Appalachian Figures
In one often shared photograph from the Thacker coalfield, a teenage miner named Vito Ragazzo stands in a coal car at Aflex, Pike County. The caption notes that the picture was taken in 1944 and that the young man in work clothes would someday play college and Canadian professional football and then coach at Virginia Military Institute and Shippensburg.
That single image holds several stories at once. It captures a coal town on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork, an Italian immigrant family in a hollow at Aflex, and a boy who still expected to spend his life underground. It also captures a starting point. Within a decade that miner would be catching passes at William and Mary, setting records in the college game, and then lining up in the Grey Cup for the Hamilton Tiger Cats.
Today most football reference books remember Vito Eupollio Ragazzo as a coach and receiver. William and Mary lists him among its all time greats. The Virginia Sports Hall of Fame celebrates his records and his work on the sidelines. In Pike County, though, his story begins in a tight coal camp on the Tug Fork, where his family lived on Culler Hollow at Aflex and worked the seam that shaped so many eastern Kentucky lives.
Two Vitos in the records
When historians and genealogists start digging into the Ragazzo family, the records split in two. There is Vito E. Ragazzo, born in 1894, an Italian immigrant who came to the coalfields and settled with his wife Mary M. Battistello in the Aflex and Belfry area of Pike County. Their address in later years appears in Mary’s obituary as 41 Culler Hollow at Aflex, a detail that fixes the family on the map of the Thacker coalfield.
Obituaries for their daughters help fill out the household. Adelaide Eva Oliver’s life notice lists her birth on February 3, 1924, in Aflex, Kentucky, and names her parents as Vito Ragazzo and Mary Battistello Ragazzo. Another daughter, Sister Clare (Frances Giovanna) Ragazzo of the Ursulines of Brown County, is remembered as the “dear sister of Adelaide Ragazzo Oliver of Aflex, Kentucky” and as having been preceded in death by her parents, Vito E. and Mary M. Battistello Ragazzo, and by her brother, Vito E. Ragazzo Jr.
Those notices give us a clear family structure. Vito Sr and Mary, Italian immigrants in a Pike County coal camp, raised a large household that included at least three children whose lives took sharply different paths. Adelaide stayed rooted in Aflex. Sister Clare entered religious life in Ohio and spent decades teaching history in Ursuline schools. Their brother, Vito Eupollio Ragazzo Jr, the boy in the coal car photograph and the subject of this story, carried Pike County onto football fields across the United States and Canada.
Aflex, the Tug Fork, and a coal miner’s son
Aflex itself sat in the narrow valley of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, part of the Thacker coalfield that straddled the Kentucky and West Virginia line. CoalCampUSA’s sketch of the Thacker region places Aflex on the Kentucky bank across from Williamson, West Virginia, at the edge of a map studded with coal towns and rail spurs.
In his later years, when he worked in athletics administration at Virginia Tech, Ragazzo liked to tell stories about growing up in that camp. A 1994 feature in the Roanoke Times described him as “a coal miner’s son” from Aflex who went into the mines himself as a teenager and once took a glancing blow from a falling rock while his father watched. The Shippensburg University obituary, written with family input, confirms that he was born in the coal mining community of Aflex, Kentucky, to Italian immigrant parents and that he “worked in the coal mines as a youth” before football opened other doors.
The Tug Fork marked a state line, but it did not cut off movement. Like many young people from Aflex and other Pike County camps, Ragazzo crossed the river to attend Williamson High School in Mingo County, West Virginia. The same Roanoke Times article notes that the school’s 1943 football team drew heavily from Aflex, with seven players from the Kentucky side. The Shippensburg life sketch adds that Ragazzo became a star in four sports at Williamson, excelling in football, basketball, baseball, and track.
Coal still shaped his choices. One early job after high school, according to that Virginia Tech profile, was teaching at the Aflex grade school, a reminder that in a coal town a young man might move between the mine, the classroom, and the playing field without leaving the hollow.
William and Mary and a new passing game
From Williamson, Ragazzo went on to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he became one of the outstanding receivers of the late nineteen forties. The Virginia Sports Hall of Fame biography credits him with a 1949 season in which he caught forty four passes for 793 yards and scored ninety points, ranking third in the nation in receptions and second in scoring. It also notes that he played in the Dixie, Delta, Oyster, and Tobacco Bowls, served as co captain of the team, and earned first team All South honors.
The same Hall of Fame entry lists a remarkable string of records that show how far he pushed the passing game of his era. It reports that he held NCAA marks for fifteen touchdown receptions in a single season in 1949, for the highest percentage of touchdown catches, for scoring a touchdown in eleven consecutive games, and for twenty nine touchdown catches in a career. Contemporary record books at schools that faced him corroborate at least one of those feats. The University of Richmond’s football record book, for instance, notes that William and Mary receiver Vito Ragazzo scored four receiving touchdowns in a 1949 game against Wake Forest.
