Appalachian Figures
On a weekday morning in Corbin the traffic along Roy Kidd Avenue tells its own story. School buses swing into the Board of Education offices at 108 Roy Kidd Avenue. Parents turn in toward the Corbin Educational Center and elementary school, both listed at the same address. At the far end of the street the public library sits near the corner with Laurel Avenue in a building that local history notes describe as a cornerstone of downtown renewal.
City engineers and planners know the road in another way. In a recent federal Safe Streets for All safety action plan the segment listed as Roy Kidd Avenue, route CS01 from Main Street to Hamlin Street, appears at the top of a priority table with eighteen crashes and six injury crashes recorded between 2019 and 2023. In that technical document the name of a beloved football coach becomes a line item in a crash chart and a reminder that memorial streets are also lived-in spaces where buses, pedestrians, and freight all compete for room.
So who is the man whose name runs through both Corbin’s neighborhood maps and Eastern Kentucky University’s campus directions. Born in Corbin in 1931, Roy Lee Kidd grew up the youngest of seven children, a multi sport star for the Corbin Redhounds who chose to play quarterback at Eastern instead of for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky. He went on to win two NCAA Division I AA national titles at Eastern in 1979 and 1982, claim sixteen Ohio Valley Conference championships, and finish his college career with 314 victories and a winning percentage a little over seventy one percent.
This article looks at Kidd as an Appalachian figure through three kinds of evidence. Oral histories and interviews preserve his own voice as he remembered Corbin childhood days, Madison county high school sidelines, and the long EKU run. Archival records and photographs at Eastern show how he and his staff actually built and managed a small college powerhouse. Corbin’s streets, schools, and planning documents show how his name left the stadium and settled into the daily geography of a mountain railroad town.
Corbin beginnings
Roy Lee Kidd was born on December 4, 1931, in Corbin, Kentucky, to Edd and Pearl Bradford Kidd. Obituaries from Eastern Kentucky University and statewide outlets emphasize that he was the youngest of seven children and that his earliest years unfolded in a railroad and sawmill town that already straddled three county lines.
Corbin High School became the first stage where he stood out. The Corbin Redhounds already had a proud sports tradition, but the late 1940s teams that included Kidd on the gridiron and Frank Selvy on the basketball court have taken on near legendary status in local memory and Kentucky high school sports histories. The Courier Journal named Kidd a first team All State football player for the 1949 season, the year before he graduated in 1950.
A 1986 interview cataloged by the William H. Berge Oral History Center at Eastern begins by noting that “Roy Lee Kidd was born in Corbin, KY on December 4, 1931. He was the youngest of” his siblings before going on to explore how that Corbin upbringing shaped him. The same collection includes a later 1996 session that focuses on the 1979 national championship, but its catalog summary still starts with those basic facts of birth and family.
To understand the physical world of his childhood it helps to look at older photographs of Center Street, the name that appears in early twentieth century images of downtown Corbin. Local history Facebook groups and newspaper columns identify these shots as “Center Street, now Roy Kidd Avenue,” showing storefronts, churches, and the Corbin Times Tribune building before the railroad underpass was built. Kidd’s later honor in the form of a street name literally overlays that earlier landscape.
From Redhound to Colonel
Kidd’s decision to attend Eastern Kentucky State College was a turning point not just for his own life but for the history of small college football. According to Eastern’s own athletics histories and later biographical sketches, he was recruited on a football scholarship yet insisted on playing baseball as well. Eastern’s coaches agreed, while the more prominent University of Kentucky program expected football players to give up all other sports. Kidd chose the place that would let him keep swinging a bat.
At Eastern he lettered four years in both football and baseball. As quarterback for the Maroons he set a dozen school passing records and earned All Ohio Valley Conference honors along with a Little All American nod in 1953. At the same time he patrolled center field on the baseball diamond and hit better than .300 in each of his seasons.
Eastern’s media guides and Hall of Fame entry note that he stayed on campus in 1954 as a student assistant for Glenn Presnell’s unbeaten team, which won the OVC and played in the Tangerine Bowl. In that role he moved from being the kid from Corbin with a good arm to someone who was learning how to coach, watch film, and manage young men.
The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives “Kentucky Football” resource guide points researchers to a 1996 oral history interview in which Kidd sat down with Ronald Chris Whitefield to talk through the 1979 championship and his years building up to it. Along with earlier Berge Center interviews and a 1988 session recorded for the Bonnet Productions North Middle School oral history project, it forms a small cluster of recordings in which he tells his own version of how a Corbin Redhound became Eastern’s long time coach.
