Appalachian Figures
On a cold December afternoon in 1940, the Chicago Bears humiliated Washington in the NFL championship game by a score of 73 to 0. Somewhere in the blur of blue jerseys and leather helmets, halfback George McAfee took an interception and sprinted thirty four yards into the end zone, one more score in a game that still stands as the most lopsided title contest in league history.
Sportswriters liked the spectacle. They liked the numbers too. In only his first two seasons as a professional, McAfee would average more than seven yards per carry in 1941, lead the league in touchdowns, and earn a nickname that stuck for the rest of his life: One Play McAfee, the back who could change a game in a single touch of the ball.
What those box scores usually did not say was that the man wearing number five traced his roots to the Appalachian borderlands. George Anderson McAfee was born in Corbin, Kentucky, and grew up a few hours down the road and across the river in Ironton, Ohio, a small industrial city in the foothills where iron furnaces and coal trains tied Kentucky and Ohio together.
His story, when read through the primary records that survive, looks less like a simple big city football legend and more like a familiar Appalachian migration tale: a crowded Kentucky household, a move north into an industrial town, and a young man who turned local athletic talent into a scholarship and then a national stage.
Born in Corbin, Tenth of Twelve
The most basic facts about McAfee’s life come first from the vital indexes that genealogists know so well. A FamilySearch profile for George Anderson McAfee Sr. gives his birth as 13 March 1918 in Corbin, Whitley County, Kentucky, and lists his parents as Clarence Potter McAfee and Mary Lyda (often spelled Lida) Archer.
His burial record points in the same direction. A Find A Grave memorial, created from cemetery data at St Stephen’s Episcopal Church Memorial Gardens in Durham, North Carolina, records his full name, his birth on 13 March 1918 in Corbin, Kentucky, and his death on 4 March 2009.
Those brief lines remind us how crowded his childhood home must have been. Both FamilySearch and an obituary carried through Legacy’s online platform remember him as the tenth of twelve children of Clarence and Mary McAfee. One of those Legacy notices, drawn from the Raleigh News and Observer, condenses his early life into a single sentence: born in Corbin to Clarence and Mary Lida McAfee, tenth of twelve, and raised in Ironton, Ohio.
That short summary matches the pattern of a great deal of Kentucky and Appalachian migration in the early twentieth century. Corbin itself straddles county lines and railroad tracks at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. Ironton, founded in 1849 on the Ohio River, took its name from pig iron and spent the late nineteenth century as one of the foremost iron producing centers in the world, feeding furnaces in England, France, Russia, and American shipyards. The McAfees were one family in a larger current that moved back and forth across the river in search of steadier work.
Ironton Tigers and a Football Family
By the mid 1930s the records shift from vital statistics to school rosters and local football lore. Ironton High School’s official list of graduates for the Class of 1936 includes a simple entry: George A. McAfee. A local booklet on Ironton football history by Jim Ridgeway, Gridiron Legends of Ironton, fills in the picture. Ridgeway notes that McAfee lettered in football for the Ironton Fighting Tigers in 1933, 1934, and 1935, then graduated with the 1936 class and joined a Duke University program that had already begun to recruit talent from the Ohio River towns.
The Ironton Tribune, the city’s long running daily, has published several retrospective pieces about the McAfee clan and their place in local sports. Articles with titles such as McAfee one of the greatest players in NFL history and McAfee: Ironton’s premier football family remember him as an Ironton native and situate his story alongside brothers and cousins who made their own marks on the gridiron. Taken together, those pieces emphasize that he was never just a Chicago Bear or a Duke Blue Devil. He was one of many Ironton kids who grew up a short walk from the old Tanks Memorial Stadium, where a local professional team had played in the 1920s and 1930s before the NFL consolidated power in larger markets.
In that sense, George McAfee’s earliest football education was thoroughly Appalachian. He played in a town built on iron and coal, on a field once used by one of the nation’s first professional teams, and in a family where sports and work were woven together with church and school.
From Ironton to Wallace Wade’s Duke
The surviving Duke University records show how quickly that local talent turned into regional and then national attention. Duke’s 1938 Chanticleer yearbook lists George A. McAfee of Ironton, Ohio among the student body and fraternity members. He arrived on campus in 1936 or 1937, depending on whether one counts a preparatory year, and made the varsity football team in 1937.
