ACC 101: Charlie 'Choo Choo' Justice was a Movement

© Tim Peeler, 2019

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Choo Choo Justice at NC State's Riddick Stadium.
[Hugh Morton photo.]

• Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice was the first Russell Wilson, a talented guy with a big heart who was just too small to make it big in football. He did it anyway.
  
• The spindly 165-pound halfback remains the most popular and accomplished football player the state has ever produced (with apologies to Wilmington’s Roman Gabriel and Sonny Jurgensen) and ranks with David Thompson, Michael Jordan, Richard Petty, Catfish Hunter and maybe Floyd Patterson as the most accomplished athletes born in the Old North State. In 1999, Sports Illustrated ranked him the No. 14 best athlete from North Carolina, which is utter bull----.
• He was the first person elected to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, as part of the class of 1963.
   
• A native of the Emma community in Asheville, Justice achieved legendary status at Lee Edwards High School, as he led the team to back-to-back state championships, in which the team outscored its opponents 300-6. In 1942, he averaged 265 rushing yards per game. In his high school career, he averaged 18.6 yards a carry.
• Choo Choo never wore a facemask, in high school, in college or in professional football.
• For a couple of years after his playing career was over, Choo Choo joined North Carolina’s Woody Durham on the Tar Heel Network as a play-by-play analyst, but he just didn’t have the natural booming voice needed to make it on the radio. “Charlie’s biggest problem was not that he didn’t know football,’’ Durham said Friday. “But he had a real high-pitched voice, a voice in the minds of a lot of people that didn’t fit the legend.’’ Even his voice was too small.
• During World War II, Justice enlisted in the U.S. Navy and he became a football star at the Bainbridge Naval Training Center in Maryland. That’s where he got the name “Choo Choo,” because of his ability to avoid tacklers. “He looks like a runaway train,” one of the officers said, “we ought to call him Choo Choo.” And they did.
• After the war, Justice was already a star, even though he had yet to play college football. He turned down a professional contract and considered Duke, UNC and South Carolina, but ultimately went to Carolina because it was the only school that agreed to his recruiting demand: His tuition would be paid by the GI Bill and his athletic scholarship would go to his wife Sarah.
• He entered UNC as a 22-year-old freshman and became one of the most highly decorated and, some say, highest paid, walk-ons in college football history. He wore No. 22 throughout his college and professional careers.
• Justice ran, threw and punted his way to UNC greatness in head coach Carl Snavely’s single-wing offense. He owned more than 80 of UNC’s football records after his four-year career ended. His total offense records lasted until 1994.
• He led the nation in punting in 1948 with a 44.1 yard average and helped the Tar Heels reach the highest ranking in school history, No. 3, with a 9-1-1 record. His greatest game came against Georgia, in which he amassed more than 300 yards in total offense.
• He was more than a performer. He was a movement. “It was the perfect time,” he said in a 2000 interview with the Charlotte Observer. “Carolina needed a star. Everyone had been through a war. Confined. There had been gas rations. The war was over, and people wanted to turn it loose a little.”
  
• When Choo Choo announced he was going to North Carolina after the war, NC State pretty much conceded any chance of being successful in college football, even with the surge of GI Bill enrollees. Instead, the school hired Indiana high school coach Everett Case to build a basketball dynasty. He immediately won nine of 10 conference championships (six Southern Conference and the first three Atlantic Coast Conference titles, a record that has never been matched in the South). That forced North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest to find their own big-name basketball coaches to compete.
   
• He was named the Most Valuable Player in the 1950 game between the College All Stars and the Philadelphia Eagles, leading the college kids to a 17-7 win over the professionals.
• He was twice named consensus All-American and was twice voted runner-up for the Heisman Trophy. Army’s Glenn Davis, Stanford’s Andrew Luck and Justice are the only players in Heisman Trophy history to be runners-up in back-to-back years. Davis was runner up in 1944 and ’45 and then won it in 1946. Justice was runner up in 1948 and ’49, while Luck was runner up in 2010 and ’11, but neither ever won the Heisman. Justice helped the Tar Heels go to two Sugar Bowls and the Cotton Bowl.
   
