Appalachian Figures
On the night of May 28, 1977, when fire tore through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, one of the 165 people who never came home was a coal camp quarterback from Harlan County. Herman Clark “Clarkie” Mayfield had been many things in his thirty five years: the only child of a Black Star coal camp family, a star at tiny Black Star High School, a battered veteran of Kentucky’s infamous “Thin Thirty” football team, and the head coach who helped turn Jacksonville State University into an offensive powerhouse. He died the way he had played, by all accounts, trying to get other people to safety.
Remembered today mostly in football circles and among families who still tell stories about the Beverly Hills fire, Mayfield’s life is just as much an Appalachian story as it is a sports one. It begins in a coal camp holler in Harlan County and ends in a Northern Kentucky nightclub, passing through Stoll Field in Lexington and Paul Snow Stadium in Jacksonville along the way.
Coal camp beginnings in Black Star
Herman Clark Mayfield was born on October 11, 1941, at Alva in Harlan County, Kentucky, the heart of the Black Star coal camp. Later records and memorials list him by his full name, “Herman Clark Mayfield,” but everyone in the camp knew him by his nickname, “Clarkie.”
Black Star was a classic southeastern Kentucky company town. The coal company owned the houses, the store, and the rhythms of daily life. In those rows of camp houses lived Herman and Ona Mae Mayfield and their only child. A community “Holler List” compiled by former residents decades later still shows the family grouped together: “Herman,” “Ona Mae Faculty,” and “Clarkie (1959).” It is a tiny line on a long page, yet it anchors the Mayfields firmly in the memory of the camp in the 1940s and 1950s.
Ona Mae taught school in the camp, a fact preserved in photo captions and reunion notes that remember her alongside other Black Star teachers. That combination, a coal camp father and a schoolteacher mother, was a familiar Appalachian pairing. It meant the Mayfield house stood at the place where mine whistles, homework, and Friday night football met.
Coal camps were tight knit places, so when a boy from the holler became a standout athlete, everyone heard about it. Local reminiscences and later sports histories agree that by the late 1950s and early 1960s the wiry kid from Black Star had turned himself into a genuine star. At Black Star High School he handled the ball as quarterback, kicked field goals and extra points, and often ran the ball too. One Harlan County sports retrospective would later remember that “the highly regarded Clarkie Mayfield was in the limelight kicking, passing and running” for Black Star in those years before “casting his lot with Kentucky.”
In a coal camp where so many boys expected to follow their fathers into the mines, Clarkie’s right leg and calm under pressure looked like a possible ticket out.
Thin Thirty Wildcat
Mayfield’s route out of Harlan County ran through Lexington. By 1960 he had joined the University of Kentucky football program as a halfback and placekicker. He arrived just in time for one of the most punishing episodes in Wildcat history.
In 1962, under new head coach Charlie Bradshaw, Kentucky’s roster was driven down from nearly ninety players to roughly thirty by a brutal regimen of practices and cuts. The survivors would be remembered as the “Thin Thirty.” They did not have a pretty record, but they played a notoriously physical brand of football and left behind a lopsided mixture of scars and legend.
For Clarkie Mayfield, the defining moment came on November 24, 1962, at Shields Watkins Field in Knoxville. Kentucky came into the season finale against Tennessee with a losing record and little depth. The Volunteers led late, and it looked like another defeat was coming, but Kentucky’s defense and special teams kept the game close. Mayfield had already kicked one field goal. In the final seconds he was called on again.
Contemporary accounts and later histories agree on the essentials. With roughly twenty seconds left, Mayfield’s field goal sailed through the uprights and Kentucky walked out of Knoxville with a 12 to 10 victory. A Lexington photo archive preserves an image of the team arriving at Blue Grass Field with the game ball and the Beer Barrel trophy. In the caption, the player on the bottom left of the line, identified as “Clarkie Mayfield,” is singled out as the man “whose two field goals decided the game.”
Local memory in Harlan County never forgot that connection. When radio stations and newspaper columns look back on the rivalry, they still note that the winning kick at Tennessee in 1962 came off the foot of a boy from Alva, Kentucky. For Black Star and for Harlan County more broadly, that night at Neyland was proof that a coal camp quarterback could decide a game on one of college football’s biggest stages.
