summer school program in Chicago studying languages. In 1897, he became an associate editor of the Alcalde, a student newspaper. After graduation in June 1897, he worked at the University of Texas as registrar for the next six years until the spring of 1903. He also had other duties such as being personal secretary to the President of the University, manager of Brackenridge Hall (the men's dormitory on campus), and serving on the Alumni Scholarship Committee. Lomax joined a campus fraternity known as The Great and Honorable Order of Gooroos receiving the title "Sybillene Priest". Sometime around July 1898 Lomax began an intense relationship with Shirley Green of Palestine, Texas, to whom he had been introduced in 1897 by the president of the University of Texas. For four years, their friendship had its ups and downs, until June 1902, when Lomax met one of Green's acquaintances, Bess Baumann Brown from Dallas. It ultimately emerged that the reason for Green's reluctance to commit herself to an engagement to John Lomax had been her awareness that she was mortally ill with tuberculosis. However, Lomax continued to exchange letters with Green until a month before her death, which occurred in February 1903. That year, Lomax accepted an offer to teach English at Texas A&M University beginning in September To bolster his credentials, in the meantime, he decided to enroll at the University of Chicago for a summer course. Upon his return to Texas he became engaged to Bess Brown and they married on June 9, 1904, in Austin. The couple settled down at College Station near the A&M campus. Their first child, Shirley, was born on August 7, 1905. Lomax, aware of the deficiencies of his early education, still wished to improve himself, however, and on September 26, 1906, he jumped at the chance to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a graduate student, having previously received a $500 stipend: The Austin Teaching Fellowships. Here he had the opportunity to study under Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge, two renowned scholars who actively encouraged his interest in cowboy songs. Harvard, in fact, was the center of American folklore studies (then viewed as a subsidiary of English literature, itself a novel field of scholarship in comparison with the more traditional study of rhetoric focused on classical languages and geared to preparing lawyers and clergy). Kittredge, in addition to being a well-known scholar of