A new calendar revisits SMU history

Mustang fans can revisit football history with a new SMU calendar, The Golden Age of Football: 1920s to 1960s. The calendar is among a variety of SMU-related items available from the Bookstore, the Spirit Shop, Heritage Hall, SMU Press and The Library of Texas, just in time for the holidays.

The 2009 calendar includes 12 reproductions of SMU souvenir game day program covers ranging from 1945 to 1965 including the 1946 Homecoming game against Baylor, 1950 Homecoming game against Texas A&M and the 1965 Cotton Bowl game against Purdue.

The covers feature color illustrations by the late sports artist Lon Keller, whose work has the look of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. Football action, lovely coeds and whimsical illustrations of players and fans create a vintage look.

“Each cover is a piece of art,” says Joan Gosnell, university archivist, who was instrumental in the calendar’s creation, along with Heritage Hall director Gerry York and members of Asgard Press. “The illustrator took the time to create covers that people would save and treasure. Now we can treasure them again.”

The football programs used in the calendar are from the SMU sports history collection at Heritage Hall, a museum that opened in 2000 in Paul B. Loyd All Sports Center. The museum highlights the accomplishments of Mustang coaches and players through photographs, uniforms, newspaper clippings and trophies.

Calendars can be purchased for $18.95 at the SMU Bookstore or online at http://asgardpress.com/09_SMU. Proceeds will be divided between Heritage Hall and the University Archives.

For the bibliophile, books of all types are to be found at The Library of Texas, SMU Press and the SMU Bookstore:

• The Library of Texas is a series of new editions of important firsthand accounts of nineteenth-century Texas, initiated to fill a need for well-introduced, well-indexed, and well-made editions of classic books. A noted scholar has written a full introduction to each volume, and the books are produced to high typographic standards. They are uniform in size, yet distinctive in design, printed on acid-free paper and bound in attractive, enduring materials.
   
• In the Bookstore, located at 3060 Mockingbird Lane at Airline Road, books by SMU faculty are in their own special section.
   
• SMU Press is known nationally as a publisher of the highest quality scholarly works and books for the "educated general reader." Among the books currently featured is Desert Days: My Life as a Field Archaeologist — about SMU Professor Fred Wendorf, the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory Emeritus,  whose expeditions have produced most of what we know about the stone age prehistory of northeastern Africa.
   

In addition, the SMU Spirit Shop offers items with the University logo online, from June Cometh sweatshirts to chocolates to tree ornaments.

The Bookstore's online items include a variety of clothing, dormats and keychains.

And SMU athletics fans can relive the memories by visiting athletichistory.com to purchase photographs and DVDs of classic games and events. The photographs date to 1915 and are available in different sizes. Football games dating to the 1930s and basketball games from the 1950s are available on DVD, which start at $25.

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