Former Central High School football players Alan Pressley, seated, Bob Standifer, left, and
Ernie McCarson join Central principal Finley King, right, outside the colorful front doors to the
school in Harrison.Alan Pressley remembers the day he took Stan Farmer to a planning meeting for the Central High School C-Club’s first reunion in 1990.
The 1976 graduate of the Harrison school walked into attorney Jerry Summers’ conference room with Farmer, the longtime football assistant coach and assistant principal and then principal, and saw a group of “older gentlemen” with scowling looks — at least in Pressley’s mind. They all had graduated from the school’s longtime home on Dodds Avenue and weren’t as embracing of the Highway 58 version.
Pressley admits to feeling “intimidated” at the time. But the 1975 team captain was one of “Farmer’s boys,” as were each of them, and a connection was made. One of the old guard ended up giving Pressley his chair.
“Now he’s one of my best friends,” said Pressley, who works nuclear outages for TVA. He visited the school this week with a couple of other old football Purple Pounders, 1965 graduate Ernie McCarson from the old school and Bob Standifer from the class of 1981. They got a preview of the school’s latest efforts to strengthen the connection of the two campuses through visible reminders of Central’s notable history, in athletics and other areas.
That has been a priority of principal Finley King, a 1983 Central graduate, who claims to bleed purple. He’s beginning his sixth year as principal of his alma mater after five years as an assistant principal.