Building offenses and mentoring players
After his playing days in Lexington ended, Mayfield stayed in the game. He went first into the Kentucky high school ranks, serving as an assistant at LaRue County and Franklin Simpson in the 1960s. The Kentucky High School Athletic Association’s magazine, The Kentucky High School Athlete, lists “Mayfield, Clarkie” with a home address in its mid decade contact sections, a small but concrete trace of his early coaching work. Board of Control minutes from 1957 also preserve his name from his Black Star playing days, when the high school principal recommended “Clark Mayfield” to the association.
In 1969, Mayfield joined the staff at Jacksonville State in northeast Alabama. There he would spend the rest of his coaching career. Official athletic department histories and his Jacksonville State University Hall of Fame biography credit him with installing a new, high powered offense in the spring of 1970. That system helped carry the Gamecocks to a perfect 10 to 0 season that fall and a school record scoring average a few years later.
Mayfield served as offensive coordinator through the early 1970s, working with quarterbacks and running backs. In 1974 he was promoted to head coach. Over three seasons as the Gamecocks’ head man, he compiled a 22 to 11 record and won a Gulf South Conference championship in his first year. For a small regional college, Jacksonville State played ambitious schedules, and Mayfield’s teams earned a reputation for attacking offenses that reflected both his gambler’s nerve and a coal camp kid’s willingness to take a hit if that is what the play demanded.
Behind the records and statistics was a young family. A photograph in Jacksonville State’s Historical Image Collection, taken in 1974 inside the Mayfield home, shows Clarkie sitting with his wife Madonna and their little boy, Gregg. The description identifies them by name and notes that Clarkie was serving as head coach at Jacksonville State at the time. It is a rare primary source glimpse of the man off the field, and it reminds us that the coach on the sideline was also a husband and father in his early thirties, thousands of miles from the coal camp where he started.
Beverly Hills Supper Club fire
In late May 1977, the Mayfields traveled back to northern Kentucky for what should have been a celebration. Several sources, including Jacksonville State’s own Hall of Fame biography and later memorials, agree that the family was at the Beverly Hills Supper Club for a retirement party honoring Clarkie’s mother, Ona Mae.
That Saturday night the sprawling nightclub complex in Southgate was packed: wedding receptions, shows, parties, and a holiday weekend crowd. Sometime after the evening program began, fire broke out in a section of the club. Within minutes smoke and flames turned corridors into choke points. When it was over, at least 165 people were dead and hundreds injured, making it one of the worst nightclub fires in American history.
Wire stories that ran in newspapers across the country carried a short but striking note. Among the victims, they reported, was “Clarkie Mayfield, head football coach at Jacksonville State,” thirty five years old. A Chicago Tribune piece, preserved today through the Harlan County USGenWeb obituary collection, bore the blunt headline “Football coach dies in Ky. fire.” An Associated Press story quoted in the Bismarck Tribune likewise listed him among the dead.
Later accounts, especially a deeply reported Lexington Herald Leader feature by Mark Story and reminiscences by former teammates, have filled in more of what happened. Survivors remembered Mayfield helping move people toward the exits once it became clear that the building was in danger, and some describe him going back into the smoke to try to guide more guests out. He never emerged.
For his aging parents, for Madonna and Gregg, for players and coaches in Alabama, and for old neighbors back in Harlan County, the news felt almost unbearable. Sylvia Warfield, writing years later in an online reminiscence of the Black Star community, recalled that when word reached the former coal camp that “Clark Mayfield lost his life in the nightclub fire in Northern Kentucky, it was about more than we could take.” The boy who had carried their hopes from the coalfields to Kentucky blue and then to the red and white of Jacksonville State was gone.
Why Clarkie Mayfield still matters
Today, Clarkie Mayfield’s name shows up in a patchwork of places. It appears on a headstone in Resthaven Cemetery outside Harlan. It is listed on Find A Grave among the victims of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, and on fan made victim memorial pages. It shows up in defensive stat lines and coaches’ records, in the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame’s sketch of a coal camp quarterback who went big time, and in Jacksonville State’s Hall of Fame exhibit, which still points visitors toward the coach who helped design some of the school’s best offenses.
In Harlan County, his story resonates for other reasons too. It links several key threads of Appalachian history: the tight community world of the coal camp, the way sports could open doors for young people from isolated hollers, the complicated promise of a scholarship to a powerful but sometimes abusive football program, and the outward migration of Appalachian people into the wider South. It ends, like too many Appalachian stories, in a distant industrial disaster that families back home could only read about in the paper.
