When Craig Greenlee went home from Marshall University to Jacksonville, Fla., for Thanksgiving break in 1970, some people thought they had seen a ghost. The hometown folks knew he had gone to MU to play football, so they assumed that he was on the plane that crashed barely two weeks before, killing 75 people, including 37 of his former teammates.
Greenlee, however, had made a decision after his sophomore season that kept him off the team that fall.
After two seasons as a starting safety, he had concluded that education, not football, was his priority. “I thought there were other ways to get through school and not feel like I had to play ball for a scholarship,” he said. Greenlee went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at Marshall and spent four decades as a journalist, much of it as a sports writer and editor.
Now based in Winston-Salem, N.C., Greenlee is a freelance journalist and the author of November Ever After: A Memoir of Tragedy and Triumph in the Wake of the 1970 Marshall Football Plane Crash, (IUniverse, July 2011).
In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I, too, was a student at Marshall at the time. I took some journalism classes with Greenlee but did not know him particularly well. I had not spoken with him in nearly 40 years. He interviewed me last year for my recollections, as he did my brother, a cousin, my roommate, and other close friends and associates.
I found November Ever After extremely painful to read at times, but also incredibly satisfying because it fills in blanks in my own knowledge, forces me to resurrect long-buried memories and shares with others the African-American experiences at MU that many of us have long wished would be examined some day.
For years, Greenlee said he thought that no one would be interested in his take on the events. He was not among the handful of people who were still on or associated with the team in 1970 but had somehow missed the flight on November 14. Nor was he on the legendary 1971 comeback team featured in the major motion picture “We Are Marshall.”
