Travel World guide

I missed Ty Cashion’s book “Pigskin Pulpit” when it was first released a few years ago but with the re-release in paper back this year (2006) I had the opportunity to read it. I think the reason I didn’t read it the first time was the title. I thought it was another “Glory” of High School Football book. Had I just paid attention to the subtitle “A Social History of Texas High School Football Coaches” my history buff inclination would have made reading this book a no brainer.

Ty Cashion was ordained to write this book. A professor of history at Sam Houston State University and more importantly the son of a Texas High School football coach, Ty had the knowledge to tell the story and the access to interview, by my count, at least 82 different Texas High School football coaches, many of which are no longer with us.

Some 40+ years ago, when I was a kid, I would listen to Texas High School football play off games on the radio. The radio announcer start by saying something like this: “Broadcasting from P.E. Shotwell stadium in Abilene, Texas …”.

P. E. Shotwell, Darrell Tully, and Gordon Wood may just be the name of Texas High School football stadiums for football fans of the current generation but they are just three of the many coaches that made Texas High School football what it is today. Many young athletes dream of “going pro” and signing multimillion dollar contracts. School boy football players born into the depression era of the early twentieth century just dreamed of the chance to play college football, get an education and coach football. It was their ticket off the farm and a way to a better life.

Ty Cashion chronicles the path to their goal and how the experiences that they had impacted several generations of young men in Texas.

If you ever knew a coach, if you ever played for a coach, if you ever learned from a coach, if you ever cussed a coached, if you ever idolized a coach …, you need to read this book.

This was a great story. I actually knew one of the characters in the book who just recently passed away. I guess that is one reason I will always treasure this book and recommend to everyone. It is not only about football but about life during the hard years.

This is a great book. It tells the story of how High School Football has become the number one event in Texas. I am glad someone put these stories into print because sadly many of these great men are leaving us but their stories and the impact they have had, and continue to have, will be passed on. This is a must read for any football fan.

This is an entertaining and inspiring true story about a football team composed of orphans from the Masonic Home during the 30′s. Though scrawny and poorly equipped, they were able to defeat many of the top high school teams in Texas due to a brilliant coach who was totally devoted to his boys. This underdog team inspired great enthusiasm around the US during the bleak Depression.

Great motivational book and the author did a great job writing the book! it starts off kind of slow but works into the meat of the story rather nicely I definatly recomend this book to anybody that liks sports and good motivation!

I grew up in Ft. Worth in the late 40′s & 50′s and heard plenty about them from my father & his friends. This is one of the best sports books I’ve read & am surprised there never has been anything ever written about them before..

I’m a high school English teacher and my kids love this book. We have a hard time keeping it in our library.

This is a pretty good book about a team I had never heard of. My brother-in-law seemed to remember them a bit as he is from the Fort Worth area. However, he doesn’t read books!! Oh for shame. Maybe he reads the comics in the Sunday newspaper.

My Father, Leon Pickett, was the oldest living member of he Mighty Mites until April 2, 2008. I cherish this book, I cherish the wonderful memories.
Sarah (Pickett) McGarrahan

Before today’s glamour, headlines, and high school state championship games played in the Dallas Cowboys stadium, Texas high school football has always been about teams, communities and individuals bonded by an internal drive to be the best you can be on the high school gridiron. It is the stuff legends are made of – at all levels – and where for just a little while you can lose your worries in life and cheer for the kids giving it all they have. No matter what the odds, the Mighty Orphans, lead by a caring coach, focused on the task at hand – playing good football. If it took their mind off the crappy hand that life dealt them for a few hours a week, then so be it.

If you like high school football, you will love this book.

I purchased this book for my father for Christmas–he’s a huge football fan, played high school ball in Texas years after the depression. He’d never heard of the Mighty Mites, and, were it not for a review I heard on the radio, we may never have. Turns out, he has a lot of ties to the people in the book.

The book itself is well-written, easy to read historical and personal account of the coach, the home and the boys who lived there. We get background on some families, a real history of the coach and the real-life look at the way life was in the home. IT was not pretty, it was hard indeed, but these boys were given a chance to do something beyond the school’s fence. Their coach taught them how to play football, but more importantly, how to be a team and how to be men. His love for the game and the boys jumps off the page and you can feel it in every move he makes, every sacrifice he makes for the school. It follows several years of the “Mighty Mites” team, from their inception to their ultimate conclusion.

This is a wonderful story of the human condition, of overcoming odds and expectations, and how one person can make a huge difference in the lives of others when he is truly committed. Football fan or not, this is a wonderful telling of the lives of some special kids and the man who led them.