Even rival programs took notice. A University of North Carolina retrospective on the Tar Heels’ 1963 team, written decades later, recalls Ragazzo from his coaching years but reaches back to his William and Mary days to explain his reputation. One former player describes him as “ahead of his time in the passing game” and insists he was “doing things no one else was doing” with route combinations and formations, ideas he had first lived out as a receiver.
For a young man from Aflex, the path from a company camp to a Southern Conference star classroom and bowl trips must have felt almost unreal. Yet, as his later stories made clear, he did not see those years as an escape from his upbringing so much as an extension of it. He often framed his toughness and work ethic in terms of what he had learned in the mines and on the streets of a coal town rather than in college weight rooms.
Hamilton, the Grey Cup, and a brief professional turn
After college, Ragazzo signed with the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union, the forerunner of the modern Canadian Football League. Statistics compiled at StatsCrew list him on Hamilton rosters in 1953 and 1954 as a six foot three, two hundred pound end and defensive back, with four career interceptions and receiving totals that include twenty two catches for 263 yards and two touchdowns in the 1954 season.
The 1953 and 1954 Hamilton team pages on Pro Football Archives confirm his place on the championship roster, giving him jersey number 70 and listing him among the ends on a squad that claimed the 1953 Grey Cup. League wide statistical tables for 1953 show him credited with five points, the equivalent of a single touchdown under Canadian scoring rules of the era.
Virginia’s Sports Hall of Fame, looking back from the perspective of later decades, goes further. Its inductee bio says that Ragazzo intercepted seventeen passes as a safety and that he scored the winning touchdown in that 1953 Grey Cup game. Whatever the precise totals, Canadian sources and Virginia sportswriters alike agree that his brief professional stint extended the story that had begun in Aflex, placing a Pike County coal camp kid on one of the biggest stages in Canadian football.
Building teams in Virginia and the Carolinas
Ragazzo’s longer legacy unfolded not in professional box scores but on practice fields and sidelines. After Hamilton, he began coaching at Hillfield School for Boys in Canada and then at William Byrd High School in Vinton, Virginia. By the mid nineteen fifties he was back in college football as a line coach at Virginia Military Institute, helping guide the Keydets to an undefeated season in 1957.
From there his career traced a path through several corners of the college game. At the University of North Carolina in the early nineteen sixties he served on Jim Hickey’s staff as an offensive assistant. The same UNC Extra Points feature that praises his innovation in the passing game notes that he helped install pro style concepts borrowed from the Green Bay Packers’ “Pro I” set, giving Carolina’s 1963 Gator Bowl champions a more varied and modern attack.
He returned to VMI as head coach from 1966 through 1970, then spent three seasons as offensive coordinator at East Carolina and later worked as an assistant at Wake Forest. Throughout those moves, former players remembered him as a teacher who could wrap tactical lessons in stories about coal camps, Canadian weather, or bowl games. The Roanoke Times profile that dubbed him Virginia Tech’s “tech story teller” describes players and coworkers gathering to hear him recall games or childhood episodes from Aflex.
Shippensburg, Coach of the Year, and a small college powerhouse
In 1978 Ragazzo arrived at Shippensburg State College in Pennsylvania as defensive coordinator. The next year he became head coach, a position he would hold through 1985. During those seven seasons he led the Red Raiders to forty one victories and in 1981 guided them to the Lambert Cup and a run to the NCAA Division II semifinals.
Shippensburg’s athletics department notes that he was the first coach in school history to be recognized as a national coach of the year when the American Football Coaches Association selected him as the 1981 Kodak College Division Coach of the Year, an honor spanning all divisions outside the top tier. The Virginia Sports Hall of Fame lists additional accolades from that period, including Pennsylvania College Coach of the Year in 1981, Chevrolet and ABC College Coach of the Year the same season, and a later AFCA and Eastman Kodak national coaching award.
For a small public college, those years were transformative. Shippensburg’s tribute to Ragazzo, published after his death in 2017, emphasizes both the championships and the personal relationships. It quotes former players who credit him with giving them a chance at a college education and a lifetime of friendships and who remember him as a coach whose stories and expectations stayed with them long after graduation.
Storyteller, scout, and mentor at Virginia Tech
After leaving Shippensburg, Ragazzo spent several seasons in pro scouting with the New England Patriots, working from 1986 through 1988 according to the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. In 1988 he accepted a new role at Virginia Tech as director of student life in the athletic department, a position that blended counseling, mentoring, and public relations.
