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  The man bowed his head, asked Jesus to come into his heart, and then Essie May ran both of them out of her bar. Years later, Goebel learned that Essie May became a Christian before her death.

  Emboldened by his first experience in witnessing to others, Goebel sought to spread the word of God’s grace wherever he could. He frequented the many poolrooms, honky-tonks, and beer joints around Tallapoosa to share what he knew to be true with the people who needed it most. He yearned to minister to people who were struggling to overcome the same demons that once consumed his life. But to truly witness to people, Goebel realized he needed to learn as much about the Scripture as he could. His biggest problem: he didn’t own a Bible.

  Goebel later said, “One of the evidences of being born again is not only to witness to your family and others, but to know the Word of the Lord. You know Him by reading the Word of God. I went to a couple of churches to see if they’d give me a Bible. The Baptist church in town offered to give me one if I agreed to be baptized, but I told them no because it felt like I would have been trading cars or something.”

  One morning, as Goebel waited outside a honky-tonk for someone to approach, he saw a car pull into a gas station across the highway. As a man climbed out of his car, he told the gas station attendant, “All of this is of the Lord.” The man was a Bible salesman from Atlanta.

  “You know anyone that might be interested in buying a Bible?” he asked the attendant.

  The attendant pointed toward Goebel, who was leaning against a wall across the highway. “You see that tall, lanky guy over there?” the attendant said. “He’ll buy a Bible from you.”

  The man motioned for Goebel to come over. He asked Goebel if he wanted to buy a Bible. When Goebel told him he did, the man asked, “What kind of Bible do you want?”

  “I want a big Bible,” Goebel said.

  Goebel later recalled, “He opened up the trunk, and there were boxes of Bibles in there. I used to carry unholy spirits in the trunk of my car. He carried the Holy Spirit in his.”

  The man pulled out a brown Bible with a picture of Jesus on the cover. “Who is that?” Goebel asked.

  “That’s Jesus Christ, son,” the man said.

  “I was so naive,” Goebel later said. “I didn’t even know they had pictures of Jesus.”

  “How much would you sell that Bible for?” Goebel asked.

  The man told him the Bible cost twenty-two dollars.

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” Goebel said.

  “Well, how much do you have?” the man asked.

  “I have two dollars,” Goebel said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” the man said. “I’ll give you the Bible for two dollars if you promise to send me two dollars every month until it’s paid for.”

  Goebel shook the man’s hand and promised to send him the money, which he did. Over the next several months, Goebel became immersed in reading the Scripture and was eager to share what he’d learned. During one visit to a pool hall, Goebel witnessed to a soldier named Harvey who had recently returned home after serving in the Korean War. As Goebel was sharing the Good News with him, Harvey suddenly picked up a pool stick and threatened to hit Goebel with it.

  “Harvey, you’re not mad at me,” Goebel said. “You’re mad at my Bible.”

  Harvey put down the pool stick and left. Afraid Harvey might be outside waiting to attack him, Goebel waited about fifteen minutes before leaving. He found Harvey sitting in his car, weeping. Goebel climbed into the car with him.

  “Wales, you’re right,” Harvey said. “I was offended by your Bible. When I was in Korea, most of the men in my platoon were killed. I promised God that if He got me home, I would live my life for Him. Now, I don’t know about everything you’re telling me, but I believe if you make a promise, you keep it. What do I need to do?”

  “You need to ask Jesus into your heart,” Goebel said.

  News quickly spread around Tallapoosa about the former bootlegger who was now a budding evangelist. A. L. Jackson, who owned Tallapoosa Mills Lumber Company and lived in one of the stately antebellum homes on Head Avenue, learned about what Goebel was doing. One day, Jackson sent his wife to find him. When she returned home with Goebel, Jackson told him that he believed God had called him to be a preacher, and Jackson offered to pay for Goebel’s tuition to seminary if he was willing to go.

