Cathey collectionEOSC Army Training
Before service in World War II, before being a Texas Longhorn, before being a New York Yankee (football) and a New York Giant â the first and legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, Tom Landry, flew planes all around our area as a part of his United States Army Air Forces training at then Eastern Oklahoma A&M College at Wilburton.
By the end of his sophomore college football season, still stuck on the jayvee squad, Landry was looking beyond Austin to uncertain horizons, which he would be able to see from above, in a cockpit of a Flying Fortress of his own. In February 1944, the call-up came and he found himself hopscotching the country from Wichita Falls to San Antonio, to receive escalating levels of training, then to Eastern Oklahoma State College for actual flight lessons.
Alicia Landry, wife of longtime Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry, died Thursday. She was 91.
As a teen, the then Alicia Wiggs attended both Hockaday and Highland Park High School before moving to Austin for college, where she met her future husband at the University of Texas.
“A sorority sister encouraged her to go on a blind date with a handsome UT football player named Tom Landry,” her obituary, published at Dignity Memorial’s website, said. “It was a match literally made in heaven.”
Landry led the Longhorns to an Orange Bowl win, then almost immediately afterward the two walked down the aisle, marrying in 1949.