The Pride Online - Winter 2003

Name the snake! Name Tri Beta’s 11.2 foot albino Burmese python. Get fame & recognition if your suggestion is selected.

Sign at Tri Beta fundraiser, staffed
by Roseanne Hardie, who recently became one of our newest alumni.
(She added that “Curly” seemed to be the most popular proposed moniker.)

I’ve streaked across a football field. … been locked in an oven while working at Dunkin’ Donuts … traveled to Europe and lived with gypsies. I’d been looking for adventures all over the world, and I found them right inside the four walls of a classroom.
The principal told me that my class had the highest scores in the whole school, and I said, “You have to tell the kids!” As she told them, I watched their faces, and I saw their futures change. Never again would they think they would always be last. Once you have that moment, it can’t be taken away.

We can all be our own best teachers, discovering and exploring our ever-changing world with wonder, making the most informed, positive contributions to our own neighborhoods when creative teachers, in all walks of life, inspire and empower us.

Becky Hollis Cassell (BA ’74, MEd ’78)
DisneyTeacher Award honoree
disney.go.com/disneylearning/ata/bio/cassell.html

These aerial shots of the University were taken by faculty member Dr. Charles Rogers (center photo at left, holding rope) using kite aerial photography. In the photo at top left, the camera is attached to the kite tether. In the photo at bottom left, the camera is looking down on the Business Administration Building, the rear of the MSC and the East Lawn. Above, the photo shows the newest addition to campus, the New Pride Apartments, in the center of the picture. At the far right of the photo can be seen the emerging shape of the Student Recreation Center.

Twenty-five years of gorgeous women in sequined gowns, high heels and leg-baring swimsuits. It’s enough to make a grown man …
Well, if you’re Alumnus Warren Morrison (BS ’77), it’s clearly enough to keep you going.
Warren is the executive director of the Miss Hunt County Organization and recently was re-elected to the Miss Texas Local Franchise Association Board of Directors. This month marks a quarter of a century that he has worked as a local pageant director.
After seeing so much beauty, poise and talent paraded before him all those years, what does Warren have to say for himself?
“Swimsuit and gown are my weakness,” he says, in the voice of a man confessing a great defect.
What Warren neglects to clarify, probably because he’s lived in the school football games this weekend because I had to go down for a pageant,” he says.
When the Banner’s sports editor asked him about it, Warren was frank: “I said ‘Where would you rather be? Around twenty muddy, smelly guys or twenty beautiful young women?”
A good deal of Warren’s own career was as a sports editor, where presumably it was not the sequined gowns that kept him going, so there must be something else built into Warren that gives him such staying power.
“He is certainly one of the most gracious, gentle-hearted people I’ve ever known,” says Jean Magness, another Alum (BS ’71) who recently was elected chairman of the Miss Texas Pageant Board and has worked with Warren for 18 years. She says that Warren’s record of service to the organization is certainly notable since few men or women are able to stay so committed to it. Even more telling, she says, are “his sincerity and vigorous concern for the young woman, which are evident in the tremendous job he’s done.”
Several of the contestants Warren has sponsored as a director have placed in the top 20 at Miss Texas, and one was even a runner-up at Miss Teen Texas.
But it takes more than getting thaaaaat close to a coveted state crown to sustain him. After all, he’s seen a quarter century’s worth of almost year-round fundraising, travel, and public relations on behalf of the pageant.
And what makes it worthwhile is, he says , “knowing that I’ve helped a lot of contestants, not just the winners, and that I’ve been a part of their lives.”