Texas and Oklahoma alumni talk about the Red River Shootout

<br>``They were pretty lenient those days. If kids did now what we did then, they would have cleared the streets. There wasn't a great effort to hide anything.'' _ Alan Ray, 58, Texas class

Friday, October 6th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

``They were pretty lenient those days. If kids did now what we did then, they would have cleared the streets. There wasn't a great effort to hide anything.'' _ Alan Ray, 58, Texas class of 1964, head of Pari-mutuel Racing's drug testing lab in Beaumont, Texas.

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``Commerce was crazy, there wasn't any question. We were down there at the Hilton one night. The street was totally packed from sidewalk to sidewalk. Somebody said, 'Look,' and then this ice bucket came down. Then there was a TV that came down and exploded on the pavement. People were cheering. Then the next thing that came down was a couch. ... The cops down there were scurrying like ants.'' _ Don Stehr, 51, Oklahoma class of 1972, owner of Mid-West Oil, Ltd. of Enid, Okla.

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``It was generally a blur and there were a hundred things going on at one time. You'd take a road trip and from there it was nonstop weekend. ...You certainly heard stories when you got back to Austin. Pretty much anything you heard that went on on Commerce, you believed to be true.'' _ Christy Amuny, 36, Texas class of 1986, attorney in Beaumont, Texas.

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``One time there were three of us that came down with this guy from Norman (Okla.). His parents were on vacation and had their '56 Caddy convertible. I'm not sure what happened, but evidently he was about to get into a fight or did get into a fight and they drug him off with the keys to the car. That was no fun, being without a car and in downtown Dallas at three in the morning.'' _ Dr. Donald R. Stout, Oklahoma class of 1960, obstetrician at St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla.

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``I was in a small fraternity and we would always lease out a bus we would go out wearing the same jersey and we would walk up and down Commerce. We would walk up and down singing Longhorn songs. Usually the result was fun and rivalry, but there were times when things went too far. ... At the particular bar we went to on a regular basis, the beer began to fly and inevitably we would end up with everyone drenched with beer. The place was divided in half, orange on one side, red on the other, but we were all soaked.'' _ Steve Anderson, 43, Texas class of 1979, municipal judge in El Paso, Texas.

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``We used to have an over-under bet on the number of people who would be arrested. Once a guy in our group was one of them. We didn't find out until we were at the gate at 1:30 for a 2 p.m. kickoff. He never got there and neither did the tickets, I think they were marked as evidence. We eventually got tickets and got into the game, but we were out $150.'' _ David Donchin, 41, Oklahoma class of 1981, law 1984, a lawyer in Oklahoma City.

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``It was almost like Bourbon Street. People taking their off clothes and drinking. There was a lot of taunting and stuff. ... When I was in law school, I had a friend who didn't come back to school for a week and he said he had some problems after the game.'' _ Steve Haught, 47, Oklahoma law 1978, a lawyer in Oklahoma City.

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``Yeah, but Mardis Gras is more fun. It was more taunting. Yelling back and forth, sometimes it went too far, but that is what everybody went to see. ... When it was time to go home, they hosed everybody down.'' _ Grant Adams, 32, Texas class of 1990, Law 1994, a lawyer in Amarillo, Texas.