• Author Frank DeFord always denied that his novel, and the movie it inspired, called “Everybody’s All-American” was based on Justice’s life, which was a natural assumption given the main character, Gavin Grey, is an All-American and Heisman Trophy winner who played at UNC but struggles with depression and alcoholism in his post-football life. The movie, which stars Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lange, was going to be shot in Chapel Hill, but UNC’s administration turned down the studio’s request to film on campus. The movie’s setting was changed to LSU, which started rumors that the movie was based on the life of Tigers’ Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. “Never met either of them,” DeFord said. “Don’t know anything about them.”
• Justice was so popular in North Carolina he could even fill up NC State’s Riddick Stadium. He never played there in his four years of college – even the Wolfpack’s home games during that era were moved to Kenan Stadium because of a lack of seating for the rivalry game. However, when Justice played for the Washington Redskins, NC State’s Wolfpack Club sponsored an NFL exhibition game between the Skins and the Green Bay Packers on Sept. 11, 1954. Carolina fans filled about 16,000 of the stadium’s 22,000 seats to see their football hero play, but Lisle “Liz” Blackbourn’s Packers whipped Joe Kuharich’s Redskins 31-3. Justice broke loose for a 21-yard gain, but Green Bay’s defense pretty much kept him under wraps. The game was sponsored by NC State’s Wolfpack Club, meaning Choo Choo raised money to help Earle Edwards’ program beat Carolina three of the next four years. State hosted four other NFL exhibition games in 1967, ‘68 and ’69 when its news home was called Carter Stadium and in 1989 when it was called Carter-Finley Stadium.
• Charlie and his wife Sarah were already married when they arrived in Chapel Hill. They lived at the Carolina Inn, which at the time was the school-provided housing for married couples at UNC. They had two children, Ronnie and Barbara. In the years after, following his professional football career, following his time in Greensboro as an insurance salesman, even as his iconic presence began to fade, that’s where they stayed when they returned to Chapel Hill.
  
  
• Justice played only 43 NFL games in an injury-hampered career. He was still named one of the top 70 Redskins of all time.
• In 1970, the University of North Carolina dedicated a section of its athletic center in his name, calling it the Charlie Justice Hall of Honor.
• Justice Street in Chapel Hill is named after him.
• The day after his death, the 22-yard-line at Kenan Stadium was painted blue in his memory and became a longtime tradition. It wouldn’t be surprising in the least if Brown, in his second stint with the Tar Heels, revived that tradition.

1952 Bowman football card.

A few nice things people said about Choo Choo when he died on Oct. 17, 2003, at his home in Cherryville, a day before he was supposed to attend a reunion of his “Justice Era” teammates. These appeared with the obituary I wrote of Justice for the Greensboro News & Record.

UNC teammate Bob Koontz

“He was a great athlete. He was a man of tremendous character. He was respected by every single man on our team, from the water boy on up. Throughout his career, he was one of the most unselfish athletes you would ever encounter. He would always deflect praise from himself to someone else. He was a friend of every man this squad. I think he was the greatest football player to ever come out of North Carolina and probably ever will.”

Former teammate Art Weiner

"Pound for pound, he was the best player there ever was. He was fearless.’’

Governor Jim Hunt

“I am deeply saddened to learn of the death of Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice,’’ Hunt said. “He was my hero as a boy, even though I was an N.C. State fan. He was a great friend to me and to North Carolina during my time as the governor. He was North Carolina’s hero, probably the best athletic hero we ever had, certainly until David Thompson and Michael Jordan came along.’’

UNC football coach Mack Brown

“It's a sad day for the University of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina to lose a guy like Charlie Justice. Seldom do you ever come across someone who gave as much of himself as Charlie did, and he gave more than he ever took. He gave people -- me included -- so much. He can't possibly be replaced.”

UNC All-America tailback Don McCauley

“When I first go here as a freshman from New York, being a bit green and not reading the sports pages, I got down here and called back after the first week of practice.
I said to my dad, ‘Who’s this Charlie Justice guy that everyone is talking about?’ With that, my father said ‘Jeez, I hope I’m the first guy you mentioned this to. If not, be prepare to be tarred and feathered and dragged out of the state on a horse.’ That’s how big Charlie was. He was bigger than life to me. As I got to know Charlie over the years, my junior and senior years we had an opportunity to spend some time together and again, he was just an inspiration to me. Probably the greatest lesson I learned from Charlie was to put the team before yourself personally. I always admired how his teammates respected his abilities, but how thankful he was to be on the same field as his teammates. Over the years, he got stronger and stronger and the name got
as big as life. He will be missed.”