  “I knew what I wanted to do, and here was a man who was willing to pay for it,” Goebel said. “But I couldn’t do it. I don’t know if I didn’t feel worthy or what.”

  After turning his life around, Goebel returned to West Georgia College and finished his degree. He was also able to win back the girl he had fallen in love with in college. Jean Duff agreed to marry him, and they eventually had three sons. Goebel took a job as a bookkeeper at a Chevrolet dealership and settled down to raise his family. Shortly after Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, Goebel was offered a job as a U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Georgia. He went to Atlanta for an interview and then waited as the FBI conducted a background check. Although the FBI raised questions about his time as a bootlegger, Goebel was cleared because he’d never been arrested.

  While Goebel was excited about the appointment and earning a higher salary, his wife wasn’t too thrilled about his new occupation.

  “Will you have to carry a gun?” she asked.

  “Well, I reckon so,” he said.

  “Will you have to shoot people?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t like it,” she said.

  Shortly before Goebel was to start his new job, his brother Seaborn called and offered him a chance for a much safer career. Goebel’s brother was a recent graduate of Auburn University with an engineering degree and was about to start building houses in Homewood, Alabama, a bustling suburb of Birmingham. Goebel agreed to take the job and moved his family to Alabama.

  Not long after moving to Homewood, the Goebel family started attending Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Soon, Goebel was teaching Sunday school classes and witnessing to people at church and around town. Bill Longshore, a Birmingham attorney, invited Goebel to attend a mission conference in North Carolina, where they listened to the testimony of missionaries from China.

  “I would imagine if anything really got me, that was it,” Goebel said. “I realized how little I was doing. I began to realize that material things weren’t important to me anymore, and God had something more important for me to do. It was an amazing thing.”

  A short time later, Goebel attended an organizational meeting for Youth for Christ, which was looking to open a chapter in Birmingham. Since Goebel had three sons of his own, he told the group he was interested in being involved. He was quickly elected the group’s speaker, even though he hadn’t done much public speaking outside of his Sunday school class.

  “I didn’t think anything of it,” Goebel said. “I thought I’d be speaking to small groups of kids. We started having weekly or monthly meetings at churches downtown. Then they started advertising the meetings on the radio, and hundreds of kids started coming.”

  One of the young girls who attended the meetings regularly was a cheerleader at Ensley High School. She asked Goebel if he would come to the school and speak to her Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter. FCA had been founded in 1954 by Don McClanen, Eastern Oklahoma A&M basketball coach. Branch Rickey, who is famously known for breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier by signing African American star Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, helped finance FCA in its first year.

  The next week, Goebel spoke to about fifty kids in the music room at Ensley High. One of the boys in attendance was a football player, who told his coach, Herbert Hanes, about Goebel. Coach Hanes invited Goebel to speak to his team one afternoon before practice. At the end of his speech, Goebel invited all the boys to receive Christ when he was finished.

  “If you’re willing to stand up in front of your buddies, come stand with me,” G
oebel told them.

  A handful of players came to the front of the room. “I felt like Billy Graham,” Goebel said. “It was empowering and exciting.”

  Before long, Goebel was speaking at high schools around the city. He was one of the most popular speakers at youth revivals organized by Southern Baptists. At W. A. Berry High School, he started a weekly Bible study with the football team, and soon cheerleaders and other students were attending. When Berry High School was planning its religion appreciation week, the principal called Goebel and asked if he’d address the entire student body. “I’m not that kind of speaker,” Goebel told him. “I only teach a small Sunday school class.”

  “Mr. Goebel, this isn’t the most popular event of the school year,” the principal said. “We have a hard time getting kids to come. You’re the first person the students have ever asked for.”

  “Well, how many kids will be there?” Goebel asked.

  “Not too many,” the principal said.

  When Goebel arrived at Berry High School on the day he was scheduled to speak, the principal told him that they had to move the event out of the gymnasium and to the football stadium because so many kids wanted to attend. When Goebel walked onto the field, there were about three thousand kids sitting in the stands.

