Charles “Charlie” Brannon was a dedicated teacher, a kind and gentle man who loved sports and made a career of his life-long passion for football.
He played football at Brown High School and later at Georgia Tech. When he graduated from college he began teaching and coaching football in the Atlanta Public School System.
“I’ve enjoyed my career,” Brannon said in a 1989 Intown Extra article just before his retirement. “A long time ago when people in high school were talking about what they were going to do with their lives I felt like I was going to do something that I felt happy doing. I think I found that something. I’ve been happy all these years. How many people can say they played a sport they love and worked in it all their lives?”
His love of the game began early.
“He would pay in the yard when he was growing up with some of the neighborhood boys, which he really enjoyed,” his wife of 55 years Ethel Brannon said. “They would go to a park and just throw the ball with each other.”
Daughter Linda Barrett of Lilburn said he was all sports all the time. He would watch college and professional football and the Atlanta native’s love extended to baseball as well, especially the Braves.
“I remember as a child when Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run he called all the kids in there so we could watch it,” she said. “He said ‘this is history in the making, you’ve got to watch it.’”
Charles “Charlie” N. Brannon, 83, of Stone Mountain, died at home July 16 of complications from congestive heart failure. A funeral service was held Saturday at 2 p.m. Eternal Hills Funeral Home and Cremation handled arrangements.
Barrett said people could tell her father loved God just from talking to him. He was the quiet type, but when did talk he had something to say worth hearing, and because of that people listened.
That’s part of what made him a great teacher.
Family said he worked in the Atlanta Public School System for 35 years, 20 of which he spent at Frederick Douglass High School coaching football and teaching geometry.
Barrett said her father, who was naturally good with numbers and never said a bad word once in his whole life, loved being a teacher and a coach.
“He loved Douglass as much as Douglass loved him,” she said.
Friend and colleague Juanita Long said Charlie Brannon was kind, godly and gentle, but firm.
“(Students) knew what he said, he meant,” said the retired math department chair at Douglass with a laugh. “He was the kind of teacher you just love having.”
She said he was dynamic and dedicated with an interest in all of his students. He taught in such a way that the children could and would learn.
“He was always very cooperative in every effort to make sure that the children were getting what they needed to go forward in their life – the math as well as other things that he would teach by example.”
In addition to his wife and daughter, Charlie Brannon is survived by sons, Harold Brannon of Decatur and Joe Brannon of Athens, Ala., and eight grandchildren.
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