Sweet Home, Alabama - Great Wally Read (Trib)

[E.T.]

Sweet Home, Alabama

By BRETT McMURPHY The Tampa Tribune

Published: Dec 21, 2006

PELL CITY, Ala. - Cross the railroad tracks and turn on Cogswell Avenue. Keep going a little farther and there it is: Pell City's cotton mill.

It was inside that cotton mill back in 1957 that Wally Burnham, then 16, first learned the importance of hard work. That lesson still remains with him today.

"That taught me work ethic and there are certain things you have to do in life to make it," Burnham said.

Burnham, the University of South Florida's defensive coordinator, has been in Birmingham, Ala., since Tuesday as the Bulls prepare for the Papajohns.com Bowl against East Carolina. Sometime before Saturday's kickoff, Burnham hopes to make the 30-mile drive east to Pell City, the place where he was born and lived until leaving for Tuscaloosa as a 19-year-old to play football for Bear Bryant at Alabama.

When he gets here, he will see the cotton mill and reflect back to where it all started. "My old home ground," Burnham said.

Back in the 1950s, Alabama state laws prohibited children from working in the mill until they were 16. So on the first Saturday after his 16th birthday, Burnham headed to the mill. Nearly five decades later, he still remembers his work schedule. How could he ever forget?

"I'd have a football game Friday night, then work at the cotton mill from 6 a.m. Saturday to 2 p.m.," Burnham said. "Then we had to take eight hours off. I'd return Saturday night at 10 and work 'til 6 a.m. Sunday, then take eight hours off and go back Sunday at 2 p.m. until 11 at night.

"We'd clean the entire mill, the floors, machines, get the lint off everything, if something needed painting. Whatever they wanted us to do, we did it. It's something I would never change. It was quite an experience."

Playing for Burnham, in his seventh year at USF, also is an experience.

"It's an honor," USF senior linebacker Stephen Nicholas said. "He's been around a long time and has coached so many great players. He's helped me a lot."

Added junior linebacker Ben Moffitt: "It's unbelievable the things he knows, the football he's been around. The history he has - playing under Bear Bryant, coaching at Florida State. Whenever you hear him talk, you know he knows what he's talking about. You can take that and trust that."

Wrong Side Of The Tracks

Burnham's childhood "square house," as he calls it, still stands on Orange Street, the last house on the right. Two fireplaces, which burned coal to keep the house warm, separated the four rooms.

"There was a class system in Pell City," Burnham said. "People who lived in town, people who lived in the south part of town [Eden] and then there was the mill village, on the wrong side of the tracks."

Burnham grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.

"That was an influence on him," Richard Robertson said.

Robertson and Burnham first met in high school. They played football, basketball and baseball together. They quickly became best friends, and each one was the best man in the other's wedding. Robertson grew up in Eden, but appreciated what Burnham went through.

"His parents were very strict," Robertson said. "When you compare my livelihood to Wally, living in the mill village was not the upper crust. Not many people that came from Pell City left Pell City. They ended up in their cotton mill or as factory workers."

But Burnham had figured football was his way out.

"That was my incentive to play football and study what little I did to get out of the mill village," Burnham said.

As a senior at Pell City High School, Burnham was one of the state's top linebackers. A couple of days before the final game against Talladega, Burnham and Robertson walked into their English class unprepared for a test.

They told their teacher they hadn't studied because football practices had run late into the night that week, Robertson said.

Burnham and Robertson, the quarterback, tried to persuade their teacher, C.C. Lee, to postpone the test for another week. Lee refused, but Burnham and Robertson asked to speak to Lee outside in the hall.

"He's telling us we've known we've had this test coming and we have to take it," said Robertson, now 65, who lives in Atlanta. "Then, for some reason, we get him walking with us down the hall."

When they approach a janitors' closet, the seniors open the door and stuff Lee inside, lock the door and return to the classroom.

About 30 minutes later, Lee - with the principal - enters the classroom. The best friends are escorted into the principal's office.

"The principal told us, 'I should kick both of you guys out of school for doing this,' " Robertson said. "I've got every right to do so."

But Dr. Bailey, Pell City's principal - neither Burnham nor Robertson can remember his first name - was a huge Auburn fan and soon the conversation drifted to football. Robertson had already committed to Auburn, while Burnham, who was recruited by Auburn, Alabama and Texas, had decided he wanted to play for the Bear.

"So the principal asks me where I'm going to play football next season and I said 'Auburn,'" Robertson said. "He then asked Wally and he said, 'Me too!'" He told us if this happens again, you're out of school. I think we got paddled for it, but that was about it."

'One Of My Best Ones'

Burnham and Robertson took the test a week later and passed. While Burnham's classroom antics were unique, there was no questioning his athletic ability.

"He was one of my best ones," said Will Glover, Burnham's high school coach. "I just had to try to get him from tackling out of bounds. He was one of the toughest linebackers you'll ever see in high school."

Glover, now 83 and living in Jackson, Miss., remembers Burnham's final high school game. Pell City was playing at Talladega, a team Pell City had never defeated, for the mythical state championship (there were no state playoffs then). In the fourth quarter, Talladega scored to pull within one, but Burnham was not about to let Talladega pull even.

"He rushed through and blocked the extra point and then ran into the kicker," Glover said. "Even though it's not supposed to be a penalty because he blocked the kick, they called him for roughing the kicker. Boy was he mad."

On the next attempt, Burnham blocked the kick again.

"This time he really ran over the kicker," Glover said. "He knocked him unconscious."

Talladega's "hometown referees," Glover said, called another roughing penalty and ejected Burnham.

Without Burnham in the fourth quarter, Pell City's defense was no match for Talladega and the Panthers lost.

After Pell City, Burnham played two seasons for Bryant at Alabama - "it was kind of like being a Marine," Burnham said - before transferring to Samford. He began coaching in 1965 as a graduate assistant at Livingston College. Soon after, Burnham got married - he and his wife, Barbara, celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary Dec. 4 - and he had to take a high school job "to keep from going broke."

Burnham figured he would put in some time at the high-school level, move into administration and then retire. Saturday's bowl game will complete his 41st year in coaching at 11 different stops, and he says he's still got a few years left in him.

Burnham's stops include Memphis State, the USFL's Arizona Wranglers, Florida State and South Carolina, the only place he got fired.

Because of his age, the 65-year-old Burnham knows he won't realize his dream of being a Division I-AA head coach, but he said being a part of USF's growth from Division I-AA to Conference USA to the Big East has been special.

"I had no idea it would last this long," Burnham said. "I'm very fortunate, the jobs I've had and people I've been around, to still be able to walk around and talk about it."

Reporter Brett McMurphy can be reached at (813) 259-7928 or bmcmurphy@tampatrib.com.

[E.T.]

Great story about what they did to his teacher  ;D

[BullDoug]

You know the same thing happened to me in my final HS football game.  I blocked a FG 3 times in a row taking out the kicker each time and the ref. kept calling me for RTK.  Dang kicker was following through so I'd catch his foot.  I finally had to take an extreme angle so he got his PAT point.  Actually it could of been against Coach's and Kravitz's team - Dixie Hollins vs Lakewood in the fall of '83.

Mutt, was Coach at Lakewood back then?  BTW Mutt aren't you at Largo HS.  If so, I played with a special ed. teacher out there named Luke Kadamorf.  He was the HC at Pinellas Park for a while.  Luke was a soph OT on the varsity that '83 season.   Luke & my Bro were partners in crime in HS.  Both should be dead or in jail.