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Courtesy Dave Knachel / Virginia Tech
Frank Beamer on the field
During his 25 seasons at the helm Beamer has led the Hokies to 19 consecutive bowl appearances, four ACC titles, three Big East conference titles, six BCS appearances and one National Championship game. He is currently the winningest active coach in FBS.
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Dave Knachel / Virginia Tech
Frank Beamer
Frank Beamer, head coach of the Virginia Tech Hokies.
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Lane Stadium, Home of the Hokies
There was a time when you could buy a Virginia Tech football ticket for $5 and sit about anywhere you wanted, recalls Barnett Beamer, older brother of the Hokies’ head coach. These days Lane Stadium’s 65,000 seats are filled every game.
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Floyd Allen, Frank Beamer's great uncle
Frank Beamer’s great uncle, Floyd Allen, depicted in newspaper accounts as a fierce mountain man, was convicted of murder (along with son Claud), in the 1912 Hillsville Courthouse shootout, and was executed by the state of Virginia.
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Sidna Allen, another of Beamer’s great uncles
Another of Beamer’s great uncles, Sidna Allen, was sentenced to decades in prison for his role in the March, 1912 courthouse shootings.
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Courtesy of the Beamer family.
Herma Allen, Frank Beamer's mother
The courthouse shootings and the dishonor it brought her family deeply affected Frank’s mother, Herma Allen Beamer, shown here as a young woman.
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Courtesy of the Beamer family.
Herma and Raymon Beamer, Frank Beamer's parents
Herma with her husband, Raymond Beamer, himself a former star on Hillsville’s high school teams in the 1930s. It was Raymond Beamer who provided the competitive nature for Frank and brother Barnett. The morning after his sons’ varsity games at Hillsville, Raymond Beamer would go over their performances in detail.
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Raymond and Herma Beamer
Raymond and Herma Beamer at a Tech game in the 1990s when the program began to prosper under their son.
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Beamer Children
The children of Raymond and Herma Beamer, left to right: Barnett, Frank, Billie Jean and Betty, in the late 1940s
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Beamer Children - 60 years later
The Beamer children 60 years later, with Frank again holding a football in his lap.
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Young Frank Beamer in the Hospital
Young Frank with nurses during his treatment for burns that required he undergo more than 30 different operations. For four years after he suffered the burns at age 7, Beamer spent most of his summers in the hospital undergoing the difficult grafts needed to replace skin on his face, arm and shoulder.
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Frank Beamer as a player
Even though the hospitalization left him weak, Beamer recovered to become a top-notch quarterback at Hillsville High School and later a star defensive back at Virginia Tech.
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Beamer Community Playground dedication
A proud Herma Allen Beamer with her four children at the dedication of a Beamer Community Playground they sponsored in their native Carroll County.
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Courtesy Dave Knachel / Virginia Tech
Frank Beamer on the field
During his 25 seasons at the helm Beamer has led the Hokies to 19 consecutive bowl appearances, four ACC titles, three Big East conference titles, six BCS appearances and one National Championship game. He is currently the winningest active coach in FBS.
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Courtesy Dave Knachel / Virginia Tech
Frank Beamer with the team
As of the end of the 2011-12 season the Virginia Tech football team is 209-98-2 under Frank Beamer, who enters his 26th season as head coach in 2012. Since the beginning of the 1995 season no team in the FBS has more wins than Virginia Tech.
The military helicopter peels sideways through the broad blue sky as the crowd roars, and soon enough Frank Beamer appears at the mouth of the tunnel here at Lane Stadium. He’s about to lead his team onto the field, but as usual he pauses as he allows the fervor to gather, all the while surveying the world he has built from what was once the quaint mediocrity of Virginia Tech Football.
On this day, his face is drawn and tired and fixed with the grave concern that always clouds over him when one of his teams stumbles. This 2010 group waits nervously behind him in the tunnel. The players are mostly young and uninitiated yet very eager to please Beamer. But stumble they have in spectacular fashion. They appeared to have beaten third-ranked Boise State in a season-opening Monday night game, only to collapse and lose at the end. Five days later they suffered the greatest humiliation of Beamer’s impressive career by falling here, on their home field, to lowly James Madison.
“It is what it is,” he told the media afterward. It is a phrase Beamer has used often in his 30 years as a head coach.
It’s the phrase his mother taught him long ago. Projected to perhaps challenge for the national championship, Beamer’s club instead began the season with two losses. So now he stands here, eyeing the expanse of Hokie faithful who have spent the past dozen days venting their anger on talk radio across the state.