In those years the Blue Devils were coached by Wallace Wade, the same coach who had led Alabama to Rose Bowl glory. Under Wade, Duke became a southern powerhouse. The 1938 team was famously unscored upon during the regular season and carried the nickname Iron Dukes, a nod to both the defensive unit and the region’s industrial identity.
McAfee quickly became the engine of that system. Contemporary game accounts and later institutional histories describe him as a true all purpose back. In his senior season in 1939 he led Duke in rushing, receiving, scoring, kickoff returns, punt returns, interceptions, and punting. He earned All America honors from several major news services and was named first team All Southern Conference.
He did not limit himself to one sport. Duke records and later biographical notes in the College Football Hall of Fame state that he batted .353 as a center fielder for Duke’s baseball team and captured the Southern Conference 100 meter sprint title as a senior.
For Appalachian historians, that combination matters. In a single body we see a Kentucky born, Ohio raised son of a large working family using a football scholarship to earn a college degree. The yearbook entry that places “George A. McAfee, Ironton, Ohio” alongside classmates who came from across the country is itself a primary snapshot of upward mobility in the late Depression era South.
One Play McAfee and the Chicago Bears
Professional football was still a young business when McAfee left Duke, but his college record made him one of the most coveted prospects in the 1940 NFL Draft. Official league materials and the Pro Football Hall of Fame agree on the basic facts: he was selected second overall, with the Philadelphia Eagles drafting him and immediately trading his rights to George Halas’s Chicago Bears.
Contemporary roster sheets preserve the details that matter to place based historians. StatsCrew’s 1940 Bears roster lists “George McAfee, RH, Duke, Corbin, KY USA” and gives his height as six feet and his weight as 178 pounds. Pro Football Reference, which compiles statistics from league game books, confirms that he wore number five, played halfback and defensive back, and eventually logged 1,685 rushing yards, 1,359 receiving yards, and 25 interceptions in eight seasons of play.
Primary game accounts, as summarized in later histories, support his nickname. In his very first professional game McAfee returned a punt 75 yards in the final half minute to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, then later that same year returned a kickoff ninety three yards and threw a touchdown pass against Green Bay. In the 1940 championship rout of Washington he added that interception return for a score.
The 1941 season was probably his best. League statistics show him leading the NFL in rushing average at 7.3 yards per carry and in total touchdowns with twelve in only eleven games. Those twelve came in every imaginable way: rushing, receiving, punt returns, kickoff returns, and even an interception return, a testament to his two way role on both offense and defense.
In later interviews, preserved in sources such as Windy City Gridiron and the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s career capsule, McAfee downplayed any heroics. He remembered instead how small he felt at his first Bears training camp and how watching another rookie knocked unconscious in practice taught him to run as fast as he could whenever he saw daylight.
Even contemporary popular culture picked up on his reputation. A 1948 Leaf football card, one of the earliest mass produced football trading cards, labeled him one of the greatest ball carriers in football history and noted that he had once scored three touchdowns while carrying the ball only four times.
War, A Lost Prime, and a Record that Still Stands
Like many athletes of his generation, McAfee’s statistical record bears the deep imprint of the Second World War. The National Football Foundation’s player biography and multiple obituaries agree that he volunteered for the United States Navy after the United States entered the war and served from roughly 1942 to 1945, missing what would likely have been four peak seasons.
When he returned to the Bears late in the 1945 season the old explosiveness was still visible. In his first game back he carried the ball five times for 105 yards and scored three rushing touchdowns, a performance that looks almost like a throwback to his One Play reputation at Duke.
From 1945 through 1950 he reinvented himself as one of the league’s great return specialists and defensive backs. Pro Football Reference and league record books credit him with leading the NFL in punt returns in both 1948 and 1950 and with a career punt return average of 12.78 yards, a figure that still stands as the best in league history according to modern analysts at the Sports History Network.
By the time he retired from the Bears after the 1950 season he had helped Chicago to three championships, scored 234 points, gained more than five thousand combined yards, and intercepted twenty five passes. In 1955 the Bears retired his number five jersey. He entered the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1966, the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1967, and the Duke Sports Hall of Fame in 1975.
Every one of those institutional biographies begins in the same way, with a place and a date: Corbin, Kentucky, 13 March 1918. In that sense, even the Canton plaques are quietly Appalachian.
Durham Businessman and Episcopal Lay Leader
If one follows only the football record, the story effectively ends in 1950. The more local and church based primary sources tell a longer tale.
