My mother met Coach and apparently decided that he was a safe person for me to see outside of school. He was. Coach Floyd took me to his house to meet his wife, a frumpy female version of her husband. Their house was filled with cats, bad smells, unmade beds and unmanageable clutter-it seemed like only a matter of time before the Board of Health caught up with them. The Floyds were friendly and warm, and they held meetings at their messy house to discuss psychic issues. I was invited to these meetings and went to a couple of them, and I knew intuitively to keep my mouth shut about them when I was at school.
Coach's biggest claim to fame was that he knew Peter Hurkos, the Dutch psychic who had helped the police solve several murders throughout the United States. In 1941, at age thirty, Hurkos was painting a house and slipped from the ladder, surviving a fall of four stories. From that moment on, he claimed to have psychic abilities, and he developed an avid interest in UFO's. Coach Floyd and his friends talked about UFO's a lot. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was soon to be released, the theory of sexual assault by aliens was still years away, and I was happy to listen and imagine and wonder. I couldn't have known it then, of course, but the biggest lesson I was learning was that the world was much, much bigger than the pedestrian confines of my birthplace.
It would have been enough for me to have just had a male teacher who gave me attention. It was a bonus that he was psychic. But there was something else about Coach Floyd that was almost too good to be true: He was a roadie.
Shreveport, where I was raised, was something of a cult music capital in the late fifties and early sixties. The Louisiana Hayride was the second biggest thing to the Grand Ole Opry, and the show had featured Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, Faron Young and Elvis. The local radio announcers whom I took for granted-T. Tommy Cutrer and Merle Kilgore-had national reputations. Coach Floyd knew these men, and he knew Tillman Franks, the highly respected manager and country music star-shaper who had helped Webb Pierce and Slim Whitman become famous.
In 1960, Franks was playing bass at the Louisiana Hayride and managing singer Johnny Horton, who had top forty hits with "The Battle of New Orleans," "Sink the Bismark" and "North To Alaska." I was a big fan of Horton's, and one day after class, Coach asked me if I would like to meet him. Horton was going to entertain at a Shreveport Sports game. The Sports were our minor league baseball team, and my baseball-loving father was more than happy to take me to the end-of-season game. During the seventh inning stretch, Horton sang with his band, and when he had finished, Coach introduced me to him out on the diamond. I was thrilled to shake Horton's hand and see him smile at me, and even my father seemed pleased that I had met the "Singing Fisherman," as Horton was known.
Not long after that meeting, Johnny Horton decided to go on tour. He was afraid to fly, so he traveled everywhere by car. Coach Floyd went along whenever he was able to, carrying equipment and helping to set up shows. As part of Horton's fall tour, he was planning to go to Dallas and meet actor Ward Bond in order to cement a plan for Horton to appear on the television show, "Wagon Train," in which Bond starred. Horton's trips were often brief, and when they were, Coach was able to sneak off and perform his roadie duties without missing much school.
There was a problem this time, though. Coach's wife asked him not to take the Texas trip because she was convinced that "something bad" was going to happen. She became more and more distraught as he insisted that he was going. She begged him not to go. She was known to have prognostic abilities, but he ignored her warnings and went. In the car were Horton, Coach Floyd, Tillman Franks and bass player Tommy Tomlinson. The group had just reached Milano, in central Texas, in the early morning of November 5, when their car was struck by a vehicle operated by a drunk driver.
Johnny Horton died soon after the accident. An amplifier hit Coach Floyd in the neck, and Franks and Tomlinson were also seriously injured, but recovered from their injuries. In a bizarre turn of fate, Ward Bond died of a massive heart attack that day in Dallas. After receiving emergency treatment, Coach was transported to Shreveport, where he entered another hospital for treatment of paralysis and internal injuries.
I went to see Coach in the hospital. I had spent little time in hospitals and was uneasy as I took in the sight of my oversized teacher trapped in a hospital bed, surrounded by tubes. It took some effort for him to talk, but he was as chatty as ever. He told me about his wife's warnings and how he had chosen to ignore them because of his desire to go on the road. He talked about Peter Hurkos and UFO's and other dimensions of consciousness. When I look back on this incident, I imagine that the nurses thought that he was talking out of his head from the drugs they had given him. But he wasn't. He was telling me what he wanted me to know, and he spoke with as much urgency as a paralyzed person in a hospital bed can muster.
Many years have gone by, and I remember Coach's sense of urgency more than I remember the details of what he said to me that day. He wanted me to remember everything he had taught me. He wanted me to be set free from the narrow world of my upbringing. About a week after my visit, Coach Floyd was set free from the narrow world of his hospital bed: He died of pneumonia. I wanted to go to his funeral, but my mother would not permit it because she thought I was too young to be exposed to death.
Many decades have passed, and my interest in both music and transcendent phenomena has never waned. Sometimes I hear "The Battle Of New Orleans" on the oldies station and I think about my extraordinary friend, my cynosure to the twilight zone, who taught me-above all-that things, like people, are not always the way they seem.