The 1994 Roanoke Times profile “Tech story teller giving retirement a try” paints a vivid picture of those years. It follows Ragazzo as he attends banquets, visits with boosters, and spends time with athletes, weaving stories about Aflex, William and Mary, Hamilton, and Shippensburg into informal lessons on persistence, humor, and perspective. The piece notes that when he finally tried to retire from full time work, colleagues struggled to imagine the athletic department without his presence and his tales.
Those final professional decades brought him back into closer contact with Appalachian students who, like him, had grown up in small coalfield towns and were feeling their way through college sports. His own journey from Pike County coal camp to Division I staff member gave him a particular credibility with families from the region.
Remembering a Pike County figure
Reference works usually file Ragazzo under William and Mary, VMI, Shippensburg, or Virginia Tech. Wikipedia’s category system, however, also lists him among “People from Pike County, Kentucky,” placing his name next to figures such as labor activist Eula Hall, mining executive Don Blankenship, and the Hatfield McCoy era lawman Sid Hatfield. That small line of categorization matters. It keeps Aflex and Pike County visible in the story of a man often remembered primarily as a coach.
For the Ragazzo family itself, Appalachian roots remained clear. Sister Clare’s obituary, published in an Ohio diocesan context, describes her as the sister of Adelaide Ragazzo Oliver of Aflex and notes that she had been preceded in death by her brother Vito E. Ragazzo Jr. Adelaide’s own obituary, written for a Pike County audience, begins by fixing her birth in Aflex in 1924 and naming parents Vito and Mary Battistello Ragazzo, a subtle reminder that the Aflex household that produced a future college coach also produced a religious sister, a coal camp neighbor, and other kin whose stories unfolded locally.
The coal camp itself is fading. The Thacker coalfield map now appears mainly in online histories. CoalCampUSA’s photograph of the young coal miner at Aflex named Vito Ragazzo circulates in Facebook groups devoted to Kentucky coal towns and Williamson history, where older residents debate which figures in other group photographs might be Vito Sr or friends from the mine.
Seen from that angle, Ragazzo’s life becomes a bridge. On one side stands a Pike County coal camp in the nineteen thirties and forties, with an Italian immigrant father, a grade school perched over a hollow, and a boy walking across the Tug Fork for school after a shift in the mine. On the other stands a web of college fields and meeting rooms stretching from Williamsburg to Chapel Hill, from Lexington to Shippensburg and Blacksburg, plus a brief stop in Hamilton and the Grey Cup. The continuity between them is not just football. It is a set of skills and values carried from Culler Hollow and Aflex into a wider world: the willingness to work in hard places, an eye for opportunity, and, as his former players often recall, a storyteller’s knack for turning experience into a lesson.
Sources and further reading
For Ragazzo’s Pike County family and coal camp context, key near primary sources include obituaries for his sister Sister Clare (Frances Giovanna) Ragazzo and his sister Adelaide Eva Oliver, which identify their parents as Vito E. and Mary M. Battistello Ragazzo of Aflex, Kentucky, and mention Adelaide’s lifelong connection to Aflex. Ursulines of Brown County+2Legacy+2 A Find A Grave memorial for Mary B. Ragazzo places the family at 41 Culler Hollow, Aflex, and CoalCampUSA’s Thacker coalfield page provides the 1944 photograph of “a young coal miner at Aflex named Vito Ragazzo” and broader visual context for the camp and region. Find A Grave+1
For his playing and coaching career, important sources include the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame inductee biography, the Wikipedia entry “Vito Ragazzo,” William and Mary football record books and media guides, and opponent records such as the University of Richmond football record book that preserve specific stat lines like his four touchdown receptions versus Wake Forest in 1949. William & Mary Athletics+3Virginia Sports Hall of Fame |+3Wikipedia+3 Professional records are summarized at StatsCrew and in Pro Football Archives rosters and CFL statistical summaries for the 1953 and 1954 Hamilton Tiger Cats. CFLapedia+3Stats Crew+3Stats Crew+3
Narrative accounts that tie his Aflex childhood to his later work include the Shippensburg University athletics obituary and associated life sketch, as well as the Roanoke Times feature “Tech story teller giving retirement a try,” which captures his storytelling voice and memories of the coal camp and the Tug Fork. Amazon Web Services, Inc.+2Shippensburg University Athletics+2 The University of North Carolina’s “Extra Points: ’63 Team Turns 50” offers former players’ reflections on Ragazzo as an offensive innovator, while the Shippensburg remembrance and Virginia Sports Hall of Fame profile document his coaching awards, Lambert Cup season, and later work as a scout and administrator. University of North Carolina Athletics+2Shippensburg University Athletics+2
Finally, for his place in Appalachian and Kentucky memory, references such as Wikipedia’s “People from Pike County, Kentucky” category and local history Facebook groups centered on Aflex and the Williamson area help situate Ragazzo among other Pike County figures and within community discussions about coal camp life and its legacies. Wikipedia+2Facebook+2