Former UNC golfer Harvie Ward, a classmate of Justice’s during the 1940s

“We had the archeology course one year and it was one of those course that didn’t have to spend a lot of time on. If the weather was good, Charlie and I would go down to the YMCA so we could watch the pretty girls go by. If it was a rainy day, we had to go to class because there was nobody out. I remember one day we tried to sneak into class after it started, and the professor noticed us and said “I’d like to introduce you all to Mr. Harvie Ward and Mr. Charlie Justice.’ They all just sat there and stared at us. I bet we hadn’t been to that class three times all year. Charlie was a great man. I never saw a bad side of him.’’

ACC Commissioner and former UNC athletics director John Swofford

“I’m not sure anybody ever made the connection between greatness and humility as well as Charlie Justice. If anybody has ever transcended generations in sports (at UNC) it is Charlie Justice.’’

Flying High Over the Aggies and Mountaineers

© Tim Peeler, 2019

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep these posts free of ads.

The first time NC State and West Virginia met on the football field, on Oct. 22, 1914, it was hardly the biggest game in town.

Even in the half-built stands of Riddick Field, there were a large number of empty seats, despite the fact the entire corps of student cadets – about 650 gray-uniformed officers in training – were in attendance, riled up by chief rooter J.R. Leguenec Jr. on the sidelines.

That’s because across the street was the grandest annual spectacle of the year, the Great North Carolina State Fair.

How did the North Carolina School for Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (A&M) end up scheduling the Agricultural College of West Virginia, in an intersectional meeting of two land-grant institutions at Raleigh’s Riddick Stadium? West Virginia had never traveled so far away to play a football game, but it was lured by a guarantee of $1,000 or half the gate receipts from the game, whichever was more.

It was also a showcase contest for former Georgetown star Jack Hegarty, in his first of two seasons as head coach of A&M. His team opened with a 51-0 pasting of Wake Forest, the fifth consecutive meeting in what is now the third longest continuous rivalry in college football history. The blow-out was considered a tune-up for the game against the Mountaineers.

West Virginia, coached by Gus Ziegler, left on a Tuesday afternoon train, rode all night long in order to practice at Riddick Field the day before the game. The Mountaineers' 18-player traveling squad left immediately after the game in order to make it back to Morgantown the next afternoon.

In order to get ready for the game, Hegarty hired Jack Martin, the head trainer for Clark Griffith’s baseball Washington Senators, to whip his A&M team into shape.

In the end, the game was just one of many sideshows for the fair.

At the time, the NC State Fairgrounds were located across Hillsboro Street from A&M College. (“Hillsboro Street” is correct; NC State’s northern boundary didn’t get its “ugh” until 1965, not too long before My Apartment Lounge opened.)

Through the years, before on-campus Riddick Field was plowed open in 1907, NC State football always hosted a football game, usually on a Thursday, in the infield of the fairgrounds’ horse racing track. (One of the few remnants of the old fairgrounds, which shut down in 1925, is a small road off Clark Avenue called Horse Track Alley.)

Fair games were a bothersome tradition through the years. Football and the fair were apart from 1928, when the new fairgrounds opened in its current location, until nearly four decades later. When Riddick Stadium shut down for good in 1965 with a 3-0 win over Florida State, Wolfpack football moved to off-campus Carter Stadium in 1966. Fair games were common and often bothersome until they were finally halted about 10 years ago because of the throngs of people who attended the fair, a football game and sometimes even an NHL hockey game all on the same piece of property, at least once all on the same day.

