[Leica] IMG: May Nawlins Wedding #1

[eperea at walkereng.com (Emilio Perea)]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 08:12:41AM -0700, Steve Barbour wrote:
> On May 26, 2008, at 1:19 PM, Peter Klein wrote:
>> Just one thing I wanna know, and forgive my cultural ignorance.  What 
>> does the crooked "two fingers" sign in picture #55 mean?
>
> I wonder too,

It's the "TCU football sign"

Paul Burka's old article on Texas Monthly:

Football Hand Signals

The Southwest Conference may not have the best teams, but it does have
the best school signs.

Blame it all on an Aggie named Pinky Downs.
A 1906 Texas A&M graduate, Downs was a member of the school's board of
regents from 1923 to 1933. He was the kind of Aggie who wore a maroon
tie every day and who prodded the school into spending an extra $10,000
so that its new swimming pool would be longer than the one at the
University of Texas. When the Aggies had a yell practice before the 1930
TCU game, Downs naturally was there.  "What are we going to do the those
Horned Frogs?" he shouted. His muse did not fail him. "Gig 'em, Aggies!"
he improvised, appropriating a term form frog hunting. For emphasis, he
made a fist with his thumb extended straight up. The Southwest
Conference had its first hand sign.

The primordial image of sticking frogs with a spear captured the essence
of Aggieness--a good ol' farm boy who was not so much unsophisticated as
anti-sophisticated. When other schools later developed their own hand
signs, the signals likewise started out as visual representations of
school mascots. But they soon evolved into more. All those horns (long
and frog), claws (bear and cougar), and the rest have become totems,
symbols of belonging to a tribe. Or a sect: They are, to borrow a phrase
from The Book of Common Prayer, "an outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace." In Texas it still matters what school you
went to and who won the last game. That is why the Southwest Conference,
defiled though its reputation may be, remains the best habitat for hand
signals since charades. Of the nine SWC schools, more have hand signs
(seven) than NCAA investigations (six). For that matter, one school,
SMU, has more hand signs than football teams.

For a quarter of a century after Pinky Downs's moment of inspiration,
the Aggies had a monopoly on official gestures. But by 1955 archrival UT
had fallen on hard times, made harder by a corresponding rise in the
fortunes of A&M. A UT cheerleader named Harley Clark syllogized: (1)
A&M has a hand sign, (2) A&M is winning, (3) UT has no hand sign,
therefore (4) UT is losing. (Such reasoning prowess would later lead
Clark, as an Austin judge in 1987, to conclude that the state's system
of financing public schools was unconstitutional.) At a pep rally before
the TCU game, Clark held up his right hand in a peculiar way. The index
and little fingers were sticking up, while the thumb held down the two
interior digits--the head of a Longhorn, Clark said. The creation proved
not to be the immediate answer to UT's football plight, however, as
signless TCU won the next day, 47-20.

Once A&M and UT had hand signs, everyone else wanted one. Even before
1955, SMU students had been raising their index and middle fingers in a
generic V for victory. By the late fifties, Mustang rooters had changed
the meaning to . . . pony ears.

Baylor was next. In 1960 cheerleader Bobby Schrade came up with the idea
of holding the hand aloft with all five fingers curved to suggest a bear
claw. Only alcohol had a harder time getting accepted on the Baptist
campus. For twelve years students and administrators argued whether the
sign was sufficiently dignified before it was formally blessed in 1972.

When the University of Houston was seeking admission to the conference
in 1972, cheerleaders decided that U of H needed a hand sign, too. The
result--the UT sign with the middle finger added--officially represents
a cougar claw; unofficially, it indicates the students' attitude toward
UT.

At Texas Tech, members of a spirit organization called the Saddle Tramps
decided in 1971 that the Red Raiders were getting left behind. Emulating
Raider Red, the costumed mascot who discharges a brace of large pistols
after each Tech score, the Saddle Tramps began brandishing thumb-and-
forefinger pistols of their own.

TCU cheerleaders began experimenting with hand signs in 1980 on the way
to a cheerleading camp in Tennessee. To represent Horned Frogs, they
first tried the UT sign with the outer fingers bent at the knuckles. No
good: it could be seen as an admission that TCU was only half as good as
UT. So they switched to bent index and middle fingers.

Even Rice students occasionally use a sign, but it is not pictured here
because university officials, suspecting that a middle finger poked
outward has a meaning other than "peck 'em, Owls", have declined to
sanction it. Not surprisingly, the only conference school without a sign
is Arkansas, whose adherents have a state all to themselves and thus
have no need to proclaim in sign language that they Belong.