To tell Mayfield’s story carefully is to pay attention to all of those arcs. It is to see the boy in the Black Star “Holler List,” the college kicker standing at Neyland Stadium with a game on his foot, the young coach drawing up plays at Jacksonville State, and the man in a crowded nightclub in Northern Kentucky who put other people’s safety ahead of his own.
For Appalachia, Clarkie Mayfield is not just a footnote in Kentucky football history or a name on a long memorial roll. He is a reminder that the lives shaped in coal camps have never been small, and that the courage drilled into those hills sometimes showed itself far from home, in final acts that most of the world never saw.
Sources and further reading
Find A Grave entry for “Herman Clark ‘Clarkie’ Mayfield,” including birth and death dates, burial at Resthaven Cemetery, and a brief biographical note that connects him to Black Star High School and the University of Kentucky. Find A Grave
Black Star Coal Camp “Holler List,” which lists “Herman,” “Ona Mae Faculty,” and “Clarkie (1959)” under the Mayfield family. Black Star Coal Camp
BlackStarCoalCamp.com photo galleries and captions, including images related to Ona Mae Mayfield’s teaching career and Black Star football teams. Black Star Coal Camp+2Black Star Coal Camp+2
Sylvia Warfield, “Memories of the Early Black Star Mining Community,” online reminiscence that reflects on the Mayfield family and community reaction to Clarkie’s death. (Accessed via researcher notes.)
John Henson, “Local teams to mark 100 year anniversary of football in county,” Harlan County sports history feature that highlights Mayfield’s Black Star career and decision to play at Kentucky. harlancountysports.com
Kentucky High School Athletic Association, Board of Control minutes, July 27, 1957, recording Black Star principal William L. Mills recommending “Clark Mayfield.” KHSAA
Kentucky High School Athletic Association, The Kentucky High School Athlete, December 1965 and late 1960s issues, which list “Mayfield, Clarkie” in coaches and contacts sections. encompass.eku.edu+1
“UK brings home the Beer Barrel, 1962,” Kentucky Photo Archive, Lexington Herald Leader, showing the Wildcats returning with the Beer Barrel and identifying Clarkie Mayfield as the player whose two field goals decided the 12 to 10 win at Tennessee. Kentucky Photo Archive
“1962 Kentucky Wildcats football team,” for season overview and confirmation that Mayfield’s late field goal provided the winning margin in the Tennessee game. Wikipedia
Game film of the 1962 Kentucky Tennessee matchup, available in various archival and online video collections, which documents the contest in which Mayfield’s kicking proved decisive.
Jacksonville State University Athletics, “Clarkie Mayfield (1992)” Hall of Fame biography, summarizing his role as offensive coordinator and head coach, the installation of a new offensive system in 1970, and his death in a fire while attending a retirement party for his mother. Jacksonville State University Athletics
Jacksonville State University, Historical Image Collection, “The Clarkie Mayfield Family 6,” photograph by Opal R. Lovett showing Clarkie, Madonna, and Gregg Mayfield inside their home in 1974. digitalcommons.jsu.edu
Jacksonville State football media guides and season summaries (early 1970s), which document his years as offensive coordinator and head coach and the records of his teams. (Referenced via the JSU citations in later secondary works.) Wikipedia
“Misc obits 1916 1990 Harlan Co,” Harlan County USGenWeb obituary collection, which reproduces portions of a Chicago Tribune story headlined “Football coach dies in Ky. fire,” noting that Jacksonville State coach Clarkie Mayfield died in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. USGenWeb Websites
Associated Press wire coverage of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, as preserved in papers such as the Bismarck Tribune, which lists Mayfield among the victims and gives his age and position. Newspapers
Mark Story, “Clarkie Mayfield, ex Cat, in life and death, refused to back down,” Lexington Herald Leader, October 16, 2011, an in depth profile drawing on interviews with family, former teammates, and survivors of the fire. Kentucky
Michael B. “Missile” Minix, “UK Football Tragedy and Bradshaw Forgiveness,” and related writings at MissileMinix.com, which recall Mayfield as a teammate and describe his actions during the Beverly Hills fire. missileminix.com
“Clarkie Mayfield,” Wikipedia entry summarizing his birth and death dates, Kentucky playing career, Jacksonville State coaching record, and death in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, with references to JSU media guides and Mark Story’s article. Wikipedia
Mountain Sports Hall of Fame, short biographical sketch and social media posts that remember Mayfield as a star quarterback at Black Star, a member of Kentucky’s Thin Thirty, and a successful college coach. kyphotoarchive.com+1