(Geronimo) – Navarro ISD held a remembrance at Erwin-Lee Field on Wednesday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragic deaths of football coach Ruel Erwin and ag teacher Norman Lee, which happened on August 11, 1971.
Erwin and Lee hepled build the stadium for Navarro High School’s first football team that summer. They were welding a goal post together when it caught the magnetic field of a low hanging power line. Erwin and Lee died that day, while assistant coach Mike Martin and students Clint Niemann, Arnold Weston, and David Arriaga suffered serious burns.
Navarro named the new stadium after Erwin and Lee. With Martin replacing Erwin as head coach, the 1971 Panthers dedicated the season to Erwin and Lee and finished with a 5-2 record.
Navarro ISD’s Randall Springs, who helped organize the effort to build the stadium’s Erwin-Lee Football Field Memorial in 2015, put together Wednesday’s remembrance to keep community members and students aware of the stadium’s history on the 50th anniversary of the tragic event.
“As this community is growing, people are moving in, they don’t know why the field was named this, and that’s why we came up with the idea one night – let’s do a memorial,” Springs said.
“So we did a memorial, it was a lot of work from May to August, but we raised 32-thousand dollars, and from then we paid for the memorial, and we als had 18-thousand dollars left over. We’ve been giving 2,000 dollars each year in scholarships – one for an ag student, and one for an athletics student.”
Martin and two members of the 1971 team, Harlan Bridges and Russell Schriewer, attended Wednesday’s remembrance, along with a number of school officials, community members and Navarro’s current players and coaching staff.
Pastor Dave Phillips of Friedens Church in Geronimo delivered a message about turning tragedy into triumph to commend the Navarro football teams that have played since the deaths of Erwin and Lee for honoring their legacies and representing the values they stood for.
Pastor Sonja Phillips then led the attendees of the remembrance in prayer.
Fans can visit the Erwin-Lee Football Field Memorial just inside the home entrance of the stadium. The next opportunity to do so is this Friday, when the Panthers host Fredericksburg in a pre-season scrimmage at 6 p.m.