Fort Worth's Scrawny Team: Mighty Good News in Tough Times...

At a time when The Great Depression hit everywhere, causing disruption to families and businesses, ripping lives asunder, times were not easy. This photo captures a bank run on a downtown bank on Main Street in Fort Worth, Texas during those Depression years.

It wasn't the coach, or the football team, or The Masonic Home officials who came up with the name "Mighty Mites" for the scrawny team of boys who were known as scrappy orphans beating the toughest football teams in the state of Texas.

The official nickname the school had chosen for its fledgling football team originally had been The Masons, a tribute to the organization that established and supported The Masonic Home and School to take in and care for children of dues-paying Masons in good standing when no one else could. When the name was chosen, no one knew or cared much about the little unknown team. In 1927 it didn't matter much what the name was.

Fort Worth newspaper sportswriter Henry Holman "Pop" Boone years later renamed them the Mighty Mites, and the name stuck as the little tough team beat opponent after opponent in spite of all odds. The city that now calls itself Cowtown, that was known from it's founding to be the town on the edge of The West, an outpost to the unknown that rounded up cattle to be sent to feed a nation, grew to love this homegrown team and came out in force to root and cheer for the little guys who felt they were giants, coached to go up against anyone and anything.

The ragged team with hardly a spare boy on the bench and no fathers to root for them, inspired a city, then all of Texas, then the entire U.S. with their winning spirit and their desire to defeat the big boy teams from the largest schools around.