He is eager to see if they still love him.
The stadium’s massive PA begins to pound out the team’s trademark anthem, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and on cue the crowd of 66,000-plus, dressed mostly in orange, rises to the insistency of their surging noise and begins jumping up and down furiously. It’s the signature manic outburst in Tech’s football ritual, as the whole place becomes some giant undulating organism. Untold numbers of students say they chose Tech as their school in large part because they longed to be a part of this pagan worship.
“It gave me goose bumps,” Beamer would admit later. “It always does.”
In due time, Beamer and his coaching staff will steady this young team and survive another crisis as they have done so many times in his 24 years in Blacksburg.
It seems odd to some observers that this unassuming man who runs onto the field each game with a gimpy gait can possibly serve as the high priest of this intense cult of Hokie Nation. But that’s good ol’ Frankie Beamer. He’s long been recognized as Southwest Virginia’s most prominent favorite son.
What hasn’t been fully revealed, though, is just how deep and how red his family blood runs in the hills of his native Carroll County, and how important that is to his coaching success.
Pausing for a serious moment in an otherwise light-hearted interview just days before the season opened, Beamer disclosed that he is a direct descendant of the notorious Allen clan.
Yes, those Allens, the fierce mountain men who shot up the Carroll County courthouse in a spasm of violence in 1912 that left five people dead, including the judge, prosecutor and county sheriff. The incident and ensuing manhunt dominated headlines across the nation for months alongside the other huge story of that spring — the sinking of the Titanic.
Beamer’s grandfather, Barnett Allen, then just 21, was charged and acquitted in connection with the incident, but the state executed Beamer’s great uncle and a cousin and sentenced several other family members to decades in prison.
The scourge on the Allens went far beyond the reach of the law. Another of Beamer’s great uncles was shot to death by a Baldwin-Felts detective in a roadhouse in 1916 and others were said to suffer various acts of retribution over the ensuing years.
This information might register as merely a quaint footnote in an excellent coaching resumé except that in many ways it explains so much about Beamer and the source of his legendary toughness. No, it’s not that he is in any way a reincarnation of his gun-toting ancestors.
More specifically, the Allen Tragedy, as it is sometimes called in the hills of Southwest Virginia, reveals the heartache long suffered by his mother, Herma Allen Beamer, an extraordinary woman credited with instilling in Beamer his trademark resiliency and fortitude.
The strong presence of his mother and father as well as a favorite uncle are all part of a rich family background that has been essential in Beamer’s rise as one of college football’s all-time winningest coaches.
In interviews with family members, it becomes clear that first as a girl, then as a young woman, Herma Allen Beamer suffered from the circumstances that branded her family.
“Her relatives were Floyd and Sidna Allen,” Beamer says of his mother’s people. “That’s right. They shot up the courthouse… You grew up in Carroll County, you knew about it one way or the other.”
The shootings deeply affected their mother, according to Billie Jean Beamer Hill, Frank’s oldest sister. “She faced obstacles every way she turned, because she was an Allen. You can imagine what the atmosphere was around Carroll County at that time.”
“It was real touchy with her,” recalls Betty Semones, her daughter and Frank’s older sister. “We were never allowed to talk about it much. It was too painful.”
Barnett Beamer, Frank’s older brother, recalls trying to get his mother and other family members to speak of those harsh times. They just weren’t going to do it.
Frank himself can’t remember the first time his mother actually disclosed the family circumstances to him. “It was just something that I don’t think anybody particularly enjoyed talking about,” he explains.
Like the Allens, the Beamer side of his lineage is another salt-of-the-earth family from the mountain farm region near Fancy Gap, hard by the North Carolina border. But where the Beamers embrace large family reunions each year, there’s no such gathering of the Allens in modern times. “Their side of the story was different,” Beamer explains.
Although the topic was taboo around his house growing up, Beamer clearly felt his mother’s emotion about what happened to her family. As an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, he wrote a paper about the incident and delivered it as a speech for his public speaking class.
His position? “The main thing I always knew is that there were two sides to the story,” Beamer says.
If you relied just on the newspaper accounts from that era in The New York Times and the Washington Post, you’d think the Allens were violent mountain brigands. In the years before the shootings, Floyd Allen was said to have suffered more than a dozen gunshot wounds, and at least five of those came from exchanges with members of his own family, the newspapers said.
The truth is, the Allens were upstanding land owners, farmers and store-keepers, recalls Frank’s 91-year old uncle, Carter Beamer, who served for decades as Wytheville’s town manager. “They were a well respected family. They weren’t white trash.”
