By Tom Mattingly
Over the years, there has been a distinct tendency for Americans to remember with great precision where they were when major world events took place.
They might recall the assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963, Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, or the 9-11 attacks in New York City in 2001, all events that seemed to cause the world to stand still.
For earlier generations, it was the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy,” according to President Roosevelt.
For Lindsey Nelson, then 2nd Lt. Lindsey Nelson, the NFL game that Sunday between the Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., turned out to be one of those moments that stayed with him for a lifetime. In his case, it was more than 50 years until he died on June 10, 1995.
“I have never managed to forget the exact date of that game,” Nelson wrote in his autobiography, “Hello Everybody, I’m Lindsey Nelson.”
There were a number of former Vols on both teams, with a get-together scheduled after the game. Ed Cifers played for the Redskins, while Bob Suffridge, Burr West, and Sam Bartholomew played for the Eagles. Jimmy Coleman and Fritz Brandt would also be there. They never forgot that Lindsey had been their tutor while they were at Tennessee.
That day, Suffridge (a three-time Tennessee All-American, 1938-40) maneuvered Lindsey into the game, telling the security guard at the players’ entrance, “This is our recruiting officer.” Lindsey watched from the Eagles sideline.
Frank Blair, in later years part of NBC’s “Today Show,” was the stadium public address announcer that day, making the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
Lindsey wasn’t convinced.
“Let me say simply if he did, we did not hear him,” he wrote. “I know it sounds strange to say that somebody announced the start of World War II on a loudspeaker, and that I didn’t hear it. But that was the way it was.
“I saw the kickoff of the game and missed the kickoff of the war.”
It probably doesn’t matter in the larger context of that day, but Washington did defeat Philadelphia, 20-14, with Suffridge putting on a “spectacular performance” in a losing effort.
In a distinguished military career that followed, Lindsey spent considerable time with Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle. His relationship with Pyle was something special.
“When one is in a combat zone, there is no future. It does not exist,” wrote Lindsey. “One who gives serious thought to it is a fool. And since there is no future, there is no past. All that one has, then, is the present. And the present is ageless.
“And so was our relationship. I never knew him in the United States. We were close friends in a combat zone, where he was in his forties and I was in my twenties, and we were the same age.”
Pyle’s final correspondence to Lindsey had this injunction: “Be good to yourself.” Pyle, 44, died on April 18, 1945, on the little island of Ie Shima from Japanese machine-gun fire.
Lindsey’s military career, stretching from the Duck River in Columbia, Tenn., to the Danube and back, had created a flood of memories, but things changed again when he came home to Columbia in October 1945.
“Like thousands of other young American boys,” wrote Lindsey, “I was home from the war—and I didn’t know what to do.
It was time to begin his life again. He applied for a number of jobs, ending up at Knoxville radio station WKGN, broadcasting high school football and other sporting events. He married Mickey Lambert, a high school classmate and coed at the University of Alabama, to prove to her “there was life after Tuscaloosa.”
They welcomed their first child, daughter Sharon, born July 17, 1948, while a second daughter, Nancy Lynne, now Wyszynski, came along on March 10, 1954.
Lindsey helped establish the Vol Network in 1949, barnstorming the state with Edwin Huster, Sr., to do so. His 1950 broadcast of the Tennessee-Kentucky game, syndicated to the Liberty Broadcasting Network (LBS) and carried on a network of 431 stations, led to his big break.
His broadcast that November day propelled Lindsey into the national spotlight. He was now a hot commodity in his chosen field. As Gen. Neyland’s Maxim No. 2 so clearly states: “Play for and make the breaks and when one comes your way— SCORE.”
He went from the Vol Network to LBS in Dallas full-time, then to play-by-play and other commentary for nearly every radio and television network that owned a microphone and had earned broadcast rights.
One thing was constant.
Lindsey never forgot where he was that afternoon, now 84 years ago, when the world came unhinged, and life was never the same.
That’s the way things appeared for Lindsey Nelson and a great many others who were part of the “Greatest Generation” on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.
