The references to "morphodites," above, rang a bell. H. Allen Smith was one of my favorite American funny writers of the last century. He spent his working life in New York, but retired to Texas in his last years, and continued writing there.

I remembered the following from his 1970 book, "Rude Jokes" - possibly one of the most accurately titled books ever published - found it and scanned it.

Peter.

Community pride is a nice thing to contemplate. Some of you have heard of this town of Alpine, not too far from here. The next community to the west of Alpine is Marfa—named for a female character in a Russian novel.

A fella in El Paso, name of Arbuckle, wrote to me recently and said: "If a citizen of Dallas is a Dailasite, and a citizen of Houston is a Houstonite, would a citizen of Marfa be a Marfadite?"
One morning at the postoffice I mentioned this to a citizen of Alpine, and it called back the days of his youth. He said that when he was in high school the football rivalry between Alpine and Marf a was intense. The Al­pine students had a special cheer which was only used in the annual game against Marfa. They would yell in unison across the field:

"Go, Marfadites, Go!"

Said the proud Alpineite there on the postoffice steps:

"Always ended up in the goddamndest fist fights you ever saw. And we won them, too."