A half-century ago, if you wanted to read an article about Texas college football in a national magazine, you’d have been lucky to find a couple of paragraphs.

And Texas high school football? Outside of the state’s newspapers, it was non-existent.

Dave Campbell changed all that in the summer of 1960.

Dave Campbell published the first Texas Football magazine in 1959. He sold the publication in 1985, but remains its editor-in-chief.

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This year's edition, the magazine's 50th, features Texas Longhorns quarterback Colt McCoy on its cover.

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Texas Football founder and editor-in-chief Dave Campbell autographs a previous year's magazine at the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. (Duane A. Laverty photo, file)

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San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson (left), a former University High standout, poses with longtime Tribune-Herald sports editor Dave Campbell after receiving an award from the Waco Chamber of Commerce. (Tribune-Herald file photo)

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The first of 10 stops on Dave Campbell's promotional tour for the 50th edition of Texas Football magazine was the Must Be Heaven restaurant in Brenham, where Campbell was presented an anniversary cake by representatives from Brenham High School.

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From its humble origins taking shape on his wife Reba’s kitchen table, Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine has served to satisfy the appetite of thousands of pigskin-craving customers for the past five decades.

The first issue cost 50 cents; the 2009 edition will set you back $9.95. This year’s issue checks in at 368 pages, more than three times bigger than the inaugural edition’s 96 pages.

But even more than those numbers Dave Campbell’s Texas Football has grown so in scope and impact that its arrival each June is eagerly anticipated by football fans all over the state.

Fresh off a two-week promotional tour of the state, Campbell sat down with the Tribune-Herald this week to talk about Texas Football’s journey toward its golden anniversary.

Trib: When you were putting together those first  Texas Football magazines on the kitchen table, could you have ever imagined that it would become what it is today?

Campbell: To be honest about it, that first year, the four of us who did it, myself and three other members of the Tribune-Herald staff (Al Ward, Jim Montgomery and Hollis Biddle), we worked like dogs. All our experience had been in newspaper work, so we didn’t really know what we were doing as far as magazines were concerned. But we worked so hard, and the big goal was just to get it out, get it to press. All I was hoping then was to get a product out there.

I knew nothing like that had never been done in Texas, and it turned out nothing like it had been done in the country. Just a single state and regional sports publication of that depth. Anyway, I was just so happy to get it off the press and see that it did look like a good magazine, I wasn’t thinking anything about the next year or the year after that. But really that first year, I lost money we couldn’t afford to lose. The next year I lost money we couldn’t afford to lose, and I knew my wife was getting tired of losing money and having to give up her kitchen table, so I wasn’t sure how much further we were going. But we persevered, and here we are 50 years later.

Trib: How close were you to discontinung the publication in those early years?

Campbell: I can’t ever remember the thought crossing my mind to quit. Really, the reception had been great, and the people who were reading the magazine were very complimentary and all that. I concluded, and it may have been erroneous, but I concluded that we weren’t given enough exposure out there in the state. So anyway, we kept going, and we did get more exposure that third year. The fifth year, I thought it was a very good magazine and it really helped turn things around. It had Donnie Anderson on the cover, from Texas Tech, the Golden Palomino, they called him.

Trib: It had a Southwest Conference retrospective in it, too, didn’t it?

Campbell: Yes. The conference at that time, it had been 20 years since World War II. So we went back and polled people who had been around those 20 years, coaches and sportswriters, and we picked out what were the best games, the best players and the best teams. I think that was very well-received.

Trib: It’s become something of a fun guessing game over the years to take a stab at who’s gong to be on the cover. How are the cover subjects chosen?

Campbell: First of all, we have to zero in on somebody who we think has had the type of season or has sparked the kind of conversation that will sell magazines. And of course you don’t want to put the same school on the cover all the time.

The first year was Jack Collins of Texas, and he had the cover all by himself. The second year was Ronnie Bull of Baylor, who had a great 1960 (season). The focus of the cover was on him, but we had two other guys who had great careers as seniors, and that was James Saxton at Texas and Lance Alworth at Arkansas. So then the third year, Sonny Gibbs at TCU was labeled the tallest quarterback in the country — I think he was 6-7. He had some great moments, and TCU had not been on the cover, so we put Sonny Gibbs on the cover, and it worked out fine.

One year, we put (Texas A&M’s) Maurice Morgan on the cover. Maurice was a transfer from Kentucky. He’d had a good year the preceding year, but that year he started off well and then he quit going to class, and Gene Stallings kicked him off the team. He went on to have a great pro career in Kansas City, played in the Super Bowl, but he was our first coverboy to get kicked off the team before he even had a chance to finish out his career.

Trib: Do you have a favorite cover?

Campbell: Oh, I’ve been asked that a lot. I’ll never forget the first one, because it was the pride of ownership, so to speak, with Collins on the cover. I liked the Anderson cover very much, it was just all Donnie, and it was a very clear-cut cover. The year that was the 25th anniversary, we ran in miniature all our previous covers. It was a fold-out cover, and we had Ray Childress of A&M as a bigger centerpiece. I thought that came out well, and thought it was a very good magazine.

