Texas Tech University Athletics
A Family Affair
October 18, 2014 | Football
BY NICK KOSMIDER
Special to TexasTech.com
Few games in a football season, whether it's high school or college, are as memorable as homecoming. It's a day and a game designed to honor the past, to pay homage to those who have come before. It's also a celebration of the present and peak into all that the future holds.
For Dan Howard, homecoming at Texas Tech is about all those things and more. But most of all, it's about family. That's because to honor the rich history of the Red Raiders for Dan and his wife Kay is to celebrate a growing, towering family tree of relatives who have donned red and black since the school opened its doors almost 90 years ago.
"It's been a love affair with Texas Tech, you might say," Howard said. With 66 members of Dan and Kay's family having attended or graduated from Texas Tech, love affair might not be a strong enough term. The Red Raiders are blood, flowing as deep as the colors on the school flag.
Dan and Kay, of course, graduated from Texas Tech -- Dan in 1959, Kay a year later. They briefly moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area so Dan could start his career as an accountant, but by 1963 they were back in Lubbock, where they have planted roots that run underground through much of the Lone Star State, but have always managed to sprout up on the Texas Tech campus.
Sixty-six tried and true Red Raiders. Might they soon create a large enough army of supporters to fill an entire section of Jones AT&T Stadium?
"We're trying," Dan Howard said with a hearty laugh at the thought. "We're doing our best."
The family's first connection to Texas Tech starts at the beginning -- as in the beginning of the university. Kay Howard's aunt, Mayme Alexander, was a member of Texas Tech's very first graduating class way back in 1927.
"For a long time we thought she was the first ever to graduate from Texas Tech, because her last name started with an `A'," Dan Howard said. "But it turns out she was the second to graduate in that very first class. Some other girl walked across the stage first."
There were only 26 students in that first graduating class, and each of them had only been at Texas Tech, then called Texas Technological College, for two years. The school had opened in 1925.
But Mayme Alexander's brief time at the school began a lasting legacy. Mayme's brother, J.C. Alexander, played on one of Texas Tech's first football teams, becoming the first of four generations of Dan and Kay's family to be a part of the Texas Tech football team.
Kay's brothers, Wick and Moody, were also Red Raiders. Moody Alexander played for just one season on the football team before suffering a broken leg. He spent his final three seasons working as a student manager. It was, at first, a disappointing blow, not to be able to play. But Moody's impact on the program ended up being larger than it would have with any play he could have made on the field.
"Moody was good friends with Joe Kirk Fulton, and he was the one who asked Joe Kirk what he would think of going to the Gator Bowl out in Florida (in 1954)," Howard recalled. "They talked to the coach (DeWitt Weaver) and got it all cleared. Sure enough, Joe Kirk got it all cleared and brought his horse up there and got it ready to ride. Right before it was time to ride, they got the message that maybe they weren't going to be able to ride at all. Moody went to the coach, and the coach went to whoever was in charge, and sure enough they let him ride. That was the first time the horse had ever represented Texas Tech with the rider and the cape and the mask. It all worked. Moody was involved in that."
There was chaos behind the scenes that day, but it produced an entrance that left the crowd in Jacksonville, Florida, stunned. The inspired, underdog Red Raiders then went on to beat Auburn 35-13 to finish 11-1. It was one of only three 11-win seasons in Texas Tech history (1973 and 2008 are the others).
The next morning, the Atlanta Journal wrote: "No team in any bowl game ever made a more sensational entrance."
Joe Kirk's ride, with a little help from Moody, began the tradition of the masked rider that has lasted 60 years and still persists today.
The Alexander legacy on the football team continued with Wick's son, Chuck Alexander, a defensive back for the Red Raiders who was an Academic All-American and graduated in 1984.
The family didn't stop contributing there. Howard's grandson, Will Watson, whose father played for the Red Raiders, is currently a student equipment manager for the football team.
"He told me the other day, `I hate to think of it as a job because it's too much fun,'" Howard said. "... We have a football family, that's for sure."
But the Howard/Alexander family hasn't limited its support of Texas Tech athletics to the football program, even if enough of them played for it to nearly form their own team. They also have season tickets to Texas Tech men's and women's basketball games and have been especially strong supporters of the Lady Raiders for years.
Dan and Kay's daughters were successful high school basketball players in Lubbock, who made back-to-back trips to the state tournament. There, the family ran into Marsha Sharp, who had just taken the job at Texas Tech and was recruiting. They quickly struck up a friendship.
"They were some of our earliest fans, some of the people I remember most from the early days when it wasn't one of the coolest things in the world to do -- be fans of women's basketball at Texas Tech," Sharp said.
Dan and Kay were more than fans. They became part of the team. They offered, early in Sharp's career, to host a dinner for the team before the season started, and it became a tradition that has lasted for more than 20 years.
Sharp said the dinner has served as an unofficial pep rally, with all the Fritos chili pies and ice cream sundaes the players could eat.
"Our players always wanted to have the next day off so they could rest a little from the food," Sharp said. "It's no question they were as much a part of us as our own parents, friends and family."
When the Howard family first began connecting with the Lady Raiders program, it wasn't the juggernaut Sharp would build it into in only a few years time.
"When we first started going to the games and we had season tickets, I asked the young lady (who was selling tickets), `Where do we sit?'" Howard recalled. "She said, `Well, anywhere you want to.' There were only about 500 going to the game in those early years. You could kind of pick where you wanted to sit."
Just a few years later, during the 1992-1993 season, as many as 15,000 people showed up to games to cheer on the Lady Raiders, who capped off a historic year with a national championship. And wouldn't you know it, Dan and Kay were in Atlanta, high atop the rafters in the Omni Coliseum, to see Sharp and company beat Ohio State 84-82 to hoist the title trophy.
"It was awesome," Howard said. "I remember one of the Tech fans sitting with us stood up and said, `We were here when it happened.'"
The Howard family hasn't missed many such special moments in Texas Tech history. They were there for Donny Anderson's illustrious career that led to his selection as the No. 1 overall NFL draft pick in 1965. They saw Zach Thomas' improbable interception and touchdown to beat Texas A&M in 1995. And they were there in 2008 when the Red Raiders knocked off top-ranked Texas in a game for the ages.
See, the family ties keep flowing. With two granddaughters having just graduated from Texas Tech, and grandson Will set to do the same soon, Howard believes the family legacy is just getting started. It's a homecoming with no end in sight.
"We kind of revolve around Texas Tech and Tech activities," Howard said. "It just means everything to our family."
