Over the holidays, I grabbed my great-grandfather’s memoirs from my parents’ house and found a few passages describing his encounters with piggaggie.
He was with a large contingent of wealthy alumni that followed Coach Ahearn down to Fayetteville in 1910.
“There was a quite the hullabaloo about the consequence of playing some backwoods school, that wasn’t even a member of an athletic conference, on our reputation among our peers in the Kansas Intercollegiate Athletic Association.”
He said a Fayetteville newspaper, that used a lot of woodcuts to illustrate its articles, caught wind of the controversy and ran a story about it. Some pigaggie were offended and wrote a jig that boasted of their wins over Drury College and Henderson State. Quaint.
“The prolific offense pigaggie alleged in song and slander never manifested, and it was just another humdrum, workaday victory for State.”
After the game, he decided to go Hot Springs for the mineral baths and horse wagering, but it sounded far from relaxing.
Apparently at every stop pigaggie kept soliciting him to “dig for diamonds” in their fallow fields. For six bits, they’d give him a bucket and a spade and let him keep "whatever he found." I guess it was incredibly vexing for him to have to repeatedly take the Patek Philippe out of his pocket, open the face and explain that he would just assume let other people do that kind of work for him.
He didn’t say much about the 1911 game, other than that he served pigaggie soup with the hospitality committee and heard accounts of dozens of deaths from typhoid during their barge ride up to Kansas City. Sad.
In the Argonne, my great-grandfather had a number pigaggie under his command.
“In no other men did I witness such high morale under such trying circumstances.”
By his accounts, they were just giddy to have a regular supply of canned beef and hard bread, not to mention shoes, but it took the threat of corporal punishment to get them to stop frolicking around in the trench filth and join the offensive.
By 1926, defeating Arkansas had become “old hat” so there wasn’t much of an account of the game aside from witnessing the vulgar hog calling that my great-grandfather found perplexing, as in his experience pigaggie couldn’t afford to keep livestock.
“By my summation, pigaggie are a simple, spirited folk who, on the whole, are perfectly content with their miserable lot in life. Bless them for that.”
Poll