She made it there, but with her heart and soul and Southern charm, she would have made it anywhere. Perian Conerly, wife and widow of New York Giants quarterback Charlie Conerly, brought all of her Delta spunk, wit and grace to New York City. But before carving out her spot in The Big Apple, the Delta lady from Clarksdale was just a smart, athletic girl with the whole world in front of her.

Perian was always popular with the boys about town. But in the summer of 1947, one man in particular caught her eye—and stole her heart. Charlie Conerly met Perian at the local swimming pool and never let her out of his sight from that day on. “He was five years older so our paths didn’t cross in school particularly, but of course I knew he was the big football star at home,” she recalls.

Conerly had served as a Marine in the South Pacific and was now back at Ole Miss to finish his education and football eligibility. After courting her for nearly a year and asking her to marry him on Christmas Eve of 1948, he had to wait nearly a year and a half more for her to graduate from MSCW. So he put in his first year of professional football with the Giants and soon scurried home with his Rookie of the Year Trophy.

Marrying into Mississippi Delta football royalty in 1949, Perian would soon carve out a kingdom, careers and countless loyal friends and family. Recently awarded her own star in the Clarksdale Walk of Fame, the football legend’s wife, columnist, author and charismatic leader of the football wives’ club would be the first to tell you that those around her were the real “stars.” Charlie Conerly and Perian Conerly are numbers six and seven in the walk that includes playwright Tennessee Williams and bluesman Son House. But the journey to her own star would take her on an annual 1,200-mile jaunt for a four-month stay in New York City.

In 1949, the National Football League was not a giant sport. Very few folks outside of the cities who had teams kept up with the league and many of Perian’s friends and neighbors never knew where she went from September through December. But the “country girl” of a 15,000-population town adapted rather quickly to the 15-plus million city folks. “It was a little overwhelming, but I learned to take advantage of all the niceties,” she says. “I learned to utilize the subway to get downtown, and I believe I could still get around on the subway today if I had to.”

Not one to be lost in the crowd, Perian helped make the football players’ temporary home, The Grand Concourse Hotel, into a small, friendly town you might find on Highway 61. Her neighbors included Giants player families and those of the New York Yankees. “It was the ‘business and social center of the Bronx’ according to their stationery,” she says. “If you were standing at home plate at Yankee Stadium what you saw over the outfield fence was the Concourse Plaza. It was lovely place with a park across the street, a really nice neighborhood.”

At Yankee Stadium, which started hosting Giant games in the mid-‘50s, the Yankees were annual hosts of the World Series. “We had to stay in regular rooms each year while the Yankees were in the World Series before we could move into the apartments,” she said. “You could walk down a couple of blocks to World Series games.”

While taking in countless Yankee World Series wins, she missed one sensational outing due to her generosity. “We had tickets to one in 1956,” she remembers. “Just before we left, Don Heinrich, Charlie’s understudy, came in moaning that he had never seen a World Series game, so I said, ‘Here take my ticket.’ And that was the day that Don Larsen pitched his perfect game. I was just sick. When they came in they were just smiling.”

With neighbors that included Frank Gifford, Pat Summerall, Kyle Rote, Sr. and many other names known to sports fans, Perian was always considered one of the boys. “I met her when I was traded to the Giants back in 1958, and we all lived at the Grand Concourse Hotel,” says Hall of Fame Broadcaster Pat Summerall. “I thought to myself, what a nice Southern lady, and I was very much impressed at the time of how friendly and gracious she was.”

Gifford recalls the southern hospitality extended by the Conerlys. “I was a first round draft pick from Southern California and most of the team thought I was a fruitcake,” Gifford remembers. “They were the only ones who were genuinely nice to me.”

With no children of her own, Perian quickly became “Aunt Perian” to the rest of the players’ children. Part den mother, part sorority leader, but always the leader of the pack, the queen of New York daily sampled what her new kingdom had to offer. “She was the queen of the Giants family for all those years Charlie was there,” says Kyle Rote, Jr. “She was the queen of that era for us. She certainly lived out what a woman could do in an otherwise man’s world being a writer.”