Madison Model and the making of a coach
Kidd began his formal coaching career in Madison County. In 1955 he took a position at Madison Central High School in Richmond as assistant basketball coach and head baseball coach. A year later superintendent A. L. Lassiter offered him the head football job at Madison Model, a combined city school whose Royal Purples had posted a losing record over the previous decade.
From 1956 through 1961 his Madison Model teams went 54 11 1, a winning percentage above eighty percent that still ranks among the best in Richmond high school history. The 1961 squad finished 13 1 and reached the state finals, earning Kidd statewide recognition as a rising coach.
He spent a brief stint at Madison High after Model’s partnership ended, then moved to Morehead State as an assistant in 1962. A year later Eastern brought him back to Richmond as an assistant. In 1964 he was promoted to head coach, taking over a program that had enjoyed success at times but had never sustained the kind of national presence that would soon become routine under his watch.
Local Madison County newspaper clippings, team photographs, and Richmond historical society posts preserve fragments of those high school years. Many were later pulled into tributes after his death, when former Royal Purples players remembered practices that began with laps around the field and ended with postgame speeches about carrying oneself with discipline and humility. For now, the oral histories at Eastern and the statistical summaries in coaching association tributes are the main primary records for this stage of his life.
Building a powerhouse in Richmond
From 1964 to 2002 Eastern Kentucky University football and Roy Kidd became almost inseparable. Over thirty nine seasons his Colonels compiled a 314 124 8 record. They won NCAA Division I AA national championships in 1979 and 1982 and finished as runners up in 1980 and 1981. They claimed sixteen Ohio Valley Conference titles and made a then record seventeen trips to the Division I AA playoffs.
His teams produced fifty five All Americans, more than two hundred first team All OVC selections, and at least forty one players who signed National Football League contracts. When he retired after the 2002 season he ranked near the top of the NCAA all time coaching wins list, particularly among Division I AA and later FCS programs.
Recognition followed. The National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame inducted him as part of its 2003 class, highlighting not only the national titles but the consistency of thirty seven non losing seasons and a streak of twenty five straight years with a winning record. The American Football Coaches Association elected him its president in the late 1980s and in 2023 honored him with the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award for outstanding service to the game.
On film he appears in countless Saturday afternoons. Broadcast footage of the 1979 championship win over Lehigh, the hard fought 1982 title game against Delaware, and later playoff runs show him in maroon jacket and white cap moving up and down the sideline in front of packed stands. Eastern’s multi part video series on one hundred years of Colonel football weaves those clips together with new interviews and serves as both a polished narrative and a repository of primary moving images from the Kidd era.
Listening to Coach Kidd
Statistics and trophies only tell part of the story. For historians and fans who want to hear the man himself, the richest sources are oral histories and interview programs recorded over four decades.
Eastern’s William H. Berge Oral History Center holds multiple interviews cataloged under Kidd’s name. The “Former Eastern Football Players: Four Decades” collection includes at least one session where he sketches his path from Corbin to Eastern and talks through the growth of the program. Another interview, tied to the 1979 national championship project and recorded in November 1996, focuses more tightly on that first title run and the pressures of sustaining success in a small college town.
The Kentucky Oral History Commission’s database lists a 1988 interview with Kidd recorded for the Bonnet Productions North Middle School project in Henderson County. In that session he was speaking not to sports journalists or fellow coaches, but to students and teachers who wanted to understand what it took to build a career in football. For Appalachian historians, projects like this are a reminder that oral history often begins in classrooms and local initiatives rather than big university centers.
Later in life Kidd also sat for long form on camera conversations that function almost like public oral histories. Eastern’s student journalists produced a reunion conversation between Kidd and longtime sportswriter Marla Ridenour, where the two look back over his EKU years and the media attention that followed deep playoff runs. Eastern also filmed a “Then and Now” interview in which he reflects on players who came through his program and on how college football had changed since the 1960s.
In the week of his death in September 2023, Kentucky Educational Television’s Kentucky Edition aired a segment called “Remembering Coach Roy Kidd” that stitched together archival footage with fresh commentary from Eastern officials. Public radio station WEKU followed with a feature titled “Coach Roy Kidd: The Legacy,” in which administrators like Athletics Director Matt Roan recalled his kindness, generosity, and willingness to mentor newer generations of Eastern leaders.
Local television coverage also turned into a kind of primary source. When news broke that Kidd had entered hospice care, Lexington stations and Madison County outlets aired pieces that mixed interviews with former players and shots of his statue at the stadium. After his passing Corbin’s own stations and social media feeds showed the Redhounds scoreboard lit up in memorial before a home game, another layer of remembrance in the town where he first wore a jersey.