  As Goebel walked to the podium, he asked the principal, “Have you ever watched Billy Graham? When Billy Graham gets finished, he asks people if they want to come forward and accept Jesus Christ. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  After Goebel finished speaking, about three hundred students accepted his invitation to become Christians. At another rally at Ramsay High School, Goebel spoke to about one thousand students, and more than one hundred kids answered his invitation.

  “Wales Goebel was a big, old country boy with a big heart for Jesus,” said Hank Erwin, whom Goebel appointed as Woodlawn High’s team chaplain. “You have to remember that back in the 1960s, men as big as Wales weren’t known for trusting Jesus. To see a guy as big as Wales talking about Jesus was remarkable and fascinating.”

  In 1967, Goebel left the home construction business and with his wife started the Wales Goebel Ministry, a full-time ministry and counseling service for troubled teenagers. The ministry had nine full-time staff members and operated on donations from churches and individuals. He continued to speak to high school students and expanded his ministry to college campuses. In March 1973, Goebel held a three-day Decision ’73 Crusade at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. More than eight hundred student volunteers were involved in planning the crusade, which was held at Memorial Coliseum, the university’s basketball arena.

  Reigning Miss Alabama Freita Fuller and several NFL players, including Houston Oilers safety Ken Houston, New York Jets center Paul Crane, and Green Bay Packers defensive tackle Mike McCoy, were featured speakers during the crusade. There was a one-thousand-voice choir and other performers. Even legendary Crimson Tide coach Paul “Bear” Bryant endorsed the event in the media. By the time Goebel delivered the closing sermon on the third night, more than ten thousand students had attended the event, including some from as far away as Indiana and Florida.

  “About ten years ago I started becoming concerned about our youth,” Goebel told The Tuscaloosa News during Decision Crusade ’73. “I was concerned about drugs and the tendency for youngsters to want to run away from home. So I started sharing a message with young people. I am just so happy that the mood of young people in 1973 has completely changed from the mood of young people in the late 1960s. These young people have seen that sex and drugs are not the answer. They do this because they know Jesus is the answer to their life.”

  Before the summer was over, Goebel held similar crusades in several cities across the state.

  “People came from everywhere to hear him talk about Jesus,” Erwin said. “He wasn’t shy. What made Wales so adorable was that he didn’t know much of the Bible. He would scramble the verses up, but he preached with all of his heart. It got to the point where we said he could read from a phone book and people would come for Christ. He was so passionate about the Lord.”

  Goebel and Erwin would need all of their passion and more as they prepared for their next challenge. After Goebel spoke to a group of football players at the University of Alabama, one of them approached him to ask for help. He told Goebel that Woodlawn High School desperately needed to hear his message. Woodlawn was the last Birmingham high school to integrate African Americans into its student body, and now a toxic atmosphere surrounded its football team as it prepared for the 1973 season.

  As Goebel walked unannounced through Coach Gerelds’s office door in August, Gerelds couldn’t have known that God would use the tall, bushy-haired son of a German immigrant to save his football team and, more importantly, the lives of many of his players.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE REVIVAL

  Shortly after Tandy Gerelds became Woodlawn’s head football coach in 1971, government-mandated busing brought more than five hundred African American students to the school. With its Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that federal courts had the jurisdiction to utilize mandatory busing as a means to achieve racial balance in public schools. Gerelds, who had grown up in Birmingham and had never left the state, rarely socialized with African Americans, let alone taught and coached them. In fact, his only previous close interaction with an African American was with his family’s maid.