Floyd Allen and his kinsmen were Democrats in a county dominated by Republicans in those strife ridden decades after the Civil War. In addition, Floyd Allen had intense conflicts with the families in power in the county.
When two of his nephews got into a minor scrape in North Carolina, deputies from Carroll County chained them behind a wagon, and instead of returning directly to jail, took them the long way home, past the Allens’ store. When Floyd Allen saw how they were being treated, he told the lawmen to unbind the boys and treat them decently. The lead deputy pulled his gun instead, and Floyd Allen took the weapon away from him, horse-whipped the deputy, and set his nephews free, only to turn them in to the sheriff a day later.
Allen was charged with mayhem, and a crowd of better than 200 packed the county courthouse that Thursday morning, March 12th, 1912. According to legend, Floyd Allen stood as his year-long prison sentence was read and declared, “I ain’t a-going.”
Authorities had anticipated trouble in the days leading up to the trial, so both sides drew their weapons and started shooting, more than 50 shots in all.
“They weren’t really sure who fired first,” Carter Beamer says of the courthouse shootout. “Politics entered into it, but there were also some family differences.”
While he pointed out the untold Allens’ side to the story in his college speech, Frank Beamer today holds no illusions about the realities. “Certainly, a bunch of people getting shot in the courthouse, that doesn’t need to happen, regardless of your side of the story,” he says.
If nothing else, his family history helps explain why Beamer was such a powerful voice in Blacksburg after the campus shootings on April 16, 2007. The important thing was not to allow the act of violence to define the university, Beamer said during those dark days, as he stepped forward as a community leader in the hours after the incident. “We can’t let one person destroy what goes on here every day, the caring, the thoughtfulness. We can’t let one person destroy that.”
In many ways, that was exactly the lesson his mother had spent a lifetime teaching him.
THE HEARTACHE
Herma Allen Beamer was only 7 and her little brother Sharrell just 5 in 1926 when their father, Barnett Allen, died of pneumonia at age 35. A short time later, the family’s farmhouse burned to the ground.
Life on the farm was already bitterly harsh in that age before rural electrification, when farming families worked around the clock in hopes of staying fed.
“Her house burned right after her father died,” Betty Beamer Semones explains. “She had a tough time as a girl.”
With the help of family and neighbors, the house was rebuilt, and Herma’s mother in time remarried a good man, James Mitchell, but then the Great Depression gripped the country.
“That was one of the things that marked her character from the time she was a little girl,” Barnett Beamer says.
Faced with difficulty, Herma grew deep in her faith and deep in her determination, according to family members. “When people told her she couldn’t do something that only made her more determined to prove she could,” says Billie.
For her entire life, the Methodist church in the little community of Fancy Gap served as the center of her world. True to her Allen heritage, she would also remain a staunch Democrat, although that meant she often had to hold her tongue as so many of her friends and neighbors were Republican.
Holding her tongue wasn’t easy for Herma, Billie says. “She was outspoken, but then she had to fight for everything she ever had. She was a lady, but she was a Methodist and a Democrat. She firmly believed in those two things.”
She blossomed into a smart, pretty young woman who despite the hard times managed to get a teaching certificate at Radford State Teacher’s College.
She fell in love and married Raymond Harden Beamer, who grew up as one of eight children on a neighboring farm in Carroll County. He had been a football star at Hillsville High in the leather helmet days of the 1930s. Raymond’s younger brother Carter would go on to win a Southern Conference wrestling championship for VMI in 1941, at a time when the conference was much larger and included many of today’s Atlantic Coast Conference schools. But while Raymond was strong and fast, the economic hard times meant he would go to work rather than to college.
Even so, Frank’s father rose quickly through the ranks of the state highway department to become an assistant district superintendent. Offered a job as the superintendent of another district, Raymond Beamer turned it down because taking it would have required moving away and giving up the family’s small farm near Fancy Gap. In many ways, that farm was Virginia Tech football’s executive training facility.
Mostly, it would be the place where they raised their four children. A daughter, Billie Jean, came first, followed by a son, Barnett, and then another daughter, Betty. Just like all farm children, almost as soon as they could stand upright, they went to work.
“We milked the cows, we had a garden, we had pigs, we practically had all our food on the farm,” Billie says, explaining that her parents were determined that there would be money for all of the children to get an education. “It was all work with Daddy. We had to save the money so that we could go to college.”
