He was instrumental in the saving of the Texas Longhorn breed of cattle from extinction.
Early years
James Frank Dobie was born on a ranch in Live Oak County, Texas, and was the eldest of six children.[1] When he was young, his father Richard read to him from the Bible while his mother Ella read to him from books such as Ivanhoe and Pilgrim's Progress. At 16, Dobie moved to Alice, the seat of Jim Wells County, Texas, where he lived with his grandparents and finished high school.
In 1906, he enrolled in Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he was introduced to English poetry by a professor who urged him to become a writer. While in college he also met "the ever loyal" Bertha McKee (1890–1974), whom he married in 1916.[2][3]
After he graduated in 1910, Dobie worked briefly for newspapers in San Antonio and Galveston, before gaining his first teaching job at a high school in Alpine in southwestern Texas. In 1911, he returned to Georgetown to teach at the Southwestern Preparatory School.[4]
In 1913, he went to Columbia University in New York City to work on a master's degree, and the following year, returned to Texas to join the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, becoming affiliated with the Texas Folklore Society as well.[2] In 1917, he left the university to serve in the field artillery in World War I, and was briefly sent overseas at the end of the war; he was discharged in 1919.[3]
