In one of the cooler afternoons I’ve spent working the last few years, I spent several hours in the archives of Mitchell Memorial Library gathering information and pictures for our story today on football players in the 1940’s who served in the military.

Being the nerd that I am, I stayed twice as long as I probably needed to, searching through old Reveilles, books and folders of random memorabilia, stopping on nearly every page to look at black and white pictures or read about what people did on campus in 1941. Every few minutes I’d excitedly snap a picture of a picture with my new-fangled phone that had nothing to do with the 1941 football team or anything related to the story I was working on.

What this blog provides, however, is an outlet to share pieces of Mississippi State history – some athletic, some just fun – that neither I nor most State graduates have seen or heard.

We’ll start with what appears to be one of the more entertaining Egg Bowls. If you click on the picture, you can read the account of what was an apparently somewhat-bloody rivalry game in Oxford in 1939. From the bottom of the story in the Reveille: “The Golden Egg has come home – may it stay here until it becomes a permanent fixture.”

One of the more interesting pieces of MSU history involved a story we’ve all heard, but now we can see. The very first Bully, from before State was even known as the Bulldogs, was hit by a bus on campus and buried underneath Scott Field, led by a processional of thousands. The story accompanying the pictures is both one of the more humorous and touching things I’ve read. The pictures of Bully with cheerleaders are both the very first Bully. You can also see the Reveille memorial to Bully II, who was also run over by a bus, it turns out.

Now, a series of random pictures from MSU’s various sports. Most of these come from the 1941-42 school year.

One of my favorite stories I found was an odd one for Mississippi. As the Reveille tells it, the day after examinations finished in December of 1939, the campus was covered in a blanket of snow, a veritable blizzard by Mississippi standards. With school out and nothing else to do, apparently the students at the time used anything they could find to go sledding, including rocking chairs and lunch trays “borrowed” from the cafeteria. I thought it was particularly cool to see Old Main (just Main, at the time) covered in snow, as well as the football stadium.

And now, we finish up with a few more random pictures that don’t fit into any one category. Thanks for letting me get my nerd on, hopefully you got some enjoyment out of this. Happy Fourth of July!