  In a testimony he wrote shortly before his death in 2003, Gerelds recalled the challenges of coaching and teaching African Americans for the first time:

  In 1970, Birmingham city schools were forced to integrate. Five hundred black students were transferred from Hayes High School to Woodlawn. The black students did not want to change schools, and the white students did not want them in their school. This led to bad feelings that soon turned into hatred. I was no different than the students. I had never been around black students, and I did not know how to act, coach, or teach them. The only black person that I knew was my maid, Ethel May Porch. Ethel had helped raise me from the time I was three years old. I loved Ethel, but she was the maid and because of her position, she could only be so close to me (my mother made sure she knew her place).

  For the next two years, Woodlawn High School became a war zone. Most of the teachers—white and black—quit. Only the strong stayed. The FBI tried to encourage the principal to close the school. He would not. I was attacked, threatened, shot at, and verbally abused constantly. I am saying all of this to explain that my attitudes about teaching and coaching were at an all-time low.

  I was made assistant principal because no one else would do it, and the principal asked for help. Not surprising, I became a very hardened person, but I still had an ego to fill as far as coaching. How was I going to get fifty football players, who did not like each other, to play together and win football games? I went about trying. The harder I tried, the worse it seemed to get.

  Woodlawn High School, which had been one of the city’s football powerhouses during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, was becoming an average football team, as racial tension ripped apart its student body.

  Heading into the 1973 season, Gerelds knew it would take a lot of work to turn his program around. He also knew that his job wasn’t in danger; who else would want to coach at the racially divided school? In fact, Gerelds might have looked for another job if Woodlawn High had not been his and his wife, Debbie’s, alma mater. He loved the school and wasn’t ready to surrender, despite so many signs that suggested he should.

  In August, Gerelds was willing to try anything to bring his players together, so he decided the Colonels would have preseason camp at Woodlawn High School. For five days, the Colonels awoke every morning at five, ran one mile before breakfast, practiced three times a day, and then slept on cots in the school’s gymnasium. Parents were banned from the school, and players weren’t allowed to leave without Gerelds’s permission. Gerelds wanted his players to spend every w
aking moment together. After so much interaction, his players would either learn to get along or become even more divided.

  Going into camp, Gerelds didn’t know much about his team. He was moving his team’s best player, Tony Nathan, from safety to tailback. Nathan wanted no part of running the ball. Besides fullback Mike Allison, safety Bobby Thompson, linebacker Peyton Zarzour, and wingback Roderick Washington, the Colonels didn’t have many returning proven players. Most of their starters would be underclassmen who had spent the previous season playing on the B-team and freshman squads. It was Gerelds’s job to mold them into a competitive team.

  After the first two days of the preseason camp, Gerelds was disheartened, as his team’s chemistry hadn’t changed. The white players were sleeping on one end of the gymnasium, while the black players slept on the other side. When the players ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the cafeteria, the whites sat together and the blacks sat together. There was very little interaction between races off the practice field. There were nine African American players on the varsity squad: Nathan, fullback Albert Benefield, lineman Reginald Greene, wingback Manuel Jones, linebacker Howard Ross, safety Tommy Rue, lineman Calvin Rumph, defensive end Gary Speers, and wingback Roderick Washington. The other thirty-nine players were white.

  “We pushed the kids to the breaking point, and they were showing signs of being very tired and depressed,” Gerelds wrote.

  In an attempt to build team camaraderie, Gerelds brought in what he hoped would be motivational speakers to address his players after dinner. Former Woodlawn High football star David Langner, who was playing at Auburn University, spoke to the team one night. At the time, Langner was the most beloved (or hated) man in the state.

  On December 2, 1972, Langner had famously returned two blocked punts for touchdowns in the fourth quarter of the Tigers’ 17–16 victory over rival Alabama in the Iron Bowl at Legion Field in Birmingham. More than four decades later, the game is still known as “Punt Bama Punt.” Ironically, Alabama’s punter at the time was Greg Gantt, who was Langner’s teammate at Woodlawn High. While Woodlawn’s players enjoyed Langner’s speech, they weren’t excited about the Methodist preacher who spoke to them the next night.