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Dixie University

Dixie University was a short-lived college in Dallas, TX that was chartered in 1933 by the Somerville Law School partly to expand into a liberal arts college, but partly also to create a home for the former Jefferson University Rangers 1932 football team to land. Early in 1933 the law school’s founder, Charles Somerville, arranged a deal with football coach Nick Dobbs to relocate his football team into the newly created Dixie University where they were re-branded as the Dixie Rebels. Based in downtown Dallas at the old YMCA Building, Dixie opened the 1933 fall semester with 350 new students enrolled in new schools of Commerce, Public Administration and Accounting – and a ready-made football team.

Dixie was not destined to be a success and as quickly as things started, the college quickly began to founder. The 1933 Dixie Rebels football team was mediocre at best in the 1933 season, and then lost its captain and star running back, Jody Whire and head coach Dobbs before the season was over. After defeating Austin College in late September, the Rebel football team met its match in a game at Texas Tech, getting trounced 33-0. After that Austin College victory, Dixie never won another game. The college’s demise paralleled that of the football team. After a disastrous 1934 campaign, the Rebels football team was disbanded and Dixie followed suit, with hardly a mention ever again. The Somerville School of Law did carry on for another ten years, but diplomas handed out in 1933 were branded as "Dixie University Law School.”

Women’s Basketball

In addition to the oddity of the ready-made football team essentially creating its own college, football was not the only sport that this was done in. Dixie did the exact same thing with women’s basketball in 1934, importing the Dallas Golden Cyclones basketball team into Dixie for that season. As one of the most successful teams of the era, Dixie had instantly created for itself a national championship-contending team. The Cyclones had been national runners-up in 1929, 1932 and 1933, but had taken the 1931 national championship, played in Dallas, led by the legendary Babe Zaharias. By 1934 though, Zaharias was already a two-time Olympic champion at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, so she was no longer on the team. The Dixie women’s basketball met with some early success, making it to the 1934 national championship tournament, but as was to be the case during the fall football season later that year, they were trounced by the two-time defending champion Oklahoma City Cardinals in the quarter-finals. The Dixie women’s basketball team apparently never played another game.

Law School Graduates

Dixie held its first law school graduation under the Dixie banner in the spring of 1933. Another oddity for Dixie was that the salutatorian and valedictorian for the 1933 class each took dramatically different paths to law school, ending up together on the graduation stage as numbers one and two in the class. The salutatorian was Anton T. Rutgers von Rozenburg, a former German World War I adversary, captain and aviator who flew as a wingman for the legendary Manfred von Richtofen, also known as the “Red Baron.” Now he was a permanent resident of the United States, obtaining a law degree in order to be a lawyer in the country he had fought against fifteen years earlier.

The valedictorian was Samuel P. Cochran, aged 78 years old, among one of the most successful businessmen in the Dallas insurance industry, a devoted member of the Masonic Lodge and a one-time Grand Master of the Masons in Texas, and a widower. Now Cochran was becoming a member of the State Bar in Texas at that age, and he also changed his widower status by marrying the youngest member of the law class, Miss Regina Urbish (age 20) in 1934. However, both his law career and marriage ended in 1936 when he passed away.

Dixie itself failed to last even to 1936 as it disappeared from the written record by 1935 and was never heard from again. Its brief foray into collegiate education and collegiate athletics was a failure.