principal by the school's new president, David Switzer, who had previously been president of Granbury College until it was closed down and he was transferred to Weatherford. In 1890, after having attended a summer course at Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lomax returned to Texas where he became head of the Business Department of Weatherford College. Each summer, between 1891 and 1894, he also attended the annual lecture-and-concert series at New York State's Chautauqua Institute, which pioneered adult education (and where Lomax himself would later lecture). According to Porterfield, "There he improved his mathematics, struggled with Latin, listened to music that stirred him (opera and oratorios, light 'classics' of the day), and learned, for the first time, of two poets—Tennyson and Browning—whose work would soon become an integral part of his intellectual equipment." Early career Lomax decided to further his education at a first-rate university. His first choice was Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but he realized he would likely fail its tough entrance examinations. So, in 1895, at the age of 28, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in English literature, and undertaking almost a double course load (including Greek, Latin, and Anglo Saxon) and was graduated in two years. With a touch of Texas hyperbole, he later wrote: Never was there such a hopeless hodge-podge, There was I, a Chautauqua-educated country boy who couldn't conjugate an English verb or decline a pronoun, attempting to master three other languages at the same time. ... But I plunged on through the year, for since I was older than the average freshman, I must hurry, hurry, hurry. I don't think I ever stopped to think how foolish it all was.Porterfield, p. 40–41. In his memoir, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, Lomax recounts how he had arrived at the University of Texas with a roll of cowboy songs he had written down in childhood. He showed them to an English professor, Morgan Callaway, only to have them discounted as "cheap and unworthy," prompting Lomax to take the bundle behind the men's dormitory and burn it. His interest in folksongs thus rebuffed, Lomax focused his attentions on more acceptable academic pursuits. He joined the fraternity Phi Delta Theta and the Rusk Literary Society, as well as becoming an editor and later the editor-in-chief of the University of Texas Magazine. During the summer of 1896, he attended a