Twelve Mighty Orphans

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GreenLantern
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This topic was first discussed when we played in the Armed Forces Bowl (Jan, 2020) versus USM in Ft. Worth . A couple of you expressed interest, and in view of the lack of any compelling Tulane football news here's an update.

I moved from north Louisiana to Ft. Worth when I was 14. My high school was Everman (south Ft. Worth) which at the time was a small 1A school. In our district was the Masonic Boy's Home, an orphanage/shelter for young boys whose father had been a member of the Masonic order. Well, the Masonic Home did their best to field a football team each year in class 1A but often lacked an adequate number of players. It was not uncommon for them to dress out less than 15 boys. The orphans were tough kids and their team was called the 'Mighty Mites'. I suppose that life had hardened them and in football, whatever they lacked in numbers they made up in toughness. They were scrawny kids who wore scarred helmets and faded jerseys that did not match.

I remember one year in the early 60s when we played them they were able to field only 13 kids, one a skinny 7th grader. We dreaded the game. These kids would hit so hard they would knock you out of your shoes. If you wanted to risk getting knocked senseless, you would taunt them by calling them orphans.

In the 1930s, the coach of the Masonic Home was Randy Russell (later to coach at SMU). For some reason I do not recall, the larger Ft. Worth schools in class 7A would play the orphans each year. To make up for his team's lack of size, Russell created a wide-open offense which would now be called the 'spread'. He used a squad of only twelve kids and won a Texas state championship in 1930. In 1931 his team was undefeated even though playing the area's powerhouses. The Mighty Mites lost the state championship that year to a much larger team from Corsicana. The score ended in a tie, but in that pre-overtime era, Corsicana won on 'penetrations'.

Jim Dent, a Dallas sportswriter who penned the book 'The Junction Boys' about Bear Bryant's hard-nosed summer camps for the A&M football team, also wrote a bestseller book about the Masonic Mighty Mites: "Twelve Mighty Orphans". It is a moving narrative which describes the winning seasons in the early 1930s and how challenging life was at the orphanage. Verne Lundquist calls it the greatest sports story ever told. I highly recommend it. The book has now been made into a movie starring Luke Wilson, Martin Sheen and Robert Duvall. It is scheduled for release in June.

Here's the book which gets five stars on the GreenLantern scale:
https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Mighty-Or ... 7253&psc=1

Here's the movie trailer:


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tpstulane
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Nice story thanks for sharing!
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winwave
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Thanks for the update. Looking forward to it.
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