Paper trails and photographs at Eastern
Behind the scenes of any long coaching career lie boxes of paper. Eastern Kentucky University’s Special Collections and Archives preserve a set of Football Office Records covering roughly 1969 through 1996, which puts researchers in the middle of the Kidd era. The finding aid describes playbooks, meeting notes, travel itineraries, rosters, tutoring schedules, and internal reports from the football program. For anyone interested in how a regional college assembled and sustained a nationally respected team, this manuscript collection is the central archival source.
Eastern’s digital collections offer a visual side to that story. Photographs tagged “football” include images of Kidd leading the team onto the field, talking with players on the sideline, and standing in front of packed stands at what would eventually be named Roy Kidd Stadium. Others show the stadium itself under that name, capturing the moment when a living coach saw his name placed on the facility he helped build.
For Appalachian historians who often work with coal company ledgers, church minutes, and family scrapbooks, the football office records and digital photographs are reminders that college sports programs also leave behind rich documentary trails. In Kidd’s case those records map out recruiting trips into eastern Kentucky counties, academic support structures for student athletes, and the growing commercial footprint of a program that brought national television cameras to Richmond.
Monuments on campus
On Eastern’s campus the most obvious tribute is Roy Kidd Stadium. University and athletics department pages describe how the facility, long home to Colonel football, came to bear his name in recognition of his decades of service and championships. A bronze statue and “Monument to Excellence” installation stand at the north end of the stadium, introduced by alumni groups as a way to honor not only Kidd but the generations of players and staff who helped construct his legacy.
Just outside, the street that fronts the stadium carries another honorific. Campus driving directions instruct visitors arriving from Interstate 75 to turn onto Roy and Sue Kidd Way, named for the coach and his wife, Susan Purcell Kidd. Delivery guides and parking advisories mention the same street, sometimes noting that traffic backs up at the left turn from the Eastern Bypass during busy weekday hours. In other words, his name is part of everyday wayfinding for students, staff, and visitors who may or may not know much about his teams.
Social media posts from Eastern alumni and local history groups make a point of noting that the street name includes Sue because of her visible role as a partner and ambassador during Kidd’s tenure. That inclusion speaks to a very Appalachian sense of family and community, recognizing the labor of a coach’s spouse in entertaining recruits, supporting players away from home, and representing the university at countless events.
Center Street becomes Roy Kidd Avenue
Corbin’s most direct tribute came in August 2000, when the city officially renamed Center Street in downtown to Roy Kidd Avenue in honor of its famous former Redhound. A News Journal piece marking his death notes the renaming as one of several ways the town has claimed him as its own, alongside his place in local and state halls of fame.
Older photographs shared by local history groups show Center Street, later Roy Kidd Avenue, before the railroad underpass was built in the 1930s. In those images the Corbin Times Tribune building, Corbin Christian Church, and other landmarks anchor the view. The captions now often point out that the same stretch carries Kidd’s name, inviting viewers to imagine a teenage Roy walking this corridor long before anyone thought to rename it.
Today the address 108 Roy Kidd Avenue serves as the hub for Corbin Independent Schools, including the Board of Education and the Corbin Educational Center. State and federal school directories list multiple homebound and alternative education programs at that same address, while local chamber listings identify it as the Board’s home. That means that parents, students, and staff in Corbin routinely write or type “Roy Kidd Avenue” whenever they contact their school system.
The street also reaches into civic and economic life beyond the schools. Business directories show law offices and other services using Roy Kidd Avenue addresses, while transportation documents from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet list a short westbound Roy Kidd Avenue segment as part of state route KY 312 connecting Main Street to Kentucky Avenue. The Corbin public library’s centennial history notes the purchase and renovation of a building at Roy Kidd Avenue and Laurel Avenue in 2009, further tying the coach’s name to a space of learning and community events.
In recent years city commission minutes and local reporting have shown that the street is not a static monument. The News Journal has followed debates over whether to shift part of Roy Kidd Avenue to one way traffic, adjust speed limits, or remove a traffic light at the intersection with Laurel Avenue. Citizens have turned out to voice both support and concern, making it clear that even when a street carries the name of a hometown hero, it still has to function for the people who live and work along it.
Corbin’s own coach
When Kidd died on September 12, 2023, at the age of ninety one, the Associated Press obituary focused on his national record number of wins and titles. Eastern’s official announcement spoke of losing one of its “most beloved and accomplished sons” and noted that his funeral would be held at the EKU Center for the Arts. The National Football Foundation called attention to his seventy one percent career winning percentage and his service to the coaching profession.
