THOMASVILLE — The Huntington, West Virginia, community meant so much to William “Red” Dawson that the Valdosta native put down his roots there, even after leaving Marshall University.

And even in the wake of one of college football’s worst tragedies.

Dawson didn’t get on the plane that was carrying the Marshall University Thundering Herd football players, coaches, support staff and some boosters back to West Virginia from a November 1970 game at East Carolina University. The plane crashed on approach, killing 75 people. 

Dawson volunteered to drive a university station wagon back, along with an assistant.

“For years, I did not want to talk about the plane crash,” Dawson said Thursday at the South Georgia Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquet. “What can you say to God and ask Him why did He allow that to happen? I fussed with that for a long time. 

“I never came up with any answers,” he said. “It was a bad time.”

Dawson stayed on as an assistant under coach Jack Lengyel, who was brought in from Wooster College in Ohio to lead the team as the program was rebuilt. 

In the movie “We Are Marshall,” Mathew Fox portrayed Dawson. Dawson recalled getting a phone call from the writers and producers wanting to meet with him. Initially, he declined. 

“I wasn’t real interested in what kind of movie they were going to make about Marshall,” he said.

Dawson still supported the university and the football program — often tailgating before home games as Marshall won two then I-AA national championships. But the head coaching job that had been promised him by the school president went instead to Lengyel. Dawson stayed on for a short time as his assistant.

“The president of the university said he had already offered the head coaching job to an assistant at Georgia Tech. He stayed three days and left,” Dawson recalled. “He said we’ll make the appointment of you being the head coach in a week or so.Then he was gone and there was the promise of the head coaching job. They offered three or four times to different people and they did not want the job.”

When Dawson got an offer from a friend in the construction business, he left coaching and never looked back. 

While the construction job may not have turned out as Dawson envisioned, it proved therapeutic in nature.

“A good buddy of mine was going to make me a trainee,” Dawson said, “and I found out a trainee had to have a shovel with him at all times. That’s probably what I needed — hard work and quit thinking so you can sleep at night.”

Dawson eventually started his own successful construction business before retiring.  

“Once I got out of coaching and out of the limelight, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and West Virginia,” he said. 

It was an old friend and teammate who helped connect Dawson to Thomasville.

Dr. Larry Green was on a road trip and decided to look up his former Florida State University teammate in Huntington, where Dawson had settled. 

During his senior year at Valdosta High, Dawson had two scholarship offers, one from FSU and another from Western Carolina. His coach, the late legendary Wright Bazemore, urged him to take the Western offer. 

But Dawson chose FSU — “I had a suitcase, a duffel bag, a shaving kit and maybe five dollars in my pocket,” he said of getting dropped off at the school — and there, he became an all-American at defensive end and at receiver. His receivers coach was a young Bobby Bowden. Bowden, in fact, introduced Green and Dawson to FCA. 

“What a man,” Dawson said of Bowden. “What a great Christian leader.”

The local FCA also announced its first two Bobby Bowden scholarship winners, Abigail Witcher and Ben Wilhelm.