I actually got this for a college history class but I really enjoyed it regardless. I will easily recommend this to anybody I know

Wonderful book, there were more than just twelve mighty orphans! The entire home was fullof mighty orphans, all overcoming the death of their parents in one way or another. I played football against the Masonic Home Mighty Mites in the 80′s, they were still a tough bunch of kids when we played them. I remember my father telling me about the tough and mean team they were sporting in the fifties, so this kind of hit home for me. I personally could not put the book down once I started reading it. If you like high school football in Texas this is a must read!

If you like football, you’ll like this book. If you like Fort Worth, you’ll find yourself being drawn into the history of it. If you like Baylor University, you’ll find a hidden gem if you look hard enough. If you like stories about selfless quality leaders who make the absolute most of their resources – you’ll have trouble putting this one down.
Setting Fort Worth Texas – during the great depression – events that occurred at the Masonic Home for Orphans
This is a wonderful book about an unlikely group of champions. Each of the boys came to the home from different, tragic circumstances. The Masonic home, while it certainly filled a need for those orphaned during this time, was not an easy place to grow up.
Some of the adults who worked with the boys were visionary, inspiring, selfless and leaderful. Others at least bordered on cruel, even by the standards of the time. This is not an easy book to read due to the rough language, brutal treatment of and by the occupants of the home.
However the book is also about self sacrifice, vision, compassion – particularly illustrated by the team’s coach Rusty Russell. He seemed to see the boys as they were and as they could become. He exemplifies the wonderful trait of being able to make the absolute best of tough situations. The obstacles he and his team faced were large, virtually constant, and always faced head on, without compliant. Russell strikes quite a heroic pose the Twelve Mighty Orphans – without the flaw so common to visionary leaders – an ego gone wrong.
Most of all, this book is about male toughness – in all the good and terrible things that word encompasses. It talks about tough circumstances, tough times, tough adults, and most of all some incredibly tough boys/young adults. You’ll be amazed at the things they could and did do.

Maybe it’s because I am from Fort Worth, and I consider myself to be an AMATEUR local historian; however, I just could not put this book down! I read the entire thing in one night, because I couldn’t stop. The story is gripping…makes you laugh, makes you cry. This should definately be made into a movie, if it isn’t being done already.

Occasionally I’ll drive by the Masonic Home and imagine it in all its football glory.

I’m a native Texan and an avid football fan who played football in the southern panhandle area between Odessa and Lubbock and I had never heard this story. I’m thankful that Jim Dent wrote this book and you will be, too.

This is a story of struggle and perseverance during terrible times. The facts are how a rag-tag football team from an orphans home in the 1930′s competed and won against the “big dogs” of Texas high school football. The heart of the story, though, is how this orphans home, Masonic Home, it’s coach, Rusty Russell, and the players, usually only 12 on the team during any season, overcame harsh times and even harsher lives.

That these boys, who found themselves in this home after the deaths of one or both parents and who sometimes witnessed these deaths first-hand, played football at all is nothing short of fantastic. That they grew as young men under the mentorship of a caring coach is a testament to perseverance in the face of enormous odds…in other words, almost miraculous.

Throughout the book, the author sprinkles stories away from the football field to bring life at the Masonic Home into focus. The oil boom, depression, poverty, Texas football politics, Jack Dempsey, and even Seabiscuit all come together to relate the life and times of this school and football team.

If you’re a native Texan, love football, or cheer for the underdog, you will thoroughly enjoy this book.

Excellent tale of the hardships, triumphs, and traditions of the Masonic Home. Particularly enlightening was a look at life in Ft Worth during the Depression years, and how a city and state rallied to support these underdogs. Classic sports tale with some twists and turns. A real page-turner!

Really good book even if you are not a football fan.

I was at Baylor when Doak Walker starred for SMU. I am glad to learn much from this book about the reasons for Doak’s success.

The book shows what one man can do to change the lives of others by learning to use what he has to the best of his–and their–abilities.

In my opinion Twelve Mighty Orphans is absolutely the best sports nonfiction book to come along since Seabiscuit, An American Legend. And they both have a similar theme throughout – that of America’s love for the underdog. You don’t have to be a football expert to be rooting for the boys at the Home. The editorial review from Publisher’s Weekly on this page that said “Dent’s strength is his play-by-play accounts of key games, but descriptions of personal interactions are often forced and lifeless” is completely off the mark. The play-by-play is great, of course, and exciting. However, it’s the back story of the underdogs that grew up at the Masonic Home and scrapped their way to winning while being transported to games on the bed of a wheezing old truck that brings it all together and makes the reader care passionately for the Mighty Mites. Without stories of what shaped the orphans before and after their coming to the Home it could very well have been like reading descriptions of games that were straight off the sports pages of a newspaper. My congrats to Jim Dent for making this story a feel-good winner.

