All Aboard!

The thunder of footsteps behind him only made Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice run faster. The fleet North Carolina tailback ran 75 yards for a touchdown against the University of Tennessee Volunteers in Knoxville on a Saturday afternoon in 1946, and after more than fifty years, Tennessee folks still talk about the run. General Bob Neyland, the Tennessee coach, said it was the greatest run he had ever seen.

But it was only one of hundreds that Choo Choo ripped off for the University of North Carolina in that immediate post-war era when college football enjoyed an age that it had never known before and has not known since. Justice, and many others on that great Carolina team of 1946-49, had played three years of service football, equal to professional ball, before playing in college. With two undefeated years at Asheville (N.C.) High behind him, and two more undefeated years at the Bainbridge Naval Training Station, Justice led the Tar Heels into the big-time, into national rankings, and into major bowl games, where the team had never been before!

This is the story of Justice's fabulous career from his first games on Asheville's sandlots to the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the College All-Star Game, to All-American, and later to the Washington Redskins and on into the announcer's booth as the first football color commentator.

In Chapel Hill, the home of the Tar Heels, they can still hear Choo Choo's footsteps echoing in the twilight of an autumn Saturday afternoon. In North Carolina athletics there has been no one like him, and there may never be. He was one of a kind. His derring-do on the football field created an era; when you speak in North Carolina of the years 1946 through 1949, just call it the "Justice Era." Everybody will know what you're talking about.