Between pregnancies, Herma continued working as a teacher in a series of one-room schoolhouses in the area, which meant she taught all seven grades to the elementary children. In early 1946, she learned she was pregnant again, her fourth child in seven years. “I think it was a little bit of a surprise,” Barnett recalls with a laugh.
Each of her pregnancies had brought difficult labors in that age before medical techniques softened the agony of birth, but the labor for this fourth child, in the hospital in Mount Airy, N.C., stretched on for two, then three days. “She just could not get the baby here,” Billie remembers. “They feared that the tube was wrapped around his neck and that he would be born dead. I remember her telling me that she prayed and prayed. When she prayed, she told the Lord that if he would allow the child to be born she would do everything she could for the Lord for the rest of her life. And she pretty much did.”
Franklin Mitchell Beamer finally arrived that October 18th.
“Really,” Billie says, “Frank was almost a miracle baby from the very beginning, because she almost didn’t get him here.”
He was named in honor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had died the previous April. “He was a popular figure as far as my mother and father were concerned,” Barnett Beamer explains.
He may have been the baby of the family, but the rules didn’t change. Just as with his older siblings, Frank went to work almost as soon as he could walk, an experience he credits as the foundation of his resilience.
“I was in the hayfield in the summertime in the heat, throwin’ bales of hay on trucks,” he says when asked about it. “I think it was just the attitude of my family. I think that was just the way I was brought up. My mom and dad had toughness, and I just inherited that from them.”
“He believed in work,” Carter Beamer said of his brother Raymond. “Herma did also. They believed in the kids doing chores around the house and on the farm there.”
THE FIRE
Beamer was 7 and his brother Barnett was 12 when they had the chore of cleaning out a small garage on the farm one day. A gallon jug of gasoline was knocked over and began rolling toward a fire they had built to burn trash. Frank kicked it to keep it from the fire, but the gasoline splashed.
The liquid flames hit on his face, right shoulder and arm, Barnett recalled. “I realized he was on fire and rolled him in the grass.
“It was a bad accident.”
“He probably shouldn’t have lived through that, as badly as he was burned,” Billie remembers.
Little Frank spent the next three years undergoing painful skin grafts, more than 30 operations in all, in which doctors tried to graft skin from his back to the badly burned area on the right side of his face. It seemed impossible to get the new skin to cover the burned area.
The skin at times had to be forced through a tube. The active little boy had to be very still.
“He was at the hospital in Pulaski for three or four summers,” recalls his sister Betty, who is 18 months older than Frank. “My mother drove him there. They practically stayed the whole summer. Dad would load us up and take us to see them on weekends.”
“I had more than 30 operations over the next four summers,” Frank recalls. “What I’d do, I’d go in for a week and have an operation, then I’d go home for a week, then come back the following week and have another operation. That’s what we’d do all summer. We were always going back and forth to see the doctor. The number of times my mother drove me to Pulaski, that’s where we’d go to have all my operations, it was just unbelievable. The amount of time she spent with me there was just unbelievable.”
The schedule brought hardship to the entire family, Frank remembers. “I guess it was hard on me, but who it was really hard on was my family. They were going to all this effort to take care of me. But that’s always the way we’ve done things.”
Their mother probably talked to the Lord coming and going with each trip over those mountain roads to Pulaski, Billie says. “She talked to the Lord her entire life, until the very end.”
A huge factor for the Beamer family was Herma’s brother, Sharrell, who had earned his college degree at Virginia Tech, then had gone off to fight in France during World War II. He returned home after the war and became a wonderful influence in the lives of his sister’s children, Barnett Beamer recalls. “He was a bachelor, but in a lot of ways he was like another father to us. He and my mom and dad were always interested in us and what we were doing.”
The experience served to pull the whole family together, which was fortunate, because they faced a series of setbacks. Doctors used ether to anesthetize Frank for the dozens of surgeries. There were several times the ether caused serious incidents so rough on Beamer that years later, when he faced surgery for a tonsillectomy, he opted for a local anesthetic rather than face going under again for another surgery, Betty says.
“I’d get to feeling sorry for myself, laying there in the hospital in the summertime and the other kids out playin’ baseball,” Beamer recalls. “I’d be pouting. My mom would say, ‘Come on, get up. Let’s go.’ I’d say, ‘Where we goin’?’ She’d say, ‘We’re gonna walk down this hall.’ Sure enough, in five minutes, I saw 10 people who had it worse than me. You’d say, ‘Well, you know, I don’t have it so bad after all.’”