According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame and to a narrative biography on Wikipedia that relies on Duke alumni publications, George and his wife Jeanne moved back to Durham after his playing career ended. For a time he even worked as an NFL official. More importantly for his daily life, he and his brother Wes launched the McAfee Oil Company, a Shell distributorship that he led for roughly thirty years.
Duke Alumni Register issues from the 1950s and 1960s record him in the mundane way alumni magazines often do. One notice in 1950, for example, simply lists “George A. McAfee, ’40, Durham” among classmates’ addresses. Later registers celebrate his induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.
Church records provide a particularly rich set of primary sources for his post football life. Journals of the annual convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of North Carolina list George A. McAfee among the lay delegates and officers from St Stephen’s, Durham, across multiple years. An Episcopal Churchwomen handbook from 1980 notes “Mrs. George McAfee” as a vice president at St Stephen’s, revealing that the family’s church involvement extended through his wife as well.
Local newspaper photography indexes from the Durham Herald Sun preserve yet another set of glimpses. A 1950 photo index records George A. McAfee among new members of a civic organization, while later entries in the 1950s and 1960s show him participating in church and community events. These are not headline stories. Instead they capture a retired athlete who ran a fuel oil business, sat on vestry and diocesan committees, and attended square dances and church fundraisers.
The North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame’s modern biography distills that entire second career into a short bullet point list. It notes that he was born in Corbin in 1918, raised in Ironton, attended Duke from 1936 to 1940, won All Southern and All America honors, and later became one of the top punt returners in NFL history. What the hall only hints at, the Episcopal convention journals and local photographs make clear. In Durham he was not just One Play McAfee. He was a lay reader, a committee member, a fuel oil distributor, and a long time resident of a growing college town.
A Difficult Ending and the Problem of Memory
George McAfee lived to be ninety. Obituaries in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and multiple regional papers agree on the key facts: he died on 4 March 2009, his funeral was held at St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Durham, and he was survived by his wife Jeanne and their children.
Those early obituaries, written within days of his death, did not initially give a cause. Later reporting and a long form investigation by journalists working with PBS Frontline and other outlets eventually revealed a much darker story. In his final years McAfee had developed dementia and was living in a memory care facility in Georgia when he ingested a highly caustic cleaning chemical that should have been locked away. State regulators found the operator negligent. The circumstances of his death became one of the central cases in Frontline’s 2013 documentary Life and Death in Assisted Living and in associated print pieces from ABC News and the Chicago Tribune.
For McAfee’s family and for historians of aging and elder care, that ending raises its own set of questions. How do we remember a life that contains both highlight reel touchdowns and institutional neglect in old age. How do we connect the confident young man pictured on football cards to the fragile elder in a locked ward far from the Ironton streets where he first learned to run.
In Appalachian terms, it is also a story about distance. A boy born in Corbin and raised in Ironton ends his life hundreds of miles away in a suburban Atlanta facility operated by a national chain. The same currents of migration and economic restructuring that once carried families from Kentucky hollers to river towns and then to midwestern cities now shape the geography of retirement and memory care.
An Appalachian Legacy on a National Stage
Today most football fans who recognize George McAfee’s name know him as an entry on a list of Hall of Famers or as a statistic in a record book that still lists him as the all time leader in punt return average. Kentucky fans claim him as a native son. Ohio fans remember him as part of Ironton’s rich football tradition. Duke highlights him whenever the Blue Devils talk about their early glory years. Chicago Bears historians and fan sites rank him among the franchise’s greatest players.
The primary sources, scattered across genealogical indexes, high school alumni lists, yearbooks, team rosters, hall of fame plaques, and church convention minutes, invite a broader reading. They allow us to see George Anderson McAfee as an Appalachian borderlands figure whose life threaded through multiple layers of the twentieth century.
He was the tenth child of a large Kentucky family who moved north into an Ohio River industrial town. He was an Ironton Tiger in a city built on pig iron and early professional football. He was a Duke student whose scholarship restated, in another form, the old promise that talent could carry a young person out of a hard working household into a new kind of security. He was a Chicago Bear whose speed and versatility made crowds gasp. He was a Durham businessman and Episcopal lay leader whose name appeared as often in church minutes and civic club notices as in sports pages.
