Cliff.Booth said:
Sorry to hear about your old man, praying for y'all. Going through a bit of that myself, man. Hang in there.
My life now seems incredibly mundane after reading all you've done recently! That's crazy.
And that Bexar County officer...imagine him being like, why does this group of skinheads all look like they scored high on the ACT and why do they have clarinets and trombones in the back....that is hilarious to imagine but I'm sure in the moment y'all weren't too amused.
Thanks man.
It's been a pretty rapid decline during the past 4 months. All of Dad's remaining friends have passed away during the past decade so family is all he has left. And those conversations you'd like to have with your dad, just aren't possible anymore.
But back to that Bexar County incident and one of my brushes with White Supremacy.
It was one of those strange situations and set of circumstances that you never forget. But let me tell you the re-telling from about a decade ago before I tell the original story.
I was working in a globally dispersed team where the company HQ was in Boston and my direct supervisor was based in Seattle. He brought us in for a team meeting at HQ in Boston. We go out to dinner and it was right when Kaepernick was taking a knee to protest the police, etc.
Sitting in this group of women who were from Boston or Seattle, they start going on about how White Men are racist and police are racist and Southerners are racist. Funny thing is, this meeting is where I learned about the brown paper bag test because one of the women told us she was Black and that's why nobody would listen to her but they did listen to me because I was a White Man. Honestly, I assumed she was Portuguese or something. She was so light skinned that I didn't know she was Black - at all. And married to a White Man of course.
So dinner conversation continues, talking about Kaepernick kneeling and at some point, the finger gets pointed at me and the statement is made - "well, you've never been pulled over by the police and held at gunpoint because of your race". And I said... (I got a little story for ya Aggies) oh, really? Actually I have.
I'm going to give you some of the background setup because... why not.
In the late 1980s, the situation in May was, you had exams which ended by Wednesday but graduations weren't until Friday night and Final Review was on Saturday. So, you wound up with a situation where people weren't going home for the end of the school year because they had to be back by the weekend and nobody had any duties or responsibilities on Thursday.
So, we had an Aggie Band tradition that we would leave Wednesday afternoon or earlier if you were all finished with exams and go down to camp out at Canyon Lake. On Thursday, we would go tubing down the Guadalupe River and drive home late Thursday (after getting totally sunburnt).
During that Wednesday night camp out, we would get bored of playing drinking games and want to do something else so a couple guys were from San Antonio and said - hey, do you want to go see the train tracks where the ghosts of the dead kids from the school bus that got hit by a train, will push your car across the train tracks.
A bunch of us were like - you're full of it but a couple other San Antonio guys swore it was true so... we loaded up 6 carloads of BQs from A-Co and B-Co '92 and '93 (which is why this must have been May 1990 when this happened) to venture out and find the train tracks.
Well the two primary instigators were from the NE side of SA and these alleged train tracks were in a totally different part of San Antonio that they didn't know.
So at some point while we're driving around lost, we pick up a tail of a Bexar County Sheriff's car.
After a little while, a few more cars hit show up, he hits the lights and we all pull over together as a group into a dirt/gravel parking lot.
I'm in my 1975 Chevy K-5 Blazer with the roof off so we're open air but I had been drinking earlier so my buddy from Virginia was driving my truck. Another guy was in a convertible Mustang so they were open air too. The point here is that the cops arriving on scene could see all these guys with fish cuts. I was a pisshead but I had gotten a fish cut on a dare in April and my hair hadn't fully grown back yet.
So here's that moment that you'll never forget.
First cop gets out of the car and he racks that shotgun and utters these words after the Chk-Chk "Nobody moves and nobody gets hurt".
And do you know what you do when that happens? You sure as hell don't move.
So the Sheriff's Deputy starts giving us the what for and trying to find out what we're doing and the story about the dead kids and the train tracks isn't adding up.
Meanwhile they start running our driver's licenses and my buddy from Virginia's license, they assume is a fake ID.
Finally, their Sergeant shows up and when he gets out of the car, he lets out the biggest belly laugh ever so much so that he's doubled over laughing.
While we're being held at gunpoint, I can't possibly think what is so damned funny.
The Sergeant comes over to the lead Deputy who pulled as over and asks him what he thinks he's got and he says that he's trying to figure that out because our story doesn't make any sense.
The Sergeant ridicules him a little bit and says "You know what ya got here? You got a bunch of Aggies".
So the Sergeant chills things out, tells us the kids pushing your car over the tracks is bogus but, if that's what we want to do, they'll lead us over there.
Turns out the reason that the cops were so amped up was that there had been a shooting earlier that night and the description of the perpetrators was a carload of skinheads. We had a Female and a couple of Hispanics with us but, with all the fish cuts, I guess they figured we matched the description of the suspects enough to warrant pulling us over.
Later we finally made it to the train tracks and I'll say that it is creepy because all the names of streets in that neighborhood are little kid names like Bobby, Susie, whatever. The myth is kind of convincing but if you were to shoot it with some surveying equipment, I think you'd find that although the level grade crossing of the train tracks appears to be uphill, I think it's really slightly downhill.
Unfortunately, they don't do the year end canoe trip anymore because two B-Company cadets were killed in a car wreck on the way back to College Station in May 2010.
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Family-friends-recall-friendly-driven-Aggie-732572.php