“It was a hard time for all of us, but we made it,” says Beamer’s sister Betty.
Through the experiences, the family grew close with the young plastic surgeon who worked so diligently on Frank, family members recall, but then the doctor died suddenly of a heart attack. And the Beamers had to find a doctor in Roanoke who could complete the complicated procedures.
By age 11, Frank was assigned his mother as his sixth grade teacher at the new elementary school in Fancy Gap. Barnett recalls his younger brother arriving home from school most afternoons frowning and fussing that it wasn’t fair, that his mother was harder on him than the other students.
“That was probably the worst year we had,” Barnett says. “Mom would get onto him for doing things. By the time he’d get home he would be upset. He felt he was being punished for things he didn’t do. She felt she had to do it to keep people from thinking she was being partial to him.
“We got through that too.”
Life for Beamer and his family eventually began to return to a semblance of normal, except that the long hours of surgery and recuperation had caused other problems.
“Most of the time he’d had bandages on his whole right side,” Barnett recalls. “His right ear was probably remade. The cartilage was intact, but they had to take skin from his back and graft it on his face, the right side of his face, his right arm and his right shoulder. During all that time, he lost any muscle that he’d had.
“He got to be a frail looking little fellow. He couldn’t even raise his right arm.”
Barnett, who was five years older, got Frank started on the road to recovery by playing catch. He says he did it simply because he needed somebody to play with, but sister Betty recalls her brother playing a major role in Frank’s recovery.
“He had to learn to catch and throw a ball with his right arm,” Barnett recalls. “We spent a lot of time out there in the yard.”
Although Carroll County had never offered youth sports teams, some leagues formed in Hillsville about the time Frank turned 12. The astounding part of the story is that Beamer matured into a top-notch high school quarterback so soon after such debilitating injuries. He would go on to throw 42 touchdown passes for Coach Tommy Thompson at Hillsville High before graduating in 1965 and accepting a scholarship to play football at Virginia Tech.
During this period, the Beamer boys were shown the larger world by their uncle Sharrell, who poured his energy into the community. He organized a church youth group and a Boy Scout troop. He and Frank were some of the world’s worst scouts, Barnett recalls.
“We didn’t care much for tying those knots.” At the troop meetings, they’d play ball or pitch horseshoes, anything to avoid working on merit badges.
Their uncle Sharrell saw the need for a community center and raised funds to build one through the local VFW he’d helped organize. Their uncle played a large role in veteran’s affairs and organized monthly trips to visit sick veterans at the V.A. center in Salem. Soon the center rose up as a fine cinderblock building where the local kids could play basketball indoors, a place that also hosted big-time country and gospel acts on weekends.
“You could not believe how humble and how kind he was,” Billie says. “He almost had too big a heart for his own good.”
Every Sunday morning, Sharrell and their father drove those mountain roads, chauffeuring people who had no transportation back and forth to the Methodist church.
Although he was quite busy, their uncle Sharrell also took the time to usher their education, Barnett recalls. “He gave us outlet to another part of the world that we wouldn’t have seen with mom and dad.”
Starting in the 1950s, when Frank Moseley built solid teams at Virginia Tech, their Uncle Sharrell took the boys to see the Fighting Gobblers play. “He was very proud that he had come from such a humble beginning,” Barnett says of Sharrell Allen. “Frank was 10 or 12, and I was a teenager. We saw Johnny Mize and Dickie Beard and the other Tech stars.”
He took the youth group on hay rides and on trips to swim at Fairystone State Park, Barnett remembers. “These were the experiences that me and my sisters and Frank had growing up that were made possible by Uncle Sharrell.”
Sharrell Allen was a much-admired man of the community, their uncle, Carter Beamer recalls.
But during Frank’s junior year in college, his parents had become concerned that Sharrell had grown despondent. A heavy snowfall had collapsed the community center he had worked so hard to build. And he seemed concerned about something health related.
“Mom, Dad, all of us, we hardly knew what to do,” Billie says, looking back.
“I think the community center collapsing was part of the thing that brought on his problem, because he worried himself to death about that.”
The family sought a doctor’s advice, and he suggested Sharrell seek treatment at the V.A. hospital in Salem.
Before that could happen, Sharrell’s depression deepened and he took his own life on May 18, 1968, at age 47, a staggering event for Herma and her family. “Another trying time in our lives was when he committed suicide,” Barnett said.
“That was so tragic,” Billie remembers, pointing out that in those days depression was such a stigma people were reluctant to talk about it. “I am sure uncle Sharrell was suffering from depression, but back then it was almost bad to have a problem like that.”
