Remembering The 1965 Tennessee Football Team, Part 2: Perseverance By The Coaches’ Widows

On the morning of Oct. 18, 1965, Bill Majors climbed out of bed early to get ready to head to the University of Tennessee campus for an early coaches meeting and breakfast with the Vols football team.
 
An assistant coach on Doug Dickey’s staff and the younger brother of former Tennessee star player Johnny Majors, Bill – a former Vol as well -- was trying to help Tennessee get back to the glory days of old.
 
His wife, Lynnie, was still in bed but remembered that her husband leaned over to kiss her goodbye. She awakened enough to notice that he was wearing the shaving lotion given to the coaches as gifts by then Tennessee radio announcer George Mooney.
 
“I said, ‘You sure do smell good,’ ” his wife, now Lynnie Tunnell, recalled via email.
 
As her husband went out the door, her hearing senses also quickly perked up as she heard the sound of a train moving eastward down the tracks not far from their rented home at 737 Cessna Drive in West Knoxville. The noise would grow louder as it moved even closer past their residence.
 
“Don’t know if the whistle blew, but I could hear the roar,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh no, they’ll be late.”
 
The next noise she remembered came sometime later, when she heard a knock on her door. Not overly loud in sound, it would still be quite impactful in significance.
 
Not wanting to wake her sons, Bo and Mark, she hurriedly rushed to the door. Standing there was a law enforcement officer, as well as neighbor and nurse Judy Shetterfly and Ms. Shetterfly’s brother, Mrs. Tunnell believes.
 
There, she heard the horrible news that would scar her and her sons for the next 50 years: Bill Majors and fellow assistant Bob Jones were killed when the car they were riding in was hit by a train at the nearby crossing. And fellow assistant Charlie Rash, who was driving the Volkswagen Beetle in which they were all riding, was clinging to life at what was then known as Presbyterian Hospital in Fort Sanders by the UT campus.
 
The Tennessee team that they had been helping coach enjoyed a solid 2-0-2 record under second-year coach Doug Dickey and was coming off a rewarding 7-7 tie against powerhouse Alabama under coach “Bear” Bryant just two days before.
 
But this horrific loss in the obviously more sobering game of life would make all that inconsequential.
 
“After a moment of silence, I believe it was Judy who told me,” Mrs. Tunnell recalled. “I kept trying to get them to tell me they were joking, but who would joke about such a thing.”
 
As Rosemary McClain recounted in part 1 of this series the shock of hearing the news about her husband, Bob Jones, Mrs. Tunnell had similar experiences of trying to handle the devastating news. There was also the concern for fellow assistant Charlie Rash, who would die four days later.
 
Mrs. Tunnell remembered that coach Dickey and one of the team doctors came by a short time later and offered her a sedative, and fellow assistant Charley Coffey and his wife, Mai, then dropped in and stayed with her the rest of the day.
 
“Our across-the-street neighbor took Bo (also known then as BoBo) and Mark under her wing, as she had similar-aged children,” Mrs. Tunnell continued. “Her husband was an engineering professor at the university.”
 
Besides the tragedy itself, Mrs. Tunnell said she also had another smaller regret from that day – she did not tell her young sons, who were ages 3 and 2, exactly what had happened to their father.
 
“I so deeply regret that I never told Bo and Mark their dad was dead,” she said. “Bo (the older one) kept asking and I would say he is with the angels in heaven – never flat out the truth.”
 
Her pastor at what is now known as Church Street United Methodist Church, Dr. Paul Worley, even came by to help her with that but they were never all able to get together.
 
After being pronounced dead, the bodies were taken to Mann’s funeral home on Kingston Pike near Northshore Drive in the Bearden area of Knoxville
 
At the funeral the next day at the Church Street church between the UT campus and downtown Knoxville attended by the entire team, the Rev. Worley led the service. Since the wives of the other two coaches were Catholic and Bob Jones and Charlie Rash were Baptist, Father Edward Dolan from Sacred Heart Catholic Church on Northshore Drive and the Rev. Andrew Prince from West Hills Baptist Church in West Knoxville assisted.
 
At the subsequent burial for Bill Majors in Lynchburg, Tenn., near where the family had been raised, retired Episcopal bishop and former star Sewanee football player Frank “June” Juhan officiated.
 
As the weeks passed, and with Mrs. Tunnell having no idea where she and her two sons should go, they lived a brief nomadic life. Bill’s parents, Sewanee football coach Shirley Majors and his wife and younger son Bobby, a future Tennessee star, rearranged their home and Lynnie’s family stayed there for a couple of months. Lynnie also took them to visit her sister and Bill’s other siblings.
 
“I was wanting the boys to be around family and especially male influences,” she said.
 
She remembered that some nice women, some friends of the university and other neighbors packed up the Majors’ belongings in their rented home on Cessna Street in Knoxville and put them in storage until they could figure out their long-term plans.  That came after a few weeks.
 
“I guess the boys were visiting in Arkansas (where Johnny Majors was then an assistant coach) when, after consulting with John and (his wife) Mary Lynn, and Charley and Mai (Coffey), I finally decided the best for us was to go back to Knoxville,” she said. “It was lonely but friends and family would visit and that helped.”
 
By this time, the university had also helped put her in touch with attorney Tom Privette, who helped her with financial and legal matters.
 
Brighter days would be ahead for her, at least as could be expected. She eventually reconnected with an old high school acquaintance from Kingsport named Lynn Tunnell. They had never dated in high school but had some of the same friends. He was also a fellow UT alumnus.
 