In the fall of 1914, however, a record-breaking crowd of some 40,000 people attended the fair, an amazing aggregation considering Cary United Methodist Church didn’t serve its first ham biscuit until 1916 and the fair didn’t get its first rides until 1938. It didn’t hurt that A&M, Peace, Meredith, St. Mary’s, Wake Forest, UNC and the Wake County Public Schools all let their students out of classes that day to attend the fair. The capital building and all other state buildings were closed, as were most of the city’s stores and businesses. Thursdays at the fair were also most popular for folks from the far-flung rural parts of the county, like Apex, Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina.

The day began with a parade of award-winning livestock, decorated with their red, white or blue ribbons, and ended with a $1,000 fireworks display called “Panama in Peace and War.” In between, the A&M beat the Mountaineers, 26-13, thanks to the heroics of sophomore quarterback C.E. “Red” Van Brocklin and the scoring of four different running backs: junior halfback Wallace Riddick, fullback P.G. Tenney, and freshmen halfback N.S. Sharp and fullback W.F. Townsend.

Only about 2,000 spectators (“among which ladies were very much in evidence”) gathered to see the game. It kicked off promptly at the civilized time of 3 p.m. There were no postgame reports of heat exhaustion on the overcast afternoon.

For the folks at the fair, it was an amazing, fun-filled day. More than 300 county commissioners were on hand to see that day’s showing of good roads construction. “A demonstration that was particularly impressive was that of a [60-horse power] tractor which pulls two road scrapers and makes a road with one journey over the route, provided the ground is free of stumps.” State mineralogist Joseph Hyde Pratt showed off his numerous geological discoveries from North Carolina, as well as classic works of mountain pottery.

Perhaps the biggest debut at the 1914 state fair was the Boys Corn Clubs, the two-year-old statewide organization that eventually became the national 4-H Club. There were other exhibits that showed the efficacy of spraying apple trees, cotton production and the always popular and gruesome cholera exhibit.

Twice, in a pregame flyover precursor, aviation daredevil DeLloyd Thompson buzzed the midway with two dangerous loop-de-loops. Aviation tricks became an N.C. State Fair staple in 1910, less than a decade after the Wright Brothers began manned flight on the North Carolina Outer Banks.

That DeLloyd was a little crazy in Orville and Wilbur’s invention is well documented. He was the second pilot to ever attempt – and successfully complete – what became his signature move. He set the world speed record over Long Island by traveling 108.4 miles per hour, showing the world the best way to visit New York – quickly. He used to perform the famous “undertaker’s drop,” the details of which I don’t know, but the sound of which is dangerous.

Earlier that summer, Thompson set the world altitude record 15,256 feet in the skies over Kansas. It was so cold on that flight, Thompson was forced to wear a sheepskin suit to prevent hypothermia. So when he sailed over the football field en route to performing for the fair, he became the first wolf in sheep’s clothing to attend an NC State football game.

Other performers at the fair included the Flying Herberts traveling circus, which featured high-wire acrobatics, as did the Delmore Troupe. Among the tricks performed by the six-member Herberts was jumping into and out of a barrel suspended high on a wire over the midway.

Music performances included the band from the North Carolina Institute for the Blind, where Doc Watson later went to school.

The crowd, which descended on the fairgrounds from streetcars, automobiles and horse-drawn carriages, was commended for their behavior, which apparently was unusual based on the following News & Observer report.

“There is one outstanding fact to distinguish this fair from many others who have preceded it. There is no disorder. There is a capable corps of special officers on duty within the walls of the fair grounds. There are mounted and unmounted policemen, but they have very little to do except in the way of looking out for traffic. Thus far there has been an unusually small number of cases of public drunkenness.

“On the Fairgrounds the shows are of higher class than usual. The midway attractions are noticeably lacking in gambling games, and chance contests. There are no candy wheels, no poodle dog games, for attorney general Bickett ruled these things out in a general opinion made upon the request of the State Fair officials.

“Ladies yesterday were not harassed by that great assortment of annoyers which at one time were the curse of the Great State Fair. Whips were not on sale and their use is prohibited. And at the same time there was just as much jollity, just as much of the holiday spirit, just as much witchery among the girls and just as much of the spirit to dare among the boys as there ever has been. Nobody is sorry that the torture sticks have been ruled out.”

How everyone enjoyed their visit to the fair and the football game without candy wheels, whips and torture sticks is an unreported mystery the N&O chose not to cover.