In telling his story through the surviving record, Appalachian historians can show that the bright lights of professional sports never entirely erase local roots. For one of the most explosive backs of the 1940s NFL, those roots lay squarely in Whitley County, Kentucky, and in the streets and stadiums of Ironton, Ohio.
Sources & Further Reading
FamilySearch, “George Anderson McAfee Sr. (1918–2009),” genealogical profile with linked vital and census records. FamilySearch
Social Security Death Index entries for George A. McAfee, as compiled in SortedByName and other SSDI derivatives. Find A Grave+1
Find A Grave, “George Anderson McAfee Sr. (1918–2009),” memorial and cemetery entry for St Stephen’s Episcopal Church Memorial Gardens in Durham, North Carolina. Find A Grave+1
Legacy.com obituary notices for George A. McAfee, based on publication in the Raleigh News and Observer, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Legacy+2Legacy+2
Ironton High School, Class of 1936 graduate list, Ironton City Schools. Tigertown
Jim Ridgeway, “George McAfee,” in Gridiron Legends of Ironton, Ohio, local history booklet on Ironton football. Gridiron Legends+1
The Chanticleer, Duke University yearbook, late 1930s volumes listing George A. McAfee of Ironton, Ohio, as a student and athlete. Internet Archive
Duke Alumni Register, various issues from the 1940s to 1960s, including entries noting McAfee’s address in Durham and his induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. Internet Archive+2Internet Archive+2
Journal of the annual convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of North Carolina, multiple volumes listing George A. McAfee of St Stephen’s, Durham, among lay delegates and officers, and Episcopal Churchwomen annual report listing Mrs George McAfee among parish leaders. divinityarchive.com+4Internet Archive+4Internet Archive+4
Durham Herald Sun photo indexes, including 1950 and later sheets noting George A. McAfee in captions of local civic and church photographs. durhamcountylibrary.org+2durhamcountylibrary.org+2
StatsCrew, “1940 Chicago Bears roster,” listing George McAfee, RH, Duke, Corbin, KY USA. Stats Crew
Pro Football Reference, “George Anderson McAfee,” player page with game logs and career statistics. Pro Football Reference+1
Pro Football Hall of Fame, “George McAfee” biography and career capsule, including draft details, high school, college, and statistical summary. Pro Football Hall of Fame+1
National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame, “George McAfee,” Hall of Fame player biography. National Football Foundation+2CFB Hall+2
Kentucky Pro Football Hall of Fame, “George McAfee,” biography emphasizing his Corbin hometown and Ironton High School. Kentucky Pro Football Hall of Fame
Sports History Network, “One Play McAfee Still Holds NFL Record Nearly 80 Years Later,” article on his punt return record. Sports History Network
Claire Noland, “George McAfee dies at 90; college, pro football Hall of Famer,” Los Angeles Times, 6 March 2009. Los Angeles Times+1
Matt Schudel, “George McAfee Dies; Hall of Fame Halfback for Chicago Bears,” Washington Post, March 2009, cited through later summaries. Wikipedia+1
New York Times obituary, “George McAfee, N.F.L. Hall of Famer, Dies at 90,” March 2009, referenced in later biographical compilations. Wikipedia+1
Duke Athletics, “Former Standout George McAfee Passes Away,” March 2009 memorial release. Duke University
National Football Foundation, “Hall of Famer George McAfee Passes Away,” March 2009 notice. National Football Foundation+1
Pro Football Hall of Fame, “George McAfee, 1918–2009,” news item summarizing his career at his death. Pro Football Hall of Fame
Ironton Tribune retrospective pieces, including “McAfee one of the greatest players in NFL history” and “McAfee: Ironton’s premier football family,” local articles on his life and family. The Tribune+1
Wikipedia and Military Wiki entries for “George McAfee,” used here as synthesized guides to primary references, especially on his later life and the assisted living investigation. Wikipedia+1
Windy City Gridiron and other Chicago Bears history blogs, including “Taking a Look in the Bears History Book: George McAfee,” drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts and league statistics. Los Angeles Times+1
Duke Chronicle, “Blast from the Past: George McAfee’s legendary Duke and pro football career,” retrospective on his college years. Duke Chronicle
North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, “George McAfee” biography highlighting his birth in Corbin and upbringing in Ironton. NC Sports Hall of Fame
General histories of Ironton, Ohio, especially works on its iron industry, early professional football teams, and role in the Appalachian region. roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com+3Wikipedia+3The Tribune+3