Hundreds of Aggie fans were up before the sun Saturday, standing in line at three locations on campus at 7 a.m. to buy a T-shirt. Within four hours, 30,000 red, white and blue T-shirts had been sold.
Red, White and Blue (RWB) Out volunteers are still counting money, but estimate that in five days they sold a total of 70,000 shirts and raised more than $150,000 to benefit the families of policemen and firefighters killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“It’s really a testament to the patriotism and the spirit of this school and proves that Aggies can pull off anything,” said Jared Pittman, a RWB Out organizer and junior political science major.
However, the frenzy of T-shirt sales Saturday morning that helped create the sea of red, white and blue at Kyle Field would not have happened without a last-minute influx of helpful volunteers, said Eric Bethea, a RWB Out organizer and junior finance major.
C.C. Creations, the apparel manufacturer that had been working 16-hour shifts all week to meet the burgeoning T-shirt demand informed RWB Out organizers Thursday that its workers were exhausted and could not print another batch of shirts for Saturday, Bethea said.
“We started calling around and put the word out on (TexAgs.com) and a guy in Dallas contacted us and said they had 10,000 shirts, so we just needed somebody to rent a U-Haul on Friday morning to bring them back,” Bethea said.
A supplier in Houston provided another 10,000 shirts, and RWB organizers acquired the use of printing facilities at Collegiate Illustrations and Screened Images, manufacturers in Bryan. RWB organizers worked making T-shirts Friday afternoon but needed more volunteers.
“We put out the word on TexAgs, on the radio, and an announcement at midnight yell practice,” Bethea said. “After yell, at least another 50 people showed up, and we just put them to work printing shirts, and folding and packing them.”
Shifts of volunteers worked throughout the night, still producing shirts as sales began early Saturday morning.
“We worked sellling shirts past kickoff, but when we finally got to the stadium and looked up and saw the sea of red, white and blue, we almost cried. It was just amazing,” said Kourtney Rogers, a RWB organizer and junior parks and recreation science major.
Organizers say they would like to produce more shirts to fill orders from A&M clubs throughout the nation that have expressed interest in buying the T-shirts and plan to officially write a check to the designated charities by the end of the week.
“To see on the numbers on the jumbotron, 70,000 shirts and $150,000 raised for the families of those policemen and firefighters, that made all the effort worth it,” Pittman said. “Since Sept. 11, I’ve been asking myself, ‘what can I do, how can I help’, and everyone who organized this, everyone who sold T-shirts and worked past midnight to print shirts, everyone who bought a shirt or forwarded an email, they all made a difference.”