The reflecting pool in front of the Mary Couts Burnett Library was the perfect spot in 1949 to gather the “admirals” of TCU’s Yacht Club, a group started by a slightly unruly bunch of students who, by their own admission, just wanted to get their pictures into the yearbook. In 1953, the 15 men who founded the club signed a resolution, which we found attached to the back of the photo donated to us by one of the charter members, Jack White ’49. Here is that resolution, in part:

Be it remembered that in the early part of the year of our LORD One Thousand Nine Hundred Forty-Nine, came on to be formed THE YACHT CLUB, an organization of Fifteen Fighting Men bound together by little else than the desire to get their pictures in the upcoming Texas Christian University annual, the Horned Frog, and the will to exist beyond the limit of that terrible year.

From out of the West came these Fifteen Men, good and true, and stifling under the wave of scholarship which threatened every man jack of them, they made common cause and thenceforward cast their lots as one, forming a clandestine organization of a nautical nature, the aims of which were frowned upon by Administration and Student Body alike.

And be it remembered that this same YACHT CLUB commandeered fifteen Jeepsters in the 1949 Ranch Week parade and so dominated said processional that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a newspaper which advertises itself as possessing the largest circulation in the State of Texas and which carries each day at least one picture of Amon Carter Sr., beloved of all those who wear Shady Oak hats, that this same newspaper was so impressed by the sheer brilliance and magnitude of the YACHT CLUB assemblage that it inadvertently called the event the Ranch Week – Yacht Club parade; that such a mistake was understandable and not objectionable and in fact commendable.

That at such parade Admiral Newbold regrettably lost control of his vehicle and smashing into the rear of the next Jeepster to the front he succeeded in unseating two beauties there perched upon the back seat of the convertible, Lindbergh style, and causing said beauties to be dumped ignominiously to the floor of the vehicle.

That at such parade Admiral Brock took his vehicle out of the line of procession and was racing about the sidelines of the column of march and was doing figure eights and disporting himself in such un-nautical light that it was difficult in the extreme the saving of said Admiral from a general court martial.

That if the owner of the Jeepsters noticed the damage to Admiral Newbold’s vessel he was afraid to provoke the wrath of the combined assemblage of admirals and that sleeping dogs were allowed to lie.