Marshall Ramsey

“We’re all born the same way but there are a million ways to die.”

Tall, thin and tired, Paul Slansky poured a handful on the dirt on the polished coffin and then rubbed his temples. Fifteen years of marriage, seven of them good, were now officially over. “‘Til death do you part,” the priest had said on that happy day. He was right, of course. Now he had said it again. Paul just didn’t think it would be so soon.

He looked over at his two sons. What the heck would they do without their mother? And how would he be a single parent? His youngest son wouldn’t remember his mom. Paul shuffled his feet uncomfortably at the thought. While he and Anna weren’t exactly wildly in love, the one thing they agreed on were their two boys, Jack, aged nine and Matt, aged six. They were the loves of her life.

He looked over at the giant statue of Jesus in the cemetery. “I know we’re just passing friends, but could you tell your Dad I need some serious help here.” Paul felt depression pulling him into the ground with his wife. At times he couldn’t live with Anna. But he sure couldn’t live without her.

The sun began to dip down beneath the mountains. A chill gripped the mourners as they scurried to their cars. One chapter had ended in Paul Slansky’s life and another one was about to begin. The chapter of single parenthood.

He stood in the field of stones alone with two boys who needed him more now than ever.

Paul Slansky had been a father like his father — not a very good one. He devoted most of his life to chasing his career and leaving the child-stuff to Anna. But what Paul had not understood was this: Your career won’t hold your hand while you are dying. As he held Anna’s in her last days, that epiphany illuminated his selfish soul. He looked over at the two boys in their ill-fitting suits. They were his legacy.They were his new career. Paul Slansky helped bring his boys into the world. Now he was going to raise them.

The following Monday, Paul walked into his office and turned in his two-week notice. His boss, flabbergasted, said, “Paul, seriously, take some time off. I know you have been hit hard by this.” But Paul didn’t care. He knew what he had to do.

So he sold the house, had a yard sale, took his 401K money and moved from the suburbs of Atlanta to the mountains of East Tennessee. Through the help of a friend, Paul got a job teaching business at a local high school. Now he and his boys were on the same schedule. He and his boys could explore the mountains together.

And that they did.

The first hike they took was to Abrams Falls in Cades Cove. His own mother had taken him there when his father had died of a heart attack when he was nine. Paul remembered her spreading his ashes carefully at the base of the falls. Now Paul was back. He and the boys took a rose to represent their mother. Paul watched as the water crashed down over the rocks. Time was like that water, constantly breaking the stone and carving out rock. The boys released the rose in the clear cool water.

Paul would always be there for them. And their mother would always be, too.

Paul would make sure of that.

It’s hard to say when the recent low points were for Ole Miss and Mississippi State were but my guess would be the Rebel’s 2010 loss to Jacksonville State and the Bulldog’s 2004 loss to Maine. I could be wrong, but my point is this: To truly appreciate yesterday’s amazing football Saturday, you have to understand exactly how far out of a hole both teams have climbed.

On paper, Ole Miss and State should have trouble competing in the SEC. They’re smaller schools who compete for the same talent pool of recruits. They don’t have the monster facilities that some of the bigger SEC schools have. And of course, both schools don’t have Alabama-like money to play with. Money is the mother’s milk of college athletics after all.

But HOW did both teams turn around so quickly? And how did they do it with so much stacked against them?

1. There was a radical culture change at the top.
This isn’t a comment on Larry Templeton or Pete Boone, but State’s Greg Byrne and Scott Stricklin and Ross Bjork molded their athletic departments into more modern athletic departments. College athletics is big business and today must be run like one. I remember when Bjork was hired, he came on my radio show and talked about his pillars of success. It has been fun to watch him implement them. Both Bjork and Stricklin are energetic professionals and have influenced the culture of their organizations.

2. Hiring coaches who are energetic winners.
Love them or hate them but Hugh Freeze and Dan Mullen compete to win. I remember when Hugh Freeze was hired, people wondered, “who is this guy?” But what critics seemed to miss was that Freeze won at every level he has coached at. He came in with a plan. And stuck to it. Mullen was brash and got under the skin of Ole Miss fans nearly immediately (TSUN) and reenergized the rivalry. Ole Miss responded by bringing in Freeze who immediately became the anti-Mullen. The bottom line? Defeated fan bases became reenergized.

3. Marketing, marketing, marketing.
Both schools have had misfires when it comes to the fan experience but what matters is that they are learning from those mistakes. They are tweaking and trying new things. Ole Miss polls its fans on how to improve game day experience. State creates the hashtag #hailstate to use Twitter in new ways. Constant experimentation leads to a better customer service experience.

