RELLIS Recollections: 75 Years of Learning, Leadership, and Discovery By Tim Gregg John Sharp had an idea. The chancellor for the Texas A&M University System envisioned the creation of a new campus that would be a research magnet to attract corporate and government partners and offer an academic alternative to Texas A&M for area students. It would be called RELLIS — the acronym for Texas A&M’s core values: respect, excellence, leadership, loyalty, integrity, and selfless-service. The campus would make good use of the 2,000-acre tract on the outskirts of Bryan, giving new life to what had served multiple purposes over the years, including the home to Bryan Army Air Field, an important domestic military installation during World War II, and Bryan Air Force Base during the Korean War.
“Sometimes in our rush to embrace the future, we pave over our past,” Sharp, a self-proclaimed history buff, says in the book’s foreword. So even before the initial $350 million construction plan broke ground, he reached out to award-winning journalist Tim Gregg to research the site’s history and preserve its legacy.
The result is RELLIS Recollections: 75 Years of Learning, Leadership, and Discovery, published by Texas A&M University Press last November. Within its 172 pages are more than 100 historical photographs and dozens of accounts from many whose lives were impacted and intersected with the locale. Among them are Travis B. Bryan, the godfather of Bryan Field; Colonel Joseph Duckworth, the first to fly into the eye of a hurricane; and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, famously known for joining Neil Armstrong on the first moonwalk. Aldrin’s memories include how he survived a near-fatal crash while training as a fighter pilot at Bryan Air Force Base.
Other chapters pay tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) stationed at Bryan Field and share remembrances from the time during WWII when first-year A&M cadets lived and schooled off-campus at what was then called The Annex.
The book ends with a forward-thinking chapter about the future of RELLIS and an epilogue that acknowledges the dreamers who contributed to its legacy. Those who would like to contribute their own stories can do so through the book’s companion website: rellisrecollections.org. But even if you’ve never set foot on what is now called RELLIS and don’t know a soul who had, by the time you finish reading RELLIS Recollections, you’ll feel like you’ve been there and knew them all.