Trib: How has football changed the most in the 50 years Texas Football has been covering it?

Campbell: Integration has really made its presence felt, for one thing. I think coaching staffs have gotten bigger, and there’s more emphasis on weight training and nutrition and out-of-season practices and work. The squads have gotten smaller, or at least the recruiting lists have gotten smaller, because back then you could bring in 40 or 50 players. Now you’re supposed to stay within 25 (per year) and 85 (total). That’s been a big change. Then of course 12 years ago or whatever it’s been, the Southwest Conference just went under. So we have a brand new major conference in this area with the Big 12, which I think is getting stronger year by year and grabbing attention. So that’s been a big change.

Trib: Over the years, you’ve had kind of a who’s-who of Texas sportswriters contribute to the magazine ...

Campbell: We’ve tried to. When I was starting out and really making the decisions, I tried to pick guys who I felt knew what they were writing about and who were really on top of their subjects. We were able to get the Jack Gallaghers and the Mickey Herskowitzes, and we had bunch of really outstanding writers who I’m very proud of.

Trib: Are there one or two feature stories that stand out as more special than most?

Campbell: Two that were very similar stand out. In that ’65 season, I hired Steve Perkins, who was with the Dallas Times-Herald, to do a retrospective of the game that was picked as the best game over the previous 20 years. That was SMU versus Notre Dame in ’49. He did such a super job going back. Matty Bell and Dutch Meyer were still alive, and he was able to talk to both of them. Bell had been the head coach, but he was able to talk to both, and to a lot of other people. There were players who played in it, and he got some stuff that may not have been published before and it made for a great story.

That went so well that the next year that I hired him to do the game that would have ranked really high if we’d opened it up to all-time, and that was SMU versus TCU in ’35 for a spot in the Rose Bowl. Again, he did a great job.

We had other stories I’ve been very proud of. We had a story written by the old Dallas News cartoonist named Bill McLanahan. Bill had been on the scene and following football closely in the ’20s and ’30s, when trick plays were all the vogue, particularly in high schools. He went back and talked to people, and he wrote a great story on trick plays. One of them was called the hydrophobia play, and it was a really good story.

Then I hired Harold Ratliff, an AP sports editor. He was kind of considered the king of high school coverage, he’d covered games from the ‘20s forward, had played at Hillsboro. I hired him to write his all-time team, and he wrote a great story.

Again, coming forward, Brad Bucholz, who’s now down in Austin out of sports, I hired him when we were putting Spike Dykes of Texas Tech on the cover. He went out to Dykes, and Spike was supposed to go out to some small town in West Texas to make a speech, and they started out with no gasoline. But Spike kept coaxing the car forward and going 90 miles a minute, and Brad had a great story from Spike and his antics.

Trib: Was it a difficult decision to sell the magazine back in 1985?

Campbell: Not really. I wasn’t tired or anything. But I had done it a long time — 25 years — and I didn’t feel that if something happened to me, that my wife could do it. I just felt that was a good time to do it.

Jim Host, who’s with Host Publications but they also at that time were doing the Southwest Conference Radio Network and all, Jim wanted the magazine and I sold it to him. I didn’t have any regrets about that. He was a man who was easy to work for, it paid the bills, and it lived up to all the contractual obligations. It worked out fine.

Trib: And of course, even after the sale, you still contributed to the magazine.

Campbell: Yes, I still worked as they wanted me to. Basically, I help promote the magazine now and do all these autograph sessions, write a letter from the editor, and that’s about it.

Trib: You’re publishing a special 50th anniversary issue in the fall in addition to the current magazine on shelves. What should readers expect from the that magazine?

Campbell: Well, they’re going to pick the best games, they’re going to pick the top 50 coaches, the top 50 games. And I think they’ll break that down to the 20 best college games, the 20 best high school games and the 10 best pro games involving Texas teams. On the coaches, I don’t know if it will be the 50 winningest coaches or what will be the big yardstick on it. I think there will be some good things in there, and I’m eager to see what they come up with, but they wanted to make something that was kind of original, but covered those 50 years.

Trib: You just completed a two-week tour of the state promoting the latest edition of  Texas Football. What was that like?

Campbell: I’m really surprised at the reaction each year. For one thing, at almost every stop, I’m there to sign the latest magazine. But inevitably someone or several people will come up with old issues. I signed a few this past trip from 1960 to ’65. One guy had a 1960 (issue), and it’s always a thrill for those people to tell me, “I was in this magazine in 1967, and my kids have seen it, and I want you to sign it.” That’s neat.

Trib: Football in Texas is always compared to religion, and it’s been suggested that Texas Football is the sport’s bible. Think you should start putting it in hotel rooms?

Campbell: (Laughing) I’ll have to suggest that to the owners now. The famed novelist, James Michener, about 20 years ago or more he wanted to write the novel Texas. After diving into it, he realized that football is really interwoven into our fabric.

He told me that in delving into history, he had found that Texans’ love for football goes back to the early teens or maybe even earlier than that. He decided that it was our love and respect for pioneer days, and that football kind of carries people back to their love of early days. He realized football had to be part of his book about Texas.