Once again, Herma bore immense pain with her faith.
“She was just mom,” Barnett says. “She was always someone that wanted you to do well. She encouraged you to do well. She demanded you do well. She was there for you if you stumbled. She would listen to you. She knew how to endure.”
“Everything she went through made her tougher,” Betty Semones says of her mother. “She could be strong-willed and a strong woman too.”
“She was a strong lady, I mean just tough,” Beamer says of the woman who did so much for him. “My mom and dad both. I don’t care how late you stayed out Saturday night, you were gonna get up and go to church Sunday mornin’. That was it.”
That toughness and resilience translated well for Frank. He hadn’t been in college but a few weeks when he was reminded of that.
“I say I played in the first game ever in Lane Stadium,” Beamer says. “But actually I stood on the sideline the whole first game. I was a true freshman, and we had a whole freshman team.
“We weren’t eligible to play on the varsity, but we played the University of Maryland freshmen, and I’ll never forget it. I sat right over there,” he says, pointing at the sideline. “That was back in the day when they brought in 65 freshmen. Well, I never got in the game. Here you are right out of high school and never got in the game. I stood on the sideline the entire four quarters.”
Beamer was undersized and perhaps easy for the freshman coach to overlook, but he was devastated.
“I was down as much as I ever had been that night,” he recalls. “You were wondering, ‘Am I in over my head?’ I came here as a quarterback and they moved me to defensive back. After I moped around for a while, I kind of remembered what I’d been through. That Monday I practiced as hard as I could. Tuesday too. And I got in the next ball game.”
In that game, he didn’t play quarterback. He played defensive back. And there was a play that changed his fortunes, he recalls.
“I was on one side of the fi eld, and the ball was thrown down near the goal line on the other side. When the ball was in the air, I sprinted as hard as I could to where the ball was thrown. Daggone if it didn’t get tipped, and I got it, I got the interception, strictly just because I went hard. That’s the only way I knew to play, and that’s the only way I know to coach… Just go hard.
“That’s the only way I know how to do it. When things are not quite right, that’s when you find out the most about people.”
He went on to become a three-year starter for coach Jerry Claiborne, and Herma and Raymond Beamer were proud of every minute of it, just as they were of the college educations and fine careers by all of their children. Raymond died in 1996 and Herma in 2004.
She never stopped being a good Methodist and a good Democrat, true to the last to her Allen heritage.
“In the 2001 governor’s campaign she had a four by eight Warner sign in her front yard,” recalls Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Democratic strategist who helped guide Warner to victory that year. “We were gonna do a flyer, with a picture of her beside that sign with the headline, ‘Mama Knows Best.’ We were gonna have kids put flyers on every car at the Tech football game right before the election.”
Saunders phoned his old friend Frank Beamer to make sure the effort would be okay. “He told me, ‘I try to stay out of politics.’”
Yet the incident reflects just how much Beamer is a product of both of his parents. “In his personality, Frank is more of a PR person,” Billie says. “Daddy was more of a PR person, an outgoing person. He would go out and listen to everybody. Momma, if she believed in something, she would more or less stand up and speak out, even if it hurt your feelings. She didn’t really try to hurt your feelings, but she didn’t mind disagreeing with you. “Frank’s more like Daddy in that regard,” Billie says, pointing out that as a coach Frank would almost have to be. “But he has a lot of Mom in him. You see it in times like when he lost those first two games this year. That’s when he’s most determined to bring that football team around when he senses people have given up on him. Frank, it always bothers him when the problems get bad with his teams. He wants to show people that he can accomplish things and we can win football games.
“There’s a lot of Mom in him, and Daddy too. She was more outspoken, but she had to fight for everything she ever had.”
The influence of family runs strong in his working life. “He’s handled the ups and downs,” brother Barnett observes. “He’s had plenty of disappointments to go with the big times.”
Inherent in the resilience is an ability to see beyond hardship. “That’s the thing that sets Frank apart from the rest of us,” Barnett says. “He learned to think bigger and dream bigger dreams. He saw that bigger world out there.”
It’s a world that comes into focus as he stands in the tunnel on game days at Virginia Tech when the building is thumping and the balloons rise to the sky. He’s very much in that moment, yet Frank Beamer’s oh so aware that he got there by virtue of the things Herma and Raymond brought him long ago. He has long made it known that when he feels that big Hokie love, it’s not his alone. It belongs to his family too.
Roland Lazenby is the author of "Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon," published this year by ESPN Books.