University of North Texas - Yucca Yearbook (Denton, TX)

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The Tale of et Din aiF Reader, gentle or savage, be not de- ceived. This is not an Uncle Remus story, nor yet a tale from Wild Animals I Have Known. If you are hoping for a chapter from Afri- can Game Trails, or from Hunting Wild Animals in Af- rica, or if even now you are reading breathlessly in an- ticipation of the thrills to come that will make the hair on your head up to stand and send gelid pulsations coursing up and down your spinal column as you peruse an exciting account of hazardous adventure taken from that inimitable record of hairbreadth escapes, Stalking the Hare in His Native Lair, you are doomed — yea, foredoomed — to disappointment. Nor will you be informed from these pages as to how the cotton-tail came by his abbreviated caudal appen- dage. But know ye, reader, that this, The Tale of the Cotton- Tail, though to the present student generation apparent fic- tion, is in reality a delayed obituary notice, chronicling the spon- taneous generation, the self-condemning christening, the unique 11

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CHBX. BRUCE, Ph. D. President

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existence, and the perfectly natural death and supplanting of the first student annual of the North Texas State Normal College. A gentleman, our non-cinematographic, pre-ragtime forbears maintained, requires three generations in the making; hut a mush- room, as everyone knows, may spring up in all its parvenu luxuri- ance over night, wholly forgetful of its lowly origin and sporo- phoric kinship. The gentleman endures; but the mushroom, when its little hour of morning exaltation has passed and the day is senes- cent, may find that it is only a toadstool, after all. Let the inquisi- tive reader puzzle out the moral of this if he can. Rightly to appreciate The Cotton-Tail in all its brevity and uniqueness, one must know something of the motives actuating and the conditions responsible for its spontaneous generation, and something of the intellectual and social environment into which this sporadic annualet was ushered and in the midst of which it passed its epehemeral existence. One should know, too. something of the persons who stood sponsor to the infant literary bunny, and who almost straightway deserted it when a more normal annual, The Yucca, was born one year later, decently christened, and, as the literary successor of this sport, this lEpus PLORIDANUS, took its place as a legitimate member of the family of Texas college yearbooks. In the early days of the Normal — back in the year of grace 1906, to be exact, the fifth year of the Normal as a State school, and before Mr. Legett became a member of the teaching staff — the Faculty consisted of fifteen men and women. Mr. J. S. Kendall, the first President of the school, and father of the present Chairman of the Board of Regents, was then at the head of the Faculty. The teachers and their respective subjects were as follows: Dr. W. H. Bruce and Mr. J. A. Sanders, Mathematics ; Mr. L. D. Borden, Physical Science; Mr. W. H. Long, Natural Science; Miss Annie Webb Blanton and Miss Edith Lanier Clark, English; Miss Emma 12