Bruce plum is way older than 1972, and it wasn’t released by Texas a&m. It was grown from seed around 1900, and released to the public sometime later, certainly by the 1920s.
Here is a link to the grave of the originator, and it has some newspaper clippings from the 1940s talking about the development and release of the cultivar.
I grow plums in two locations about a mile apart. Very different experiences in these two locations.
In my orchard location, there was good fruit set on all plums, but very little harvest. Plum curculio devasted Drag Queen, Toole’s Heirloom, and Odum. Those are the only fruiting Chickasaws I have there. The few plums not hit by PC were carried off by squirrels or raccoons or hit by birds. Out of several hundred plums I ate maybe five. I blame myself for this because I was slow to get my initial PC spray, in large part because I was fooled by what was happening at my home location.
At my home location I grow Guthrie and Robusto. Both set a lot of fruit and had to be thinned, with Robusto having to be thinned heavily. A really good year for both. Guthrie bounced back from a couple of years of declining production. I pruned it heavily in the winter and it responded very well. In previous years I’d had tremendous aphid damage on Guthrie which the ladybugs eventually took care of. This year I caught the aphids just as they were getting started and pruned out the limbs with them. They weren’t a problem. PC also was a very minor issue this year. I believe this was because of some birds that ate them as they were just emerging. I noticed a lot of unusual bird activity in my home plums in early spring and couldn’t figure out what they were doing. I kept waiting to spray when I noticed the first PC strikes, chasing the little birds out of the trees, checking daily. Then the PC just didn’t show up. There were a few scattered strikes later on, but less than 5% of the plums got hit.
Taste was good on all plums, except Odum which tastes bland until they are very ripe, and even then is only ok. My flavor impressions generally match @coolmantoole.