"Dago" Webb, sports star

UPDATED!

Olney High School football team, 1920s.
Roy Lee "Dago" Webb is in the center of the back row.

I’d always heard that Roy Lee was a good football player, but I’ve recently learned that he played baseball too. I never remember him watching sports on TV, however, all the time I was growing up, and indeed the sports gene seems to have skipped a generation. Rodger Lacy was a star athlete, our daughter Rachel played soccer until she sought out the bright lights of the theater, and our other daughter, Sarah has been a dedicated soccer player since the 2nd grade and has tried swimming, basketball, and track and field. Both of Ken and Jimmy’s kids, Patrick and Cullen, played football all through school. But I never cared anything about sports myself, nor did any of my siblings although I know that Guinn follows various teams; and of course Jimmy is married to a coach and All-American college football player. But Randall never cared much about sports of any kind as far as I know.

All this is by way of introduction to Roy “Dago” Webb, star athlete at Olney High School in the 1920s. Somehow I had it in my head that he had left school in the 9th grade, but I was disabused of this notion at the recent family reunion, where I learned that he attended high school so that he could play sports until he was 20 years old! I further heard that the reason he had little interest in football was because during one game, he and his friends decided to “take out,” in today’s terms, someone they didn’t like, so they all tackled this person at the same time, injuring him permanently. Enough to put you off your game. But he was apparently good enough to be offered a scholarship to Decatur College; not sure whether this is Decatur, Texas, home of the World Oldest Community College, or the more famous one in Georgia. "He also had an offer to play semi-pro baseball for a team sponsored by an oil company," again according to Jimmy, who got all this straight from Roy Lee himself.

But football and baseball weren't the only games; according to Jimmy, he also played basketball, ran track, and was a member of the Glee Club, the latter being "the reason for his popularity w/the girls." In the 1926 O-Hi, the Olney High School yearbook referred to below, he does not show up on the basketball team nor the track team--maybe he did that earlier in his high school career; he was 18 when the yearbook was made and might have already graduated (as noted below, his picture isn't in the Seniors section). Or perhaps he wasn't there for the picture that day. Nor is there a section for a Glee Club, which, according to Wikipedia is a choir composed "historically of men but also of just women or mixed voices, which traditionally specializes in singing short songs." There is however a Pep Squad in the O-Hi, but it's all girls (one of which is his sister Lura). There are proportionally more female names than males on the signature page, which is some evidence that he was indeed popular with the girls.

Guinn has recently sent a 1926 O-Hi, the annual of Olney (Texas) High School. It’s really fun to look through, but noticeable by his absence is Roy Lee Webb. He does not have a picture in the class photos—although his sister Lura appears in the Sophomore section—but he does show up in the sports sections under football and baseball. I’ll include a couple of pictures from that book. Also, Guinn sent a wonderful photo of the Olney HS football team, in which Roy Lee appears very prominently; he’s taller than everyone else on the team. Apparently it was a common practice for boys who were about to graduate to fail in one class, so they could play football the next fall.

Lura Webb, 1926

Lura and Roy Lee were in high school at the same time, as she related in a letter:

"Roy and I were in high school at the same time. I was a freshman when he was a junior. He was on the football team and I was really proud of him. He kept an eye out on me. If he saw me riding around town with a boy (especially if we drove out of town) he always knew it and and told me so but never told on me. Papa was very strict (do as I say not as I do) and I don’t think Jewell was in a car with a boy until after she came back from her first year in college. I started a little younger and he found out one of the times. I wouldn’t tell him the name of the boy but Roy learned it with his football coach who called the boy in and told him if he ever even looked at me, Old Man Webb was going to kill him. Needless to say, I could pass him in the hall after that and he never looked my way again."

I recently made contact with Mr. Dorman Holub, of the Young County [Texas] Historical Commission, and he has been a wealth of information about Olney and Young County. With his kind permission, the following short history of Olney High School sports is reprinted from his personal research files: “The first football game played by an Olney team was Fall of 1924 against Seymour. They traveled to Seymour and lost the game. Their mascot was the Olney Hillbillies. They did not play another game that year. The Olney Hillbillies played 9 games in 1925 and ended up 4-4-1. [A] new high school was built in 1926 and bleachers were moved from the Olney baseball park to the football field. 1928 is when the Olney mascot became the Cubs which is the mascot still today. 1928-1932, Olney won five consecutive district championships and three regional crowns. It was a "B" school. In those days, you could win a Regional Crown and decide if you wanted to go into the "A" school playoffs. Most didn't. There were 8 Regional Crown teams in the State. 1928, Cubs were undefeated in district and lost to Mineral Wells in Bi-district.”

By the end of the 1920s, though, Roy Lee was getting ready to move on, get a job, get married, get on with life; but that's a subject for another post.

[and I should add that I'm fully aware that "Dago" is a derogatory term and an ethnic slur; but there it is in the yearbook. I have no idea why he was given that nickname, only that nicknames were much more common then than they are now. -RW]