Set in depressing (but not necessarily economically depressed) Fort Worth, Texas 1928 to 1943, this is a initially heartwarming high school football story about a disparate, desperate crew of orphans that never really warms your heart. Dent opens with the murder of the father of four orphans in 1928. And then it’s off to the school. Being outweighed, ill-equipped orphans, the Masonic Home Mighty Mites football team has three strikes against them and immediately deserve and earn a lot of sympathy. But the details make the orphans more unsavory and unsympathetic than one would imagine. They pride themselves on being mean, not just to opposing players, but also to each other. Their most reknowned pro football player earned recognition for being the “meanest” player to ever play pro football, not something I’d frame and write home about. They are brutal, blocking to injure. They perfect an almost lethal, lip-splitting hit – the Humper – that marks many of their opponents with split lips, missing teeth, and players carried from the field. Playing without faceguards, they exploit vulnerabilities of their much larger opponent, but the reader sometimes must wince at the thought of the clash. Dent repeatedly refers to “Twelve Mighty Orphans” but it was not clear to me that the team always or usually suited up only twelve players. He writes about the orphans being shoeless through half the year, but it is not clear that they ever played football that way. Their highly successful, quite humble coach, Rusty Russell, builds a lean, mean, fighting machine, but the team and their later lives show that building character may not have been so successful. Survival skills, yes. Character? I’m less sanguine. Maybe call them the Spartans, not the Mighty Mites.

On the dust cover, Brent Musburger says that the coach and team “steal your heart as they overcome every obstacle imaginable,” but that is hyperbole. Yes, the odds were strongly against them. The rich and the powerful disdained the Mites and, more importantly, the Mites’ success. The best teams earn resentment and that often turns into revenge, and I can easily imagine other obstacles. Plus, as other coaches noted, Russell had the advantage of 24 x 7 year-round access to and complete, absolutely authoritarian rule of the boys. Vince Lombardi’s Packers had a summer idyll as compared to the training and school life the orphans suffered. Apparently, all of them started out hating the place (and, of course, missing their dead parent or parents), but they all seemed to convert to a love of the place based on a defensive, almost psychotic stance towards the more privileged, meaning the rest of the world.

The dialog often sounds like a bad Bowery Boys script. The physical and psychological abuse almost steams off the page, along with some of the excessive testosterone. One last note on poor copyediting: On p. 131, a missed kick by Jeff Brown leaves the Mites tied with Lubbock, 6 -6. Dent reminds us of that score, 6-6, on the following page. But when Lubbock’s Shakespeare Sewalt scores and Lubbock converts the extra point, the score somehow becomes 13-7. Another Lubbock TD and PAT and on p. 134, the final is 20-6. Huh?

Aren’t history books supposed to be dull as dishwater? I gave this book to my 80+ year-old Father for Christmas. He really enjoyed it! So did I, for that matter. Dr. Cashion must have spend untold hours interviewing old-time Texas High School football coaches and those who played under them. This book is as close to listening to those old timers as the written word can be. Growing up in football crazy Garland, Texas (back-to-back state championships in the 1960′s under Chuck Curtis), I remember as a child “high school football fever.” This hits the mark, or should I say is a “two point conversion.”

Twelve Mighty Orphans certainly captured not only my attention but my heart. Dent brought to light not only a completely different era of high school football but a story of underdogs fighting for glory. I fell in love with the story line and the individuals who made this a must read. This team and school epitomized the era in which the story took place.On a side note I loved the discussion and the political nature of high school athletic associations which Dent related as well as the manner in which the football players were treated in comparison to the rest of the student body.

While I hesitate to call this hoosiers or seabiscuit it certainly falls in that 2nd tier of quality sports books.

Better than what my title suggests – it is just a great book aboout people overcoming through grit, determination and basic values. As usual, Dent offers a superb story about the boys at the Home, a Texas orphanage during the Great Depression. Working with no equipment, being vastly undersized, dealing with tremendous emotional traumas and initially knowing very little about the game of football, these boys mature through the guidance of Rusty Russell who could have coached elsewhere for greater glory and money. Instead, he took the boys under his wing and they collectively rode to well deserved glory. Fabulous book!