They were married in December 1966. He was in sales with Eastman Chemical Co. in New York City. They soon settled in Connecticut, where they had their first child together, a son, Andy.
 
Longing to return to the South, Lynn Tunnell took a job with Phillips Fibers in Greenville, S.C. He would travel often to Dalton, Ga., for work, and was eventually offered a partnership with sales agents in Dalton. It was in Dalton where another son, Ben, was born.
 
It was a blended family that worked, she said.
 
“Andy and Ben feel as much Majors as Bo and Mark, and the Majors have treated them as their own, just as the Tunnell family have accepted Bo and Mark as family,” said Lynnie Tunnell.
 
Mrs. Tunnell over the years has focused on her sons’ schools, her church and her friends, and says life has not always been easy, including now as her current husband deals with complications from multiple sclerosis. But knowing others have also had a difficult life, she said she tries to count her blessings and is thankful for her faith and the support of family and friends. Today, she and her husband spend most of their time in Dalton.   
 
And through the tragedy, she also has become someone who can empathize with and offer encouragement to others who have gone through serious forms of heartbreak.
 
“It’s a matter of keeping on whether you want to or not, and trusting you can see your loved one again and that God’s promises are true,” she said. “When I see others go through such loss, I do pray for them to come to know the peace which passes understanding. It’s difficult to realize there are some things that happen which will never make sense on Earth.”
 
Chris Rash, the widow of coach Charlie Rash, a former Missouri standout player, eventually remarried and went back to school. She moved to Tallahassee, Fla., in 1976 and her sons, David and Steven, both graduated from Florida State University. David eventually became a lawyer.
 
She went on to become a publisher of tourist maps for the panhandle area of Florida, and became a charitable supporter of several philanthropies, including the local orchestra. She also remained a devoted member of the Catholic church.
 
Mrs. Tunnell said the two continued to keep in touch with Christmas cards and other correspondence, but one time she received the card back from her address saying the addressee was deceased. Ms. Rash had died on Jan. 29, 2007, at the age of 67.
 
According to her obituary found online, she was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Panama City Beach area.
 
Rosemary McClain, the widow of coach Bob Jones, also had a challenging life after the death of her husband, but tried to search for a silver lining as well.
 
She said that after a burial service in her and her late husband’s former hometown of Hearne, Texas, she stayed there. Her mother also moved in with her and her three sons, Bobby, Stephen and Mark. Ms. McClain remembers that those first few weeks and months were hard. But one day she looked out the window at all the young people happily going down the street to a nearby school and realized it was time to try to go on with her life.
 
“I said, ‘You can sit here and lull your life away or you can do something about it,’ ” she said.
 
She moved to Waco, Texas, and later married Joe McClain. She later moved to Tyler, Texas, and eventually went to work at the East Texas Food Bank, providing food nourishment after having spent part of her life receiving emotional nourishment from others who helped her after Jones’ death.
 
She had remained close for several years with coach Rash’s late wife, Chris, and just this summer reconnected over the telephone with Majors’ widow, Lynnie Tunnell, for the first time in years. They were brought together with the help of Britt Britton, whose father and mother had been close friends with Bob Jones and Ms. McClain. Mr. Britton had tracked down Mrs. Tunnell’s son, Bo Majors, via Facebook.
 
Ms. McClain’s second husband died in 2014, as did her oldest son, Bobby, from heart disease. In part because of the recent additional emotional scars, she said she did not feel like attending the dedication of the memorial plaque in honor of the three coaches on Oct. 2. She did receive from UT senior associate athletic director Chris Fuller a 1965 replica Tennessee helmet – with its now-familiar black crosses in memory of the deaths. The helmet was signed by the former players who attended the 50-year reunion.
 
That team, which would have been inspiring even without a tragedy to overcome, went on to lose only one game in what was considered a surprise and set the stage for about a successful 10-year run by the Vols. The team’s story on the field and through the eyes of the players will be told in part 3 of this series in the near future.
 
Ms. McClain – who still has her husband’s 1957 Sugar Bowl watch that was found at the accident site and was stopped at 6:53 a.m., the apparent time of the crash -- said she does hope to attend and revisit Knoxville for the first time since 1965 in the near future with her two sons.           
 
But she has revisited the town many times in her mind, and they are mostly good memories, she said.
 
“I’ll never forget the generosity of Knoxville,” she said. “I’ll always be indebted to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the state of Tennessee for always being so caring.”
            
“That whole community, they were reaching out to all of us. The state legislature passed a resolution and sent us each a copy. And we would periodically get letters from Sunday school classes” (who were involved in a community-wide fund to help the coaches’ children).
 
Lynnie Tunnell’s and Bill Majors’ son, Mark, also expressed a sense of gratitude for the fund-raising efforts during a heartfelt talk at the October plaque dedication ceremony in the UT football training and office facility.
 
“That helped put me through school and helped provide a job to support my family,” said the current resident of South Carolina in the video of the event found on YouTube. “I’ve always wanted to be able to say thanks. We appreciate the support you all had for our families.”
 
Mrs. Tunnell said she is also appreciative of the kindness of the entire University of Tennessee community – and thankful for the grace of God.
 
“I find comfort in scriptures which my public school teachers in Kingsport had us memorize, including Psalm 121, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and Earth,’ ” she said.
 
(To see the video on the Oct. 2 ceremonies at UT honoring coach Doug Dickey, the 1965 team, and the three assistant coaches who were killed, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwhGKQQoXZg)
 
jcshearer2@comcast.net