The THS Buccaneer is 90 this year. THS is 98.
Eleanor Hays was my neighbor, so I told her one day that I’d heard she was the first Homecoming Queen. She chuckled. “I was the first Queen, but we didn’t really have Homecoming. In 1926, I was a sophomore,” she said. “Each class selected a candidate, and the class that sold the most tickets to the Carnival won the title for their candidate. My class won, and I became Carnival Queen. But we really got things going in 1929,” she added, and proceeded to tell me THS history.
University Preparatory School was only the high school until 1921 when the State Legislature threatened to close it if the town did not build and maintain their own high school. A red brick building, Central, already held elementary students. It was built to replace the wooden structure that had served elementary students since 1896. The town added an addition to Central to appease the State and called it Tonkawa High School. Some students continued to attend UPS until 1942 when UPS began phasing out its high school to become a junior college. Others transferred “downtown” to red brick building on 7th street. Eleanor’s future husband attended UPS, and Eleanor went to the addition known as Tonkawa High School.
The first class to graduate from the new high school was 1925. The curriculum consisted of Science, English, and Math. Two foreign languages were available, Spanish and Latin. The music department consisted of both vocal and instrumental education and a girls’ glee club and quartet. The high school did not have a cafeteria; everyone had an hour to go home for lunch. There was a junior-senior banquet, but no prom. THS Homecoming did not begin until the after establishment of the Alumni Association.
Original 1929 Buccaneer
By 1929, the graduating class had thirty students and twelve faculty members. The school had grown enough to join the
Salt Fork Valley Conference, which included Pond Creek, Lamont,
Nash, Jet, Medford, Jefferson, and Deer Creek. Seventeen boys played basketball. Nineteen boys played on the football team.
There was only one cheerleader, but about twenty girls participated in the “Pepperettes.” A yearbook was planned. Since UPS already used the OU colors of red and white, THS took the opposing orange and black of Oklahoma A&M. A mascot and lyrics for the school song were adopted. For the mascot, students submitted suggestions in a contest format, and ...
