Here is an excerpt from my book, "Warbirds – How They Played the Game," about the Abilene Eagles' 49-game Texas high school football winning streak at mid-20th century:
"A win over bitter rival San Angelo, 87 miles southwest of Abilene on U.S. 277, was always satisfying. And it was the Eagles’ seventh victory against three defeats for the 1952 season, earning them a third-place finish in District 1-AAAA, by consensus the most rugged district in Texas high school football. A respectable season, Abilenians rationalized.
"That same day, the defending state Class AAAA champion Lubbock Westerners beat the Amarillo Golden Sandies, 40-13, to complete a second straight undefeated regular season and repeat as District 1-AAAA champions.
"Abilene, 170 miles west of Dallas, was the easternmost team in the district. Other teams in sprawling District 1-AAAA stretched from West Central Texas up the Caprock to the Panhandle. They were Lubbock, Amarillo, San Angelo, the Midland Bulldogs, the Odessa Bronchos, the Borger Bulldogs and the Pampa Harvesters. In 1952, Abilene, with a strong defense but a sporadic offense that only scored 120 points all season, collected wins over Fort Worth Arlington Heights, Sweetwater, Borger, Amarillo, Midland, Odessa and San Angelo and lost to Breckenridge, Pampa and Lubbock.
"As the Eagles once again hung up their football gear and moved indoors to basketball, Lubbock High swept through the state football playoffs and defeated Baytown, 12-7, to repeat as state Class AAAA champions. It was only the second year that Texas high schools played to a state championship in classes – AAAA, AAA, AA and A – based on school enrollment. Cities with only one high school, like Abilene, in Class AAAA, had populations in the 40,000-75,000 range. Abilene’s population of about 60,000 was not as large as Amarillo or Lubbock, but larger than Midland, Odessa and San Angelo. The district’s “small” cities were Borger and Pampa. They were all working-class cities, with economies based on oil, agriculture and ranching, and the boys growing up to play football knew about work . . . ."
To a football fan, living in Abilene in the 1950s has become a lifelong definition of being in the right place at the right time. District 1-AAAA was a great district, deserving of its reputation as the most rugged in Texas high school football, and its physical location, west of the 100th Meridian, the so-called "arid line," added to its aura of toughness. Another "Warbirds" excerpt:
"Piety was a strong feature in West Texas thinking, and it had found a particular focus in Abilene, where there was a church for every 100 people, and three denominational colleges: Hardin-Simmons, operated by the Baptists; McMurry, operated by the Methodists; and Abilene Christian, operated by the Church of Christ. The 'Western Parson,' who hosted an after-school show for kids, was a local TV celebrity.
"Much of this attitude had been imported with the early Texas settlers from the South, who brought along their Christian fundamentalism, and it was reinforced by living in a region where God’s stern hand was so evident in the lay of the land and the extremes of the heavens. It was not an environment in which to gloat or to tease fate. Safer all around to be tough as a boot but meek as a lamb, and on this principle was the culture grounded . . . ."
It was an unbeatable, richly romantic environment for the kind of football played in the cities of District 1-AAAA, which by the end of the 1950s had earned a nickname: "The Little Southwest Conference." Observers seriously believed that there were teams in 1-AAAA that could beat some of the college teams in the Southwest Conference. After watching Abilene beat Waco in 1956, Waco Times-Herald sportswriter George Raborn wrote, “Abilene’s first team played three full quarters, and looked strong enough to beat either of the freshman teams that had played the night before at Baylor Stadium. In fact it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say Abilene could beat the Texas Longhorns.”
The Abilene fan's dream began to unravel very quickly, because of changing Texas demographics and population distributions. In the autumn of 1955, the University Interscholastic League announced a realignment for the 1956 season. Abilene would go into District 2-AAAA, with San Angelo, Odessa, Midland and Big Spring. The new 3-AAAA took in Amarillo, Lubbock, Borger, Pampa and Plainview.
Eventually San Angelo would drop into lower classifications, but Abilene, Odessa and Midland stayed locked in fall combat in the Little Southwest Conference for another half-century. Then on Friday, another reclassification – no, call it a tectonic shift – came down from the UIL. Abilene in a Fort Worth district? Old Abilenians are taking this hard, the world over.
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