McCOMB - Someone may steal your tombstone after you're buried, but they can't take away the influence you have on future generations.
How that influence lives on long after a person's death is illustrated by a fascinating story put together by Pike County Veterans Affairs Officer Jim Coleman about a former coach at what was once Burglund High School in McComb.
Coleman's quest for information about the late Murray Leon Creshon began several months ago when Sylvia Goldberg called him to report a tombstone was found by workers clearing her property west of Interstate 55, just north of Park Drive. She called the veterans representative because identification on the grave marker indicated Creshon had served in the military.
Coleman and a helper - "it took two of us to put it in my pickup" - retrieved the tombstone, and Coleman started looking for where it came from.
He found a March 31, 1967, Enterprise-Journal obituary on Murray Leon Creshon, the man whose tombstone mysteriously showed up in Pike County.
The obit reported that Creshon died at the age of 46 on March 26, 1967, in Jackson where he was Center Director for Star, Inc.
His funeral was in Pass Christian, but he was buried in Carver Heights Cemetery at Brookhaven. How his tombstone wound up in Pike County is anyone's guess, but I doubt it was blown here by Hurricane Katrina.
The obituary, in addition to listing a number of organizations to which Creshon belonged, reported he was a native of Lincoln County and was a former coach at Burglund which, in the days of segregation, was the black high school in McComb. The building now houses Higgins Middle School.
In the April 29 edition of The Clarion-Ledger, Coleman noticed an article headlined "A lesson in loyalty."
It was about James Brooks of Jackson paying a visit every Sunday to a woman who taught him in the seventh grade back in 1950.
That's the same James Brooks who within the past year was inducted into the McComb High School Athletic Hall of Fame. Now the supervisor of the Mississippi Driver's Education Program for the state Department of Education, Brooks is a former football coach and athletic director at Alcorn State University and is in the baseball and football halls of fame at Jackson State University.
When Brooks was in the seventh grade at Burglund, one of his teachers was only seven years older than he. Grace Weakly (her maiden name; it's now Grace Lee) was only 21.
Brooks, who had started the first grade late, was attracted to Miss Weakly because of her good looks and he wasn't missing a day of class.
But apparently he was a handful for the young teacher. The odds against his succeeding were great. His parents had died before he entered junior high, and until a cousin gave him a job and a place to stay, he slept in church outhouses and parked cars.
"He was very popular with the girls," Mrs. Lee is quoted in the article. "I had moved that young man all over the room, but he just kept talking.
"Finally, I went to my friend Murray Creshon. He was the football coach.
"I said, 'Murray, this boy is driving me nuts. Please take him and make him a water boy or something. Just take him."
Take him Coach Creshon did, but not as a water boy. Brooks became a star athlete at Burglund, earning a scholarship as a standout football and baseball player at Jackson State.
A month after seeing The Clarion-Ledger article, Coleman noticed another article in the Enterprise-Journal, this one about Coach Kenny Carter speaking at South Pike.
The Fernwood native, whose career as a basketball coach was the subject of the 2004 movie "Coach Carter," in his remarks credited Coach Brooks and childhood friends Napoleon Hodges and his brothers of Fernwood for helping make him tough.
So, there you have connections from Mrs. Lee and Coach Creshon to Coach Brooks to Coach Carter to no telling who else.
As for the tombstone, Coach Brooks picked that up from Jim Coleman to take to Coach Creshon's daughter.