In Corbin, coverage centered on the local boy who had made good. The News Journal story “Corbin’s own Coach Roy Kidd passes away at age 91” reminded readers that before the College Football Hall of Fame and national titles there was a kid from a railroad town, a three sport star at Corbin High whose name now marks the very street where the stadium sits. Lexington television footage from a September home game at Corbin High School showed his image on the scoreboard and players standing helmets off in a moment of silence.
For Appalachia, Kidd’s story carries several layers. It is a tale of a small town athlete who stayed in his home region rather than chase glamour elsewhere, a coach who spent nearly his entire career in one state, and a family who made Eastern Kentucky University a second home. It is also a story about how communities remember people whose work played out on fields and in film reels. Oral histories and interviews, from middle school projects to professional radio features, capture the cadence of his speech and his views on leadership. Archival records preserve the planning and labor beneath those Saturday afternoons. Street signs, stadium names, and safety plans mark the ways in which memory gets woven into maps and traffic counts.
Walk down Roy Kidd Avenue today and you can hear that layered history if you listen closely. Schoolchildren carrying backpacks, coaches shouting from practice fields, parents turning into the library parking lot, and the rumble of trucks headed toward Main Street all pass under the same name. For a boy from Center Street in Corbin, whose teams made Richmond a destination for college football fans across the country, it is a fitting Appalachian kind of monument.
Sources & Further Reading
William H. Berge Oral History Center, Eastern Kentucky University. “Interview with Roy Kidd,” items 1986 OH 059 and 1997 OH 024, in the collections Former Eastern Football Players: Four Decades and Eastern Kentucky University 1979 National Championship Project. oralhistory.eku.edu+2oralhistory.eku.edu+2
Kentucky Oral History Commission and KentuckyOralHistory.org. “Interview with Roy Kidd, June 29, 1988,” Bonnet Productions: North Middle School, Henderson County Oral History Project. kentuckyoralhistory.org+1
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Kentucky Football” resource guide, citing Roy Kidd interview by Ronald Chris Whitefield, November 12, 1996, tape no. 1997OH024. kdla.ky.gov
EKU Special Collections and Archives. EKU Football Office Records, 1969–1996, and associated finding aids. Eastern Kentucky University+1
Eastern Kentucky University Digital Collections. Photographs tagged “football,” including images of Roy Kidd leading teams onto the field and views of Roy Kidd Stadium. Digital Collections+3Digital Collections+3Digital Collections+3
EKU Athletics and EKU Alumni. “EKU Football Legend Coach Roy Kidd Passes Away at 91,” “Roy Kidd (Hall of Fame),” Coach Roy Kidd legacy pages, and “Monument to Excellence” materials. Wikipedia+5Eastern Kentucky University Athletics+5Eastern Kentucky University+5
National Football Foundation, College Football Hall of Fame. “Inductee: Roy Lee Kidd (Class of 2003)” and “Hall of Fame Coach Roy Kidd Passes Away.” National Football Foundation+1
American Football Coaches Association. “1988 AFCA President Roy Kidd Passes Away” and related coverage of the 2023 Amos Alonzo Stagg Award. AFCA+2AFCA+2
Associated Press obituary, as carried by AP News, ESPN, and regional outlets, and Lane Report and On3 stories on Kidd’s passing in September 2023. AP News+1
KET, Kentucky Edition. “Remembering Coach Roy Kidd,” September 12, 2023, and WEKU, “Coach Roy Kidd: The Legacy,” September 15, 2023. KET+2PBS+2
City of Corbin. Safe Streets for All Safety Action Plan, including Appendix C1 on Roy Kidd Avenue (CS01) from Main Street to Hamlin Street, crash data and proposed countermeasures. Corbin, Kentucky+1
Corbin Independent Schools and Corbin Public Library. Web pages and histories documenting facilities at 108 Roy Kidd Avenue and the library’s move to the corner of Roy Kidd Avenue and Laurel Avenue. Wix Images+3Corbin Schools+3Corbin Schools+3
The News Journal and related Corbin Times Tribune coverage, including “Corbin’s own Coach Roy Kidd passes away at age 91,” articles on the 2000 renaming of Center Street to Roy Kidd Avenue, and reporting on proposed changes to the Roy Kidd Avenue corridor. Yahoo News+4The News Journal+4The News Journal+4
Wikipedia entry, “Roy Kidd,” for a synthesized overview of his playing and coaching career, with references to Eastern’s records and national recognitions. Wikipedia