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Tuesday, Jun. 02, 2009
Ex-Viking 'People Eater' became a people helper
By Merlene Davis - HERALD-LEADER COLUMNIST

Former Minnesota Vikings defensive end Jim Marshall, a member of the famous "Purple People Eaters," excelled in the wrong profession to realize his desire for anonymity.

"I try to stay quiet and anonymous until people like you open my life," Marshall said last week when I called. "I don't even go to games. I don't like to sit in the stands with people jumping up and down. I feel safer on the football field, where you know the traffic flow."

As I said, wrong career choice to avoid reporters.



From 1960, when he played for the Cleveland Browns, and from 1961 to 1979,when he played for the Vikings, Marshall didn't miss a game, playing a position that is known to chew up and spit out players in less than half that time. Of a span of 282 games, he started in at least 270 games consecutively, a record.

He earned the nickname Iron Man by reporting to work game after game despite injuries and illnesses.

I wanted to talk to Marshall about his induction on June 19 into the Kentucky Pro Football Hall of Fame, and I wanted to find out more about his Kentucky connection, one of the requirements for induction.

James L. Marshall, 71, was born in Wilsonville, a community near Parksville in Boyle County. It had been a hamlet for freed slaves after the Civil War.

"I was down there a year or two ago," he said. "We had our own school and church in Wilsonville. I went there to check on my relatives' graves and looked at the school my mother went to and my aunt taught in," he said.

It was a one-room school house that his aunt, Ella Mae Marshall, was working to preserve before she died in 2003.

"My aunt was the first special-education teacher in Boyle County," he said.

Marshall moved with his parents to Columbus, Ohio, when he was 5, but he said he never really left Kentucky.

"Every summer, I was back in Wilsonville with my grandfather," he said. His grandfather owned a farm there. "That continued until my grandfather died when I was 15."

It was his father and grandfather who molded him, he said.

"They taught me to go out and try to make things better," Marshall said. "If you can't improve it, don't touch it. I try to help people around me to realize their own personal health and to explore their growth and become good productive human beings in our society."

Marshall began playing football at Columbus East High School and later played at Ohio State University, where he became an All-American. He skipped his senior year in 1959 to play football with Saskatchewan in the Canadian Football League because that's what his buddies were doing. After a year there, he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns. He landed in Minnesota in 1961, where he ended his career after 18 years.

Ex-Viking 'People Eater' became a people helper - Sports - Kentucky.com