Tech graduate Burton scheduled for book signings on Saturday
In one of the eight books he's written, Alan Burton describes an especially memorable Thanksgiving trip from his family's hometown of Sherman to visit relatives in Ropesville. It was memorable partly because Southwest Conference football on the Humble Oil and Refining radio network served as a backdrop on the drive.
That was in 1968, and seven years later Burton returned to West Texas to attend Texas Tech from 1975 to 1979.
He's coming back again this weekend to promote his past three books. From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Burton will be at Wild Lark Books (513 Broadway) to autograph copies of volumes I and II of "Squib-Kick it to a Fat Guy" and "Go to the Games with Humble: Kern Tips and the Golden Age of SWC Radio".
Burton is an author on the side. He commutes the 30-minute daily drive from Sherman to his job as director of communications at Southeastern Oklahoma State in Durant. His love for sports research has produced literary treats for Tech fans and for fans of the old Southwest Conference teams in general.
"The Squib Kick it to a Fat Guy" books are chock full of Mike Leach's off-the-wall comments. In 2010, Burton wrote "Pirates, Soldiers and Fat Little Girlfriends: More Classic Texas Sports Quotes" that included a chapter of Leach material.
"There's no telling how many of the quotes in both the Leach books came from (Avalanche-Journal) articles, a lot of just daily stories and notebooks and stuff," Burton said. "The more I dug, it was uncanny the funny stuff he said. ... It wasn't really until later, when I did that one book that had the chapter of Leach quotes, I started digging and I thought, 'Man, this guy, he deserves a whole book.' "
Another subject that deserved an entire book was the glorious history of Southwest Conference football on the airwaves, in the days when radio was king. In "Go to the Games with Humble," Burton chronicled the era from 1934 through 1977 when SWC fans tuned in to games via the Humble Oil's Southwest Conference network, the title sponsors for which later became Enco and then Exxon.
The legendary Kern Tips and Connie Alexander were the network's most renowned voices, but through searches of newspaper archives and multiple other sources, Burton put together a roster of 85 men who called SWC games over the network's 44 seasons — even compiling an extensive year-by-year list of game assignments with their play-by-play announcers and analysts.
Who called the 1974 Texas Tech-Texas game, for example, when the Red Raiders routed the Longhorns 26-3? Connie Alexander and Stan McKenzie. Jack Dale, longtime voice of the Red Raiders, was doing Texas A&M-Washington that day.
While Dale is synonymous as a voice of Tech sports, it was not uncommon for him to be assigned elsewhere during his time with the Humble/Enco/Exxon Network, especially for conference games. He did Alabama-TCU in 1957, LSU-Rice in 1963, Florida State-TCU in 1964, Clemson-TCU in 1965, Southern California-Texas and UCLA-Rice in 1966, Notre Dame-TCU in 1972 and Virginia Tech-Texas A&M in 1977.
The night of the 1965 Tech-Kansas game that ended early because of a tornado warning, Tips and Alec Chesser were at Jones Stadium while Ray Boyd and Dale were doing Baylor at Auburn.
Burton dug it all up in newspaper archives.
"Just about every week, in most of the daily newspapers in Texas, they'd run a little blurb about this week's game," Burton said, "and that's where I got the (announcers') rosters. It would have, like, Kern Tips calling the Texas game or whoever. And there for a long time, they did that every week. It took a while to go through all the microfilm or internet online to find all that kind of stuff."
Burton said he has two objectives when he undertakes a book project: Find a topic he's interested in — a topic he believes that will interest others and has never been done before.
"That was sort of the idea behind the Humble network," he said. "I couldn't believe no one had written a book about that. I thought, man, as the years go by, someone needs to capture the history, because it was a pretty neat time in our history that has sort of gotten away from us."
Moving a ton of books and making a bestseller list wasn't necessarily the objective, Burton said, when writing about the men who called games on a network gone for 45 years in a conference dissolved for nearly 30.
"It's obviously a limited market, because you're talking about older folks that anyone would remember that," Burton said. "So I knew going in it's not going to just go up the charts as far as sales. It was more of a fun project than anything. I felt like it was something that had never been done before, and I felt like it deserves the history telling of it, so the research part was fun for me."
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech graduate Alan Burton scheduled for book signings on Saturday
