Ole Miss Great Farley Salmon Passes Away at Age 88

Ole Miss lost one of its sports legends here Sunday, June 7, 2015, with the passing of Raymond Farley “Fish” Salmon, Jr., 88, life-long resident of Coahoma County, Miss., at the Mississippi State Veterans Home in Oxford.

Photo courtesy of Ole Miss

Born November 20, 1926, Farley was the son of Raymond Farley Salmon and Alma Bell Black Salmon. He grew up in Coahoma, Miss., and graduated from Clarksdale (Miss.) High School at mid-term in 1945 in an accelerated class designed for students who wished to enlist in the military during World War II. He served in the Army Air Corps.

Farley graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1949, where he was a member of Kappa Alpha fraternity, the Mortar Board and the M-Club.

Salmon was a member of the Ole Miss football team as a halfback in 1946 and 1947 and as quarterback under Coach John Vaught in 1948. He became the Southeastern Conference’s first Split-T quarterback in 1948 when Vaught brought the offensive formation to the South a year after leading his first Rebel team to their first of six SEC crowns.

Standing only 5-8 and weighing just 145 pounds, Vaught had some concerns about Salmon being big enough to run the Split-T.

“Coach Vaught never could accept the fact I was the No. 1 quarterback,” Salmon recalled for the 1976 book “Ole Miss Rebels, Mississippi Football” by William W. Sorrels and Charles Cavagnaro.  “He’d keep looking for somebody else, because I was so small.  When I moved to first string in the spring, I figured I had it in the fall.  But when we got back, I was on the third string.  I got upset, but it worked out pretty good.”

All Salmon did was lead Ole Miss to an 8-1 record, with the only setback coming at Tulane, which paved the way for Georgia to win the SEC with its 6-0 league record. Football wasn’t his only sport at Ole Miss as Salmon also lettered twice in basketball.

In 1993, he was inducted into the Ole Miss Athletic Hall of Fame and into the Clarksdale/Coahoma County Sports Hall of Fame in 2014. In 1996, he was honored by the Ole Miss Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame with its Distinguished American Award.

He married the former Stella Caroline Connell of Clarksdale in 1951. He founded Salmon Sales Company, an agricultural chemical business in Clarksdale and was later a sales executive with Display Sales of Minneapolis, Minn. At the time of his retirement, Farley was director of Sunflower Landing in Clarksdale, a substance abuse treatment center for adolescents.

Farley was a communicant of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Clarksdale, where he served as a vestry member, Senior Warden, lay reader, and Eucharistic lay minister. He was a past-president of the Clarksdale Chamber of Commerce and a member of the American Legion.

In addition to his wife of 64 years, he is survived by three children, Terre Sullivant (Henry) of Memphis, Tenn., Farley “Fel” Salmon, III of Jackson, Miss., and Caroline Mayo (Cal) of Oxford, Miss.; eight grandchildren, Connell Sullivant NeSmith (Eric) of Athens, Ga., Henry “Hank” Sullivant (Daisy) of Athens, Ga., Farley Salmon, IV (Suzanna) of Atlanta, Ga., Bryant Salmon of Jackson, Miss., Virginia, William, Callie and Thomas Mayo of Oxford, Miss; and three great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents and his brother, William Thomas (Billy) Salmon.

Visitation will be in the parish hall at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Clarksdale Wednesday, June 10 at 12:30 p.m. A memorial service will follow at St. George’s Church at 2:00 p.m.

Memorials may be made to St. George’s Episcopal Church in Clarksdale, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford, the Ole Miss Athletics Foundation in Oxford, or to the charity of the donor’s choice.

Courtesy of Ole Miss Sports Information