The Guidon is the magazine of the Corps of Cadets Association. What a joy it was for me to open up the latest issue and find that they had found a sheet containing a poem entitled "To the Aggies" in an old stack of Battalions from 1942, written by my maternal aunt, June Brown Leap. The editor writes that any information about the poem and the author would be appreciated, and I emailed the following in response:
Edited to add: Here is the poem, published in the Battalion, January 14, 1943:
quote:
June Brown Leap was born in Somerville in 1922. She was the youngest child in a family of eleven children. (My mother, her sister, was three years older.)
June and her family were inextricably connected to A&M when the family's oldest son, Paul Armstrong Brown, enrolled in 1924, graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1928. Uncle Paul eventually changed his commission from the U.S. Army to the U.S. Marine Corps, and when his reserve unit was called to active duty in 1940, he was sent first to China and then to Corregidor in the Philippines.
Captain Paul Brown was the commanding officer of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment during the heroic defense of Corregidor. He was captured when the island fell on May 6, 1942, was held in POW camps in the Philippines, and endured a horrific journey aboard a Japanese "hell ship" to Japan in late 1944. He died in a POW camp in early February 1945. He was awarded the Silver Star for his bravery during the fighting on Corregidor. The 1943 Longhorn (as the A&M yearbook was called in those days) has a three-page color tribute to him.
Uncle Paul is also commemorated on the large bronze plaque at the entrance to the MSC and on the smaller plaque in the same location devoted to the Aggie defenders of Bataan and Corregidor.
Uncle Paul is also mentioned in the recent book The Fightin' Texas Aggie Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, though you will note that the index has him listed twice, as a captain and as a major.
Back to Aunt June: After she graduated from high school, she got a job working for the Genetics Department and for the Agricultural Engineering Department on the A&M campus and--sweet, smart, generous, beautiful young woman that she was--she was much beloved by the cadets. They called her "Spirit" (as in "Spirit of Aggieland") both because of her dedication to the Aggies and because of the poem she wrote that you have republished.
June also wrote a dedicatory poem that appears as a preface to the 1942 edition of The Cadence, which was at that time issued to freshman cadets and contained everything worth knowing about A&M and the Corps.
June also wrote a wonderful, beautiful poem about the original Reveille, whom she knew well. I would be happy to send you a copy if you are interested.
June married an A&M physics professor, Howard Leap, during the war. In her later life she wrote many, many poems and read them before appreciative audiences numerous times, winning quite a few awards for them. She loved literature, most notably Shakespeare and Dickens.
She died in Feb. 2015, the last Brown sibling, and she was buried in the family plot outside of Somerville, with her parents. At her funeral I said that I always considered her the true Poet Laureate of Texas A&M. No one loved A&M and the Corps of Cadets more than she. She wrote very moving and lyrical poems about an A&M that has almost vanished now and which is remembered by fewer and fewer each year, but which is the A&M of commitment to country and service to others that forms the foundation for the university which has sprung up from the little cow college/military school that the Brown children knew and loved.
She would be pleased as punch to know that her poem was published for such an appropriate audience.
Edited to add: Here is the poem, published in the Battalion, January 14, 1943:
quote:
To the Aggies
When you go
You will leave the Academic Building
With the flag waving high and Sul Ross
Standing bravely in the sun.
You will leave your post office box,
Metallic and shiny, that has held
Many letters from home and a few
From "Up Denton Way."
You will leave your roommate,
And your roommate's kid brother, and
Your Battery Commander, and his Buddy,
And his roommate's Buddy.
You will leave that corner room
You have been so proud of--the calendar
You put on the wall, and the funny sticker
That has been on the door for years.
You will leave the moonlight walks back
To the dorm that came after a show,
Or a Town Hall at Guion,
Or a dance.
You will leave Kyle Field
And the yelling mob of friends at a
Home game, and everyone singing
THE SONG.
You will leave the drill field, too,
The review on Armistice Day--the hushed
Silence and the salutes--and the
Final Review when you saw your brother
Cry and couldn't figure it out because
You weren't even a fish then.
You will leave many jokes and laughs;
Yell practices that made a lump come
In your throat. All of the squshie,
Rainy days and blinding blue ones when
You went to class, and Fridays when you
Cut a quiz so you could hitch-hike home.
When you go, you will leave many things
You love. But you will not fail.
You will not go alone. I shall be with
Each one of you every step of the way.
For when you go, a part of me will go with you.
And I am the Spirit of Aggieland.
June Brown