Nostalgic look back on the university's annual snowball battle

Think your Christmas would be complete if only there was snow? Here’s a nostalgic story to enjoy without putting on your hat and gloves.  

This snowy story actually happened each February. It occurred on the San Marcos Campus and involved a gift of snow sent each year beginning in the 1960s from students at Michigan Technological University in the state’s Upper Peninsula. 

What began as a fun exchange between buddies representing two colleges would last for 15 years. Bruce Roche and Roy Moses were friends and once both faculty members at Texas State. Roche would go on to become advisor to the University Star and director of University News Service. Moses headed north for a job at Michigan Tech, located in Houghton, Michigan. The swap idea, according to University Archives, was hatched in 1964. It was agreed that the men of Blue Key Honor fraternity would ship 500 snowballs via air freight to San Antonio International Airport.

In a 1966 letter, Roche floated the idea of sending Michigan a rattlesnake or a bobcat. But by the mid-1970s the idea to send beauty queens was born. Michigan receives upwards of 200 inches a year—more than what was needed for the annual  Winter Carnival. In turn, Texas State appeared to have more coeds. By the mid-1970s, Texas was sending beauty queens to Michigan in February to reign beside the Winter Carnival queens. [It should be noted that the Michigan Tech campus in 1960 had a male to female ratio of 22:1—so few women that they had to bus in ladies for their Sno-Ball. And until 1976 the Blue Key Society was 100% men.]

Once the snow arrived on this campus, someone from administration such as the president would throw out the first snowball. The snowball fights would pit the Greek organizations against “independent” students. The battles were never the men vs. the women. The fun would last about 20 minutes and the local media including television and newspaper would report. One year the snowballs arrived so hard frozen that the students had to utilize a snow cone machine. 

The arrival of snowballs and the subsequent battle on campus was good for getting a write up in the newspaper or a spot on the evening news for Texas State. And often, the publicity went national.

In 1974, Bobcat sophomore Anne Lochte was Miss All Campus Beauty Queen and traveled to Michigan to represent Texas State. Lochte was squired around the Houghton campus by Blue Key president John Helge, who fondly remembers the national media attention that the snowballs for beauty queens earned both universities. Later that year, he made the trip to San Marcos to judge the 40 women vying to represent Texas State. 

Helge also recalls the year that another Texas State beauty arrived in Michigan during a blizzard wearing a windbreaker as a winter coat. “She was blue by the time she walked across the tarmac to the building,” he remembers. Luckily, the Winter Carnival queen had a spare snow parka with a fur-lined hood.