Scouring the city during the day, Perian and her friends saw many Broadway shows and met plenty of movie stars after games at historical bars such as Toots Shors, The 21 Club and PJ Clarke’s. In her autobiography, Backseat Quarterback, she writes of meeting Rock Hudson at an after-game get together and stated out loud, “You are beautiful!”

A Dash of Eudora with a Sprinkle of Red Barber

With the hometown folks wondering what the Conerlys were up to every fall, Perian came up with an idea to help “educate” the home folks with a weekly “behind the scenes newspaper column” that would give folks a look into the Conerly’s world. “It usually had stuff like who was dating Kim Novak and where we would eat and the expectations for the team,” she says. “I wrote for the Clarksdale paper and then it was picked up by the Jackson Daily News.”

The hometown column opened doors for Perian to write a more serious nationally syndicated column hitting on more important sports issues of the day. A woman sports columnist was unthinkable in the male dominated sports writing world. But her “one of the boys” personality kept her in line for the hottest news tips in and out of the locker room.

Heinrich and others helped repay Perian’s generosity by providing locker room gossip about who was dating whom, but the final print always had to get the “Roach’s Approval.” She says, “I’d have Charlie copy read it for silly mistakes, sit down at the typewriter and then I would mail it.”

The columns were so popular that two book publishers approached her about writing a book detailing her life. Backseat Quarterback was published in 1963 and again in 2003. The book offers a 253-page view of 1950s era New York and a look into the real life of the Giants football family.

“That was just another indication of her leadership,” said Rote Jr. “She was willing and smart enough to have figured out that people would be interested in that perspective of being the wife of the quarterback of the number one team in the country.”

Leader of the Pack

Perian charmed the rest of the Giant kingdom from the owners down to the back-up quarterback. But it was her time invested in the families of the players that friends remember most. “She was Aunt Perian to me,” says Rote. “She wasn’t biologically linked, but football linked.”

Affectionately known as “Rookie” by players and family alike, Rote, the former professional soccer player and now sports management professional from Memphis enjoyed the “fraternity” of players and families that spanned two major league sports. “In her gracious, magnificent way, she decided to invest her life in all of the ‘nieces and nephews’ and that was driven in great part by the Mara family [owner of the Giants]. The Maras were a high-moral, high-family value people. Everything we did involved the families.”

Those values instilled into the young Rote would come to fruition in a confession to Perian 50 years later at a sports banquet. Rookie had discovered he could make money around the hotel by performing various tasks. He had also discovered the hotel gift shop and its abundant supply of Hershey bars and various treasures. When the jobs weren’t producing chocolate income, Rookie derived a scheme. “I used to sell Charlie Conerly autographs, Frank Gifford autographs and my father’s autographs on the street by the hotel,” Rote Jr. says.

But soon those few handwritten treasures were gone along with the Hershey bars. “I ended up doing their autographs myself and I sold fraudulent autographs to satisfy my chocolate addiction to Hershey bars,” confessed Rote Jr.

The Real First Families of Football

Growing up 30 miles down the road in Drew, Archie Manning knew everything about the New York Giants and Charlie Conerly, thanks to his own dad.

“It’s funny, I tell people now, with Eli playing for the Giants, it’s hard for folks in New York to believe that I grew up a Giants fan,” Archie says. “The reason I grew up a Giants fan was because my dad was a Giants fan and the reason my dad was a Giants fan was because of Charlie Conerly. My dad pulled for Mississippians. He didn’t mind if they went to Ole Miss, Mississippi State or Southern Miss, if you were from Mississippi that’s who he pulled for, and he pulled for the Giants because of Charlie Conerly.”

And now the entire Manning clan has adopted Perian as many other families have across the Delta. “She’s a great lady,” he adds. “I think the world of her; she’s a dear friend. She and Charlie used to come to New Orleans a lot when I was with the Saints.”

Manning’s description of the “royal couple” was in line with their other close friends.

“Charlie was very reserved and didn’t say a lot, but when we’