4. Surround yourself with great people.
Dan Mullen came in and won the recruiting wars. Then Hugh Freeze came in an won them back. Both brought in enough talented young players who made a difference on the field immediately. You can’t win without energized, talented people surrounding you — in football or business. They built for today while building for the future. That gave fans hope. Which led to:

5. Building on small wins and turning them into big wins.
When State went to Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl and Ole Miss went to BBVA Compass Bowl in Birmingham, it was like National Championship games for the fan base. Because it showed them that after a long drought, things were changing. If you don’t have belief, you won’t have believers. And without believers, you won’t have support and money.

Ole Miss and Mississippi State’s success this weekend is about much more than just football. Their rapid turnaround is something that should be studied and modeled by business leaders and politicians who want to break a culture of failure. Imagine a failng business that hires a brash new leader who brings in motivated executives, hires good people, uses marketing to find out how they can serve their customers better and builds on small victories. I can’t imagine them doing anything but succeeding. Or imagine a government leader who makes his or her constituents believe again. You won’t be 49th for long.

Yesterday was an amazing day for football in Mississippi. But I can’t help but think it was a bigger lesson for us all.

“GO AWAY!” Marvin Hamill screamed as he sat up in his sleep. “LEAVE ME ALONE. I DIDN”T DO IT ON PURPOSE.” He had done this for the past 40 years.

Marvin Hamill had a secret. And Susan Hamill couldn’t pry it out. She had been married to him for two decades and never knew the source of his nightly nightmare. “No marriage should have secrets, particularly one like this,” she thought.

Marvin Hamill was a good man, a solid man. But a not particularly exceptional man. He was a member of the Third Baptist Church, a Vice Vice President of Fourth National Bank and the second-string catcher on his softball team. He’d fade into a tan-painted room if he walked into one. He was soft-rock in a punk-rock world. It was like something was holding him back. Something was haunting him.

But Susan loved him dearly. Except for the secret.

She looked at the clock again. 12:45 a.m. The room was as dark as bottle of India Ink, except for the red glow illuminating her husband’s twitching body.

He popped up again and started screaming, “NO!! GO AWAY!! QUIT HAUNTING ME.”

Susan started to turn on the light but she stared into the darkness at the end of the bed instead. It was hard to see anything but the blackness — but she swore she saw something at the end of the bed.

It was a faint flicker at first. But then is glowed brighter. The specter took shape — the shape of a little girl. She had long brown hair, brown eyes and a huge wound on her forehead. She might have been eight. The little girl looked at Susan sadly and put her finger to her blue lips.

Marvin was screaming louder now, “MAKE HER GO AWAY!”

The little girl walked over the Susan and held out her hand. Susan put her finger up to her heart. “Me,” she thought. The little girl nodded.

She led Susan from the bed into the walk-in closet. The little girl pointed to a pile of clothes in the corner. Susan got on her knees and dug through it. Her hand hit something solid.

It was a nondescript wooden box.

Susan’s hand shook as she opened. She didn’t know Marvin had a box like this. Inside of it was a yellowed newspaper article. Susan’s hand shook harder as she began to read it.

Jenny Woolworth, aged 8, died today after a tragic accident. Police report that she was accidentally hit with a baseball bat as she walked into the middle of a baseball game. The little boy who swung the bat’s name has been withheld due to him being a minor.

Susan looked up at the specter in front of her. She looked exactly like the little girl in the picture.

Tears streamed down Susan’s face. Her love, her Marvin, had been living a hellish nightmare of guilt for nearly 40 years.

The little girl motioned to Susan. They walked back to Marvin again and Susan kissed him on the forehead. Both stood in front of him. He screamed again. “NOOOO!!!!”

“Shhh,” Susan said. She took Marvin’s hand. “She has something to tell you.”

The little girl’s mouth began to slowly move. The sound she made was hard to describe. It sounded almost like harps and screeching. But what Marvin heard with his ears wasn’t what he heard in his head. The little girl continued with three simple words:

“I forgive you.”

Marvin Hamill crumpled into a pile of tears. Forty years of guilt flowed down his cheeks.

Susan said, “Honey, that’s what she has been trying to tell you for 40 years. She knew it was an accident.”

And on that dark October night, a wife and a little girl healed a broken man’s spirit.

My thumb fumbled for the switch. I pushed it smartly to the right and a LED light began to glow red. I didn’t feel nervous — practice brings calm, I guess. I heard my speech teacher Dr. Faye Julian’s voice in my head, “You have to have energy.” I always hear her voice before I speak. My heart beat a little faster. Then I heard my name. Polite clapping faded away.

It was time to earn my keep.

The folks at the Meridian Regional Airport invited me to be a part of their celebration luncheon — they had secured jet service to replace another airline named for a precious metal. It seemed appropriate to me to be speaking at the Riley Center — a place that had reinvented itself. I know I had. And so has the airport. And Downtown Meridian, too. I began to speak.

