Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

49. HORNYTOADS

+49+ HORNYTOADS WH EN I WAS ten years old and living in Washington, DC, one of my West Texas cousins sent me a horned toad through the mail. It arrived in a perforated box, and I took it to a Cub Scout meeting, where it disappeared under the den mother's sofa, never to be recovered. I wrote my cousin and he said never mind, his mother's yard was full of them. Now they are a threatened species, so scarce in Texas that the El Paso Zoo has just acquired three of them. It is a misdemeanor to own one without a permit, punishable by a fine of $500. I don't know what they would do to you if you tried to send one through the mail. I have always had a special affinity for horned toads, probably because I went to Texas C hristian University, whose mascot is the horned frog, which is another name for horned toads. Neither name is correct, because the little animal is actually a species of lizard, Phrynosoma com utum. Just to confuse things, phrynosoma means "toad-bodied." When I was at TeU, the director of the Fort Worth Zoo, Lawrence Curtis, who was a very literal-minded man, used to write an annual letter to Abe Martin, the Teu football coach, explaining that horned frogs were actually lizards and suggesting that the name of the Teu football team be changed to the Horned Lizards. Martin would write him back thanking him for the information, but the name of the team remained the Horned Frogs. The horned frog has been the Teu mascot since 1897, when the school was in Waco and was called AddRan Christian University. College football teams were just starting to acquire mascots in the 1890s- Princeton had the tiger, and Yale had a bulldog named Handsome Dan (U1"s Bevo did not come along until 1916)-and AddRan students wanted a mascot. Someone suggested that the most common animal on the campus was the horned frog, and so they became the AddRan Horned Frogs. VVhen the school moved to Fort Worth as Texas Christian University in 1911 , they tookthe horned frog mascot with them. Like other lizards (and frogs and toads), horned toads hibernate in the winter, shutting down their systems and going underground for a few months. The most famous Texas horned toad, Old Rip, managed to hibernate for thirty-one years inside the cornerstone of the Eastland County Courthouse in Eastland. VVhen the courthouse was being built in 1897, someone remembered that it was customary to place a few mementos inside the cornerstones of public buildings. A Bible, some newspapers, and a few coins were put into a small lead box, and at the last minute the county clerk, Ernest E. Wood, tossed in Blinky, his son's pet horned toad, saying that horned toads were certainly typical of Eastland County and his son could always catch another one. The box was sealed behind the cornerstone. By 1928 Eastland County had outgrown the old courthouse and it was being torn down to be replaced by a new one. Ernest Wood remembered Blinky, and he told Boyce House, the editor of the Eastland Argus Tribune, about him. House was an irrepressible publicist, and he wrote a story about the horned toad in the cornerstone that the national news services picked up. As a result, three thousand people gathered in Eastland on February 18, 1928, the day the cornerstone was to be opened up. The county judge, Ed Pritchard, officiated, and a Methodist minister, Frank Singleton, was designated as an observer to ensure that there was no hanky-panky. Sure enough, when the cornerstone was pulled out and the box opened, there was the horned toad. He was flat as a dollar and covered with dust, but when Judge Pritchard held him up by his tail for all to see, he took a deep breath and started wiggling , and the crowd roared. 180 +Of course, there were some spoil sports that claimed that Pritchard and Singleton had conspired to palm a live horned toad off on the crowd as Blinky, but Blinky's defenders pointed out that horned toads hibernated underground in February and that it would be impossible to find one to substitute for the real Blinky. A local businessman offered a thousand dollars to anyone who could produce a horned toad in February, and...