Margie Nance Frost ’31 remembers a historic Frog Football game more than eight decades ago. She was part of the crowd praying for an extra point against SMU on a very chilly day in 1929.

“It was snowing lightly,” she reminisces. “We needed to tie the score. We needed not to lose.”

Their prayers were answered: The Frogs clinched their first Southwest conference title by tying the Mustangs 7-7.

It was late November of Frost’s first year at TCU, and she had gotten over most of her homesickness. She hailed from Gainesville, just 60 miles away, but trips home were rare. She relied on public transit, catching the streetcar from campus to the train depot or bus station.
“That was the hard part of coming to TCU — I got homesick at first. One day I was so sad because I realized I didn’t have enough cash to make the trip home.”

Mostly it was good times, though. The Great Depression struck soon after she started at TCU, but she had a scholarship and a job as a secretary in the Registrar’s Office. Tuition cost $100 for 15 credit hours, which seems like very little until you consider that the average American’s yearly wage was only $1,970, and a pound of hamburger meat cost just 13 cents.

Frost majored in economics, double-minored in communications and government, and graduated summa cum laude. Her job often required her to work in the afternoons when her friends were having fun. But she found time for recreation here and there. Sometimes she went to the movies with friends.

“And there was a café that had good pie, and a drugstore across from Brite with a soda fountain where a bunch of us gathered and sat on the stools. “And,” she says with a twinkle in her eye, “we beaded our garters.”

Near the Fort Worth Zoo was an amusement park where she went on double dates. Some things are the same in every generation: “My mother would have had a fit if she’d known I rode that roller coaster.”

In winter Frost and her friends played games and made popcorn in an electric popcorn popper her mother gave her.

She seldom got to phone home, but letters were a comfort. “My mother wrote often, my father not so often, but his letters usually had a little money in them.”

Her parents were chiropractors, having moved from Kentucky to Oklahoma City to go to chiropractic school, then to Gainesville where they bought out a practitioner on the town square.

Frost finished two years of junior college in Gainesville. She got interested in furthering her education during summer trips to TCU that were sponsored by her church, Dixon Street Christian.

Although Frost is now 101 years old, her thinking is sharp, her humor warm and her memory accurate. All the historical details she related to a recent visitor checked out perfectly.

She recalls that on one of her trips to TCU she met the legendary President E.M. Waits. He told a joke referring to newly minted slang of the time: “How do you tell if someone’s an old-timer? He doesn’t know that ‘neck’ is a verb.”

During Frost’s student years, she lived in Jarvis Hall. To grasp why one fine day she was so excited she turned cartwheels the whole length of the corridor, it’s necessary to understand that women seldom wore pants of any kind. But a special package had arrived in the mail.

“My mother sent me new pajamas she sewed — with a sailor collar.”

Margie was famous for her smile, and she was petite. Her friends gave her several nicknames: Nubbin, Little Bit, Registrar, “and Half Pint— I never drank my milk, I gave it to the football players.”

In the dorm, the toilets had a nickname inspired by a school rivalry. Before TCU moved to Fort Worth in 1910, it was situated in Waco and twice a year played football against the Baylor Bears. And that’s why Frost’s classmates called the privy “Baylor.”

After she finished her degree, Frost met a man named Myron Everts, patriarch of a jewelry store in downtown Dallas. He was looking for a secretary. In the course of conversation, he told her to look up Psalm 1 when she got home. “I started quoting it to him on the spot” (“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked…”)

She was hired and worked in the store for more than a decade: “I wrote all the letters for everyone.”

She has been in Dallas ever since, and today lives in a quiet neighborhood with her son Jack. She displays a Horned Frog insignia in her home.

Frost offers this advice to today’s students: “Everyone gets homesick — when I was in college, one girl from West Texas was so homesick she cried. But she got over it, and they all do get over it.”

And she advises young people to study and apply themselves, “because people are counting on you to make good, and you may not get another chance if you waste this one.”

Related story:
TCU in the 1930s

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