This Aggie Family's Love for Texas A&M Is 100 Years Old

Hailing from Beaumont and Houston, nearly 20 Aggies have come from the Dollinger family across four generations. This spring’s graduation photos of Charlie Dollinger ’26 will go into the family memorabilia, too. But these photos have an especially meaningful significance for the Dollingers: Charlie’s graduation coincides with the university’s 150th anniversary and also marks 100 years after his great-grandfather, Charles “Chick” Dollinger, Class of 1926, began writing in the ledgers of his own scrapbook about his Aggie experience. It’s a family legacy marked by excellence, service, generosity and a Spirit can ne’er be told.

Framing First Impressions

When Chick toured a young Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas as a high school senior in 1922, the campus stood conspicuously in a sea of pastureland. Excitedly, Chick enrolled as a mechanical engineer and first-generation college student. But when he arrived in the fall, he found himself in an unusual housing situation: living in a tent camp across from the YMCA Building in what was the university’s makeshift accommodation for students due to the influx of World War I veterans returning for schooling.
 

By the time Jerry Dollinger ’69 ’71, Chick’s youngest son, needed to pick a college, it was an easy choice. “I didn’t consider another school,” smiled Jerry. “It was just baked in from birth.”

Like his father, Jerry reveled in his college years. A vivid Aggie championship at the Cotton Bowl and electric Midnight Yell practices flash through his memory, but it’s the strength of friendships that have stayed the longest in his life. Along with four other cadets and their girlfriends, Jerry and his own high school sweetheart, Jan, cemented quickly as a group that still meets once or twice a year, often in College Station for an Aggie football game.

Another friendship that the Dollingers hold dear is that of longtime university employee Walter Penberthy and his wife, Lollie. When football and dancing season rolled around in Aggieland, dates of the Corps of Cadets found themselves scrambling for places to stay in College Station. The Penberthys, along with other generous Texas A&M professors, opened their upstairs rooms for traveling young women, including Jan, who still remembers freshly ironed sheets on her bed and homemade cinnamon rolls. For decades, the Penberthy family supported and hosted Jan and Jerry when they later visited the university with their children “They were a huge draw to us whenever we would come up to College Station,” Jan said. “They became our forever friends.”

Mirror Images

Unlike his father’s experience, when Texas A&M was predominantly a male military school, David enjoyed new aspects of the university. He pledged with a fraternity, studied abroad at Texas A&M’s Italian campus in Castiglion Fiorentino, served as a Fish Camp counselor and lived in an off-campus apartment. But however much the campus had changed, his ears were still trained to love the notes sounding from the Aggie Band and the hush blanketing a somber crowd at Silver Taps.

One hundred years after his great-grandfather walked the storied campus, David’s son Charlie strolled to and from his own classes on paved sidewalks. The school boasts more than 70,000 students now instead of a modest 2,000 as it did in 1926, along with countless student organizations and campus initiatives Chick could have only imagined, which provided Charlie the opportunity to follow his father’s footsteps in studying economics, venturing abroad and finding his brotherhood in the Aggie Cowboys. No longer primarily attended by rural Texans, the university now has worldwide reach and booms with fresh facilities — like Blue Bell Park, where Charlie enjoyed watching home runs on Tuesday nights.

Chick might have been surprised at the university’s advancements, but he would have recognized the same drive in his great-grandson. “It’s an honor for me to carry on the tradition my family started a century ago,” Charlie said. “I hope future generations can keep it going.”

Capturing Commitment

For the Dollingers, Texas A&M’s spirit is a continuum of the strong character already present in their family. “We’ve chosen Texas A&M because our family shares the same values, and four years at Texas A&M has served to reinforce and drive those values home: honor, friendship, traditions, family and loyalty,” David said.
 

“In each generation, service has been really big,” Jerry added. “We’ve all been leaders in our communities in various ways and magnitudes.” As dedicated representatives in the Texas A&M Beaumont Club, the Dollinger family continues to invest in the university that has shaped them.

It’s also why Jerry and David established an endowment with the Texas A&M Foundation in honor of Jerry’s late brother and father in 2024 to support Texas A&M’s School of Engineering Medicine (EnMed) through student scholarships. Merging the medical and engineering disciplines, the program prepares Aggies to pioneer advancements in global health care. As lifelong engineers, Jerry knew his father and brother would have rallied behind these critical innovations. “Both of their minds would have been blown away, to think that doctors would be doing engineering work,” he said.

Over decades, the family has watched proudly as the school has developed new programs like EnMed, continued to deepen the quality of education, and expanded nationwide while maintaining its traditions, outstanding education and strong family ties. “For the Dollinger family, their love of Texas A&M cements them together,” Jan said.