The worst moments in your life are seeds for the best.

That’s a hard sentence to justify at times. Yet I think about all those moments that seemed so terrible in my life. It was so hard to see the good in something that at the time seemed so sucky. But at the very least, a “worst” moment blasted me out of my of comfort zone. Nothing is ever accomplished in the comfort zone.

The worst moments in your life are seeds for the best.

A few funny cartoons brought laughter. I’ve come to enjoy speaking as much as anything I do. If an audience enjoys you, their energy is like a powerful narcotic. A brain that had been clumsy and balky a few minutes early started to fire on all cylinders.

Sometimes you hit a rock and it sinks you. But most of the time you just bounce off and head off in a better direction. If I had not been a custodian, I would have never been introduced to my wife. If I had not had melanoma, I would not have had a chance to pay my blessing forward. If I hadn’t had a few career hiccups, I would not have been standing in front of this crowd.

The worst moments force you to become creative.

They cause you to experiment. They are gifts served on a platter. Like sand in an oyster, the worst moments are the grit that make the pearls.

But you have to see it that way. And that’s the trick. It can be hard sometimes. Very hard.

I loaded up my car and turned the key. I thought of all the challenges I face in my life. I wondered how I could turn them into opportunity. Then I thought about what an amazing day I had had. I smiled and thought to myself:

The worst moments in life are indeed the seeds for the best.

And then I headed home.

Meridian’s Al and Fred Key had a problem. The Great Depression had threatened Meridian’s airport and they weren’t going to allow it to close.

So they did what they did best: They took to the air. And didn’t come back down for 653 hours.

Flying a borrowed a Curtis Robin, they constantly fed it gasoline during their nonstop flight. The Robin’s name? Ole Miss. The Ole Miss now hangs in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum on the Washington Mall.

Al and Fred took off on June 4, 1935 and landed 27 days later, breaking the endurance record. In the process, they traveled an estimated 52,320 miles and used more than 6,000 gallons of gas.

To service the engine and refuel it, they built a little walkway out to the engine. And to prevent the fuel from spilling (and catching fire) when they finished refueling the plane, they and A.D. Hunter invented special value. That valve, in modified form, is what the KC-135 tankers use to refuel planes today. So it’s very appropriate that those very tankers are based at that airfield Al and Fred successfully kept open — Key Field.

I look forward to speaking to my friends at Meridian Regional Airport tomorrow. I’ll talk to them about how the worst moments turn into the best. Just like what Al and Fred did so many years ago.

On paper, it’s a great story: Man from the Greatest Generation is reunited with the airplane (named after his girlfriend, who he has been married to for over 60 years) that he flew over the skies of Europe. In person, well, it was nothing short of amazing — and touching. Dan Fordice, Governor Kirk Fordice’s son, recently purchased a P-51D and had it painted like Cary Salter’s plane, Charlotte’s Chariot II to honor him. Today out at Hawkins Field in Jackson, Mr. and Mrs Salter and their daughters got to relive a piece of Mr. Salter’s past.

Cary Salter sees the P-51D Mustang for the first time as it taxied in from the runway at Hawkins Field in Jackson.

Dan Fordice pulls Charlotte’s Chariot II up to the hanger after buzzing the hanger twice (he made two fast passes down the runway) It took him 12 minutes to fly from Vickburg to Jackson.

Dan Fordice and Cary Salter stand on the wing of Charlotte’s Chariot II

In the foreground is a photo of Cary Salter as a 23-year-old pilot. In the background, 88-year-old pilot recreates the moment.

Cary Salter told me he didn’t know this picture existed until 1976. A friend had died and his widow had the negative in a box.

Cary Salter checks out the cockpit. Someone yelled, “was your GPS like that one?” Note the crosses on the side of the fuselage. Salter shot down two and a half aircraft in WW2, earning him the nickname from his friends , “half ace.”

Cary Salter tells WLBT’s Bert Case all about the day. (yes, Bert Case survived an encounter with the Fordice brothers).

P-51D Mustangs were the premier fighters in Europe during World War II. Their performance and long range allowed the allies to escort bombers deep into the heart of Germany — striking a fatal blow to German industry. This particular Mustang is immaculate. The engine only had 170 hours on it (the plane’s second engine, it was found in a warehouse after 40 years and installed in the plane.) And you could eat off the floor of the interior.

Friends and family admire the aircraft.

Dan Fordice has a photo of Charlotte Salter inside of the cockpit — just like Cary Salter did 65 years ago. My son and I got to meet Mrs. Salter — and he told me, “she looks just like her picture.”