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Pat Dye on his friendship with Harper Lee: 'She was a hero to me'
Former Auburn football coach Pat Dye relaxes at his home at Crooked Oaks in his den in 2002. (Joe Songer/jsonger@al.com)
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on February 19, 2016 at 6:21 PM, updated February 19, 2016 at 10:25 PM
They seemed an unlikely pair, the former Auburn football coach and the Alabama literary legend 13 years his senior.
But many people might not know that Pat Dye and Harper Lee — the "To Kill a Mockingbird" author who died Friday at 89 — were great friends. Dye wrote of their late-in-life friendship in his 2014 memoir "After the Arena" and told the story again in a radio interview on Friday.
Dye said he first read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 2007 or 2008, long after his coaching career was over. He said he was so impressed with the book — as well as Charles J. Shields' "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee" — that he made it a point to meet the author in person.
"I wouldn't call myself an avid reader, but I do read," Dye said Friday on "Sports Drive" on WNSP FM-105.5 in Mobile. "When I got through with ('To Kill a Mockingbird'), I thought 'that's a nice little Southern story.' And then I read her (biography), 'Mockingbird.' And she didn't have that much to do with it, but the guy who wrote it did a great job with the research. Once I got through with it, I thought, 'you know, I'd better go back and read that book again.' When I got through reading it the second time, I laid it down and I said 'I've got to go see Harper Lee.'"
Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died at the age of 89.
Dye — who lives in Notasulga — reached out through a niece to David Brown, an Auburn graduate and Monroeville pharmacist who was close friends with Lee. Brown agreed to take the old football coach to meet the venerable author.
After touring through town and seeing many of the sites described in the book, Dye visited Lee at the nursing home in which she was living after suffering a stroke.
"I heard she told (Brown), 'I don't know why he wants to come and see me, I don't know a thing about football,'" Dye said. "I said, 'well just tell her I don't know a thing about literature either, but I want to come see her.'"
Dye met with Lee, and the two quickly found out they had more in common than they might have thought. Lee was an avid Alabama football fan, and had known legendary Crimson Tide coach Paul "Bear" Bryant through the state and national celebrity banquet circuit in the 1960s and 1970s. Dye worked for Bryant at Alabama from 1965-73.
Dye said Lee told him to call her "Nelle," her given first name and what all her close friends called her. The two visited for nearly an hour, but became fast friends.
"We had a lot more to talk about other than just a book or football," Dye said. "I got comfortable with her and she got comfortable with me. We were having a big time laughing and kidding. I told her 'you know Nelle, you're not really an obnoxious Alabama fan.'
"She said 'I've got a brother and a sister that went to Auburn. (Sister) Alice and I went to Alabama." (Lee received her undergraduate degree from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, but worked toward a law degree at Alabama).
Dye said the two "just had a delightful time." The two kept in touch in person and via letters for several years after that.
"It wasn't long after I got back home that I got a sweet letter from her, talking about how much she enjoyed the visit," Dye said. "I guess I visited a half a dozen times over the years. ... We just hit it off. I liked her and she liked me. I'd always take her a little libation. She liked to have a little toddy late in the afternoon. And she loved chocolate candy, so I would take her a sackful of chocolate. She always looked forward to me coming."
And to this day, Dye continues to marvel at what his friend accomplished with "To Kill a Mockingbird" and remains in awe of her legacy in the state and around the country.
"She was a free-spirited lady," Dye said. "And the thing that impressed me ... for (her) to grow up in Monroeville and have the wisdom to see what was going on around her and enough wisdom and talent to put it on paper and then have the guts to publish it in 1960. I lived in the 60s. I was playing football and going to Georgia in the 50s and 60s. I know what it was like. Anybody that's got that much guts, I want to go meet them. She was a hero to me."
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