to New Zealand. I lost track of the club after that, but I was active in it in 1993, when Bob Glennon's youngest son Alan Glennon was running the show. Somewhere in there, Travis Kitchen came along. And then Travis Scott many years later. I am leaving out quite a few people who I never got to know, like Peter Baron, etc. [ Please correct me as I have no information from 1994 to 2007. ] One thing unique about the club is that is had the same faculty advisor for over 20 years. His name escapes me ( Bob ? ), but he had done some caving in Bustamante with Mary Kay's father, Harvey ( ? ) Manning back in the 60's. At a TCR in 1993, the Aggie attendees posed for a group photo for a 20th anniversary shot. I never saw the photo, but Jay Jorden and Ernie Garza were the photographers. The club had some interesting T-shirts, patches and flags, banners over the years. A really nice banner around 1988 disappeared. It was maroon and white about 4 feet by 5 feet and had a guy rapelling into a room from a small hole in the ceiling. The rarest item is a patch for the back of the jacket about 8 inches in diameter. I was told Phil Jank had one. The few newletters in the mid 80's weren't that great. They were very similar to my post on Cavetex, and had there been e-mail, they would have probably never been printed on paper. Alan Glennon should get the credit for getting the ASS into the electronic age. He was ahead of his time on that. He did an electronic ASS newsletter in 1993. And this is directly responsible, for me getting interested in e-mail, which eventually led to me posting a bunch of stories on Cavetex. There are Aggie Cavers that I would like to track down. Namely, Cesar Koppel. His father was a Mexican Customs official in Nuevo Laredo and lived near the bus station. I regret losing contact with them. They were a great bunch of folks and Cesar was a lot of fun to hang out with. I believe he lives in Austin. And I would like to find Lee Perry, Mason Estes, and Freddie Platt. During the late 80's, the club had a cubicle in the student center with a tiny library of caving books and newsletters. A few of them had been given to me by the late Jon Everage. I don't know what became of the books, but they disappeared a few years later. The ASS never had very many active older members. There was always a turnaround after graduation, and sometimes the club had to re-start from scratch with little or no guidance. Once in a blue moon, an old-timer would drop in with a slide show: Ron Fiesler, Charles Fromen, Bill Steele, etc. Ironically, there was a great caver and student at A&M who was not an ASS member. Charles Fromen's son, Carl Philip. He won a few rope climbing awards, and explored most of Precipicio when he was just a little kid using a inch-worm climbing system. The last time I met with some Aggie Cavers, I felt like an ole geezer. My fond memories of caving with the ASS in 1987, don't seem like so long ago to me. Regrettably, after moving to Houston and getting a mortgage, and joining the rat-race, I forgot about my previous life in College Station, and also the ASS. David Locklear --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
