By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — Charles Edward Partee, a J.C. Price Hall of Fame inductee for athletics, died at 79 recently in Riverview, Fla.

Partee’s father was Emery Jethro Partee Jr., who was known as Jack.

Jack was born in Rowan County in 1912, was educated at J.C. Price and worshiped at Moore’s Chapel AME Zion Church. He was a carpenter by trade, mostly employed in construction, and he and his wife, Agnes Howard Partee, produced a large family that included a handful of athletic sons.

The oldest  of those sons, Emery III, graduated from Livingstone College, earned a masters from Louisiana State University and became a famed science, algebra and calculus teacher and coach in Reidsville. He was one of North Carolina’s foremost Black high educators in the 1970s and was chosen to instruct gifted students at the Governor’s School in Winston-Salem.

Charles was born in 1945. His glory days on the field and in the gym for the J.C. Price Red Devils were mostly in 1962 and 1963. He was a 1963 graduate.

Price’s 1962 football team had many Hall of Famers on the roster, players such as Joseph Johnson, Roy Keith and Murrell Graham, and did amazing things. There was an 82-0 win against Burlington’s Jordan Sellars and an 80-0 win against Logan High of Concord. The Red Devils beat East Spencer’s Dunbar High 48-0 in a rivalry game. J.C. Price pounded Reidsville’s Washington High 52-18.

Many of the Red Devil football players also competed in basketball. Partee was one of them. He averaged 9.3 points per game as a senior and was one of the leaders for a strong and balanced team.

Partee was inducted into the J.C. Price Hall of Fame, along with several of his classmates, in ceremonies at the Miller Center in 2017.

He was an avid golfer, bowler and cyclist later in life.

He is survived by his wife, a son and four daughters. Services were held in Salisbury on Saturday.