By Mike London
mlondon@salisburypost.com
Billy Ray Barnes, a halfback for Philadelphia’s 1960 NFL champions, helped Eagles coach Buck Shaw hand Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi the only postseason loss he’d ever suffer.
Barnes played for a winning Wake Forest team under coach Tom Rogers and became the ACC’s first 1,000-yard rusher for Rogers’ successor, Paul Amen, in 1956.
On the baseball field, Barnes played third base for coach Taylor Sanford’s 1955 national champions at Wake.
Barnes sweated and bled for renowned men, but he’s always insisted the best coach he ever had was in high school.
Barnes’ coach at Landis High from 1949-53 was Daniel Noah Hamrick. He passed away at age 88 in July, but not before touching the lives of thousands of men and women who played for him in Granite Quarry, Rutherford County, Landis and Kannapolis.
“Coach knew the games, he was disciplined, he was organized, and he made us all better in football, baseball and basketball,” Barnes said. “He was someone you respected so much that you’d do everything you could for him. No question, he is the best coach I ever had, and I can’t imagine anyone else being my coach.”
Hamrick’s coaching career wasn’t especially long.
World War II got in the way, and Hamrick also traded his coaching whistle for a principal’s desk ó and a feared paddle ó when he was only 39.
Still, he was part of 37 championships in American Legion and high school baseball, girls and boys basketball and football.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” Barnes said. “He’d be in the North Carolina Hall of Fame if he’d kept coaching.”
Born in 1920, Hamrick grew up on a farm in Rutherford County as one of 11 children. His father was a mail carrier, but the Hamricks picked cotton and raised crops and animals for food just like their neighbors.
“When the depression came, they didn’t know it,” said Danny Hamrick, a China Grove dentist and the youngest of Hamrick’s three children. “They were better off than most, but no one had much of anything.”
Hamrick was an all-around athlete at Lenoir-Rhyne, best in baseball, but hard-nosed in basketball and relentless in football.
After graduation, he was hired to teach and coach at Granite Quarry as a 21-year-old. He was known as “Noah” in those days. Bill Williams, a senior at Granite Quarry when Hamrick arrived, typed his memories in a Gaston Gazette column after reading Hamrick’s obituary.
“We soon found out who the new basketball coach would be,” Williams wrote. “A couple of days after classes had begun, this young fellow who looked as if he might be trying out for the team put out the word that practice would begin on the following Monday. His name was Noah Hamrick, a handsome, young guy with a lot of energy. He was fresh out of Lenoir-Rhyne and he had a big smile to go with his large and muscular frame. We knew at first glance that here was a coach for whom we would do our best.”
By 1941, most of the world had been at war more than two years. Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor two weeks after Hamrick’s team won its first practice game with China Grove.
Hamrick’s first official boys basketball victory came against Landis two days after Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into the war, but the rest of the season must have been a blur. Hamrick was almost 22, single and healthy. He had to know he wouldn’t be around for the baseball season.
Hamrick’s coaching debut produced an 8-4 record and a third-place showing with the Granite boys. He likely coached the girls as well. They were 9-3 and placed second.
Rockwell’s boys stretched their long winning streak to 38 games that season. Their toughest game was a 27-25 decision against Granite.
Hamrick enlisted in the U.S. Army in March.
At boot camp, recruits were rated for potential assignment to the Signal Corps. The test was listening to Morse Code and recording it swiftly and accurately.
The 10 most proficient of the 180 test-takers were pulled from the ranks. The other 170 were sent to infantry. The process was repeated with each incoming bunch of recruits, paring the Signal Corps hopefuls down to an elite group.
“My dad went through that process six times and through boot camp six times,” Danny Hamrick said. “I asked him once how tough that was. He said it was better than plowing behind a mule all day.”
As part of the Third Army Signal Corps, Hamrick rolled across France and Germany with General George Patton in 1944-45. Hamrick wore a headset in a windowless trailer, near the front lines, listening intently to German Morse Code transmissions and writing it down to pass on to translators. His work provided advance notice of incoming artillery barrages and saved lives.
Somewhere along the line he decided if he got back to the states in one piece he would marry Granite Quarry typing teacher Sara Wellman. The wedding took place a few months after the war ended, and the union lasted until Hamrick’s death.
In 1946, Hamrick coached at Tri High in Caroleen and played third base for the local minor-league team, the Rutherford County Owls.
His fling at pro baseball was short. When he returned to coaching in the fall of ’46, he was at Landis.
He succeeded legend T. Frank Bostian as football coach in 1948. He practiced his team 22 grueling days before it finally debuted with a 0-0 tie at Hartsell. His second game was disastrous ó seven turnovers in a 2-0 loss to Winecoff ó but things turned around after fullback Don Cross scored two TDs in a 13-7 win over Cooleemee.
All of Landis’ games were on the road in 1948, and there was an odd forfeit loss to Cleveland when Hamrick removed his team from the field to protest officiating in the second half of a scoreless game.
But Landis football and basketball (girls and boys) were stout throughout his tenure, and he coached four Landis baseball champions.
Hamrick’s boys basketball teams made the Rowan County tournament their personal invitational, and one of his female hoops stars, Melba Overcash, scored 102 points in a single game in 1950 as Landis ran the table in the Rowan County League.
Barnes emerged as a dominant athlete as a junior and was all-state in all three sports as a Landis senior.
Barnes had a six-touchdown effort against Rockwell and scored 136 points as a senior. Hamrick was always his inspiration.
“Coach was a strapping young man, bigger and stronger than anyone we had playing football,” Barnes said. “He was tough, but he was fair, and he gave everyone an opportunity to perform.
“He taught me so much. I really don’t have enough praise and admiration for the kind of man he was.”
Hamrick announced he was leaving for Kannapolis in the spring of 1953.
On A.L. Brown’s football field, he was reunited with former Landis coach and old friend Ed Edmiston. Hamrick coached the line, and he and Edmiston produced a winning team every season until Hamrick turned in his whistle. The Wonders lost only one game in both 1953 and 1955.
Hamrick became principal of Kannapolis’ J.W. Cannon Junior High in 1959 and stayed there until retiring in 1982. His son was a 1972 Shrine Bowler and an All-America lineman at Brown.
As the principal for a generation of Kannapolis kids, Hamrick impacted thousands, and he remained a familiar presence in the bleachers at Memorial Stadium decades after his retirement.
“I’m just glad I got a chance to tell him how I and my teammates felt about him,” Barnes said. “When they opened the South Rowan library, they had a thing at Gary’s Barbecue and asked me to speak. Coach was in the audience, and I told everyone what he’d meant to my career ó and my life.
“I found out recently Coach was with General Patton, and believe me, he could have been Patton. That’s how tough a man he was.”