Wednesday, April 20, 2016

(Not-So-) Wordless Wednesday: TAMU RPTS Stories - My Favorite T-Shirt

I've been sharing a number of stories recently here in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences (RPTS) Department at Texas A&M University.  This isn't an "RPTS story" per se, because it's not about events or activities that occurred in that department. Instead, it's about t-shirts.

I have saved a bunch of t-shirts from my college years, and plan to have them (and other t-shirts commemorating later special events in my life) made into a quilt some day.  Most of the shirts related to the Recreation and Parks Club (as it was called back then) at A&M were actually shirts commemorating particular events or conferences - like TRAPS (Texas Recreation and Parks Society) or STRAPS (Student Texas Recreation and Park Society), or ones RPTS hosted like AIN (Association of Interpretive Naturalists).

The year I was RP Club president (1977-78), we sold some iron-on decals for t-shirts for $1 each.  As I recall, there were three designs - one for the department itself (nearly identical to the one shown just below, except the blue and green were different shades), one for the club (as pictured below), and one with the old "Welcome to Aggieland" metal water tower that had been part of campus until it was torn down in late 1975.

I still have two of the three shirts.  Here's the front of the one where I applied the club decal.  As you can see, iron-on decals don't hold up as well as today's screen-printed t-shirts - especially when they are worn and laundered as much as mine was:


And here is what was added to the back of mine, with iron-on letters and numbers:


"Wonder Woman" was a name I picked up while working as a volunteer at the 9th RMI (Recreation Management Institute) hosted by RPTS in March 1977.


© Amanda Pape - 2016 - click here to e-mail me.

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