Issue date: 9/10/04 Section: News

On Sept. 22, 2001, about 70,000 Aggies donned red, white and blue T-shirts for the "Red, White and Blue Out" during the first football game after the Sept. 11 attacks. This movement was deemed "the greatest act of symbolic patriotism in the history of organized sports" by senior history and political science major Kevin Capps, whose parents - Debbie and Oral - were in the Twin Towers when the planes hit, but managed to escape.

The 12th Man Student Foundation planned to initiate a similar event - a Red White and Blue Towel Out - for Saturday's game against Wyoming, but after an overwhelmingly negative response from polls taken on Texags.com, as well as individual input from survivors of the attacks, the Foundation changed its mind, said Linda Salzar, vice president of publicity and promotions for the 12th Man Student Foundation.

"It's just not something you can do if (...) 100 percent of people (don't participate)," Kevin Capps said. "We're very afraid of tarnishing the memory of (the original Red White and Blue Out,) but we have supreme confidence in the ingenuity of the Aggie family that we can come up with something else that expresses our feelings and does not harm the cherished moment in our school's history."

Debbie Capps said she was on the 16th floor of the World Trade Center when the first plane crashed. Her husband, an agricultural economics professor, was scheduled to have a breakfast meeting on the 102nd floor, but the meeting had been moved to the lobby instead. After the planes crashed, she and her husband escaped, leaving behind all of their belongings - including Debbie's wedding ring - and it took the couple almost a week to travel back home to Texas from New York City.

"The Red White and Blue Out game that occurred in September after 9-11 was our family's first outing since we got home," Debbie said. "Only at A&M could you hope to achieve that kind of participation. (Our family) holds (the event) so dear that until we could have something that would rival that or come up to that standard, I (worry) that the students set the bar very high."

Continued...

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