Biography explores the life of UNM and Dallas Cowboys legend Don Perkins

If you were living in New Mexico in the mid-20th century you probably remember the name Don Perkins.

Perkins’ name — and his fame — were usually associated with the game of football.

He had a brilliant collegiate career as an All-American running back for the University of New Mexico in the late 1950s.

In the ’60s he played in the National Football League as an All-Pro fullback with the Dallas Cowboys, rushing for 6,217 yards over eight seasons.

Perkins had earlier attended West High School in Waterloo, Iowa where he played football and basketball and was on the track team. He was honored as the school’s Most Valuable Athlete of 1956.

The recent biography, “Don Perkins: A Champion’s Life” by Richard Melzer, tells in greatly annotated detail Perkins’ life from impoverished childhood through his football-playing years and later in his varied business endeavors.

He was a network and local TV sportscaster. He served under two New Mexico governors.

In Albuquerque, where he and his family lived after his NFL playing days, Perkins was a community relations counselor for the police department and served as a volunteer member of the boards of a number of local nonprofits.

He acted on local stages, including giving one-man Chautauqua presentations as abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

For many years he was an in-demand public speaker across the country.

And he worked as a long-haul semi-truck driver, a dream job he had long wanted to try.

These pursuits demonstrated Perkins’ range of skills and interests.

The book’s introduction points to a related issue — Perkins’ identity.

The issue arose at a preliminary meeting Melzer had with Perkins in early 2019 to discuss the proposed biography. The two were sitting at a table at a northwest Albuquerque senior living center where Perkins was residing. With them were Perkins’ daughter Karen Walter and her husband Bucky.

The author remembers looking at his planned book outline for an opening discussion topic. “But just as I began to ask my first question, Don politely interrupted to declare, ‘I don’t know who I am,’ ” Melzer recounts in the introduction.

What exactly did Perkins mean by that? It left Melzer unsure just what was the nature of the identity problem, if it was a problem, that Perkins raised.

Melzer writes that he initially assumed Perkins was thinking about identity in terms of the many paths he had taken over his life.

Then again, maybe not. Melzer believed Perkins felt comfortable with those paths “because they matched his skills. … He was exploring things and taking on new challenges.”

Melzer also speculated that maybe Perkins didn’t know his true identity because others were opening doors for him in the business world rather than him choosing job options more to his liking.

Perhaps Perkins’ identity issue was tied to his gradual loss of memory, largely due to the head injuries he suffered playing football, the author writes. Or maybe a combination of those factors.

At the end of the book Melzer writes that Perkins “may never have known who he truly was, but he had certainly made the world a better place in his quiet, private, dignified quest for identity.”

He was a kind, humble, modest person in the opinion of the many people Melzer interviewed and of others whose comments Melzer read in his research.

“He was the sort of man who put you at ease immediately,” Melzer said. “He was an amazing person for so many reasons. One was his ability to get along with all kinds of people of many races. He was so trusting and sincere.”

In sum, Perkins was a gentleman. Melzer said he never encountered anyone in his research who had an unkind word to say about Perkins.

There was, however, one time when Perkins lost his cool. It was a moment in his family’s swimming pool, according to what Melzer said he learned from Ira Harge, a Lobo and professional basketball star and Perkins’ good friend. Harge heard Perkins raise his voice to admonish his kids: “Quit splashing!”

Perkins died last year at the age of 84.

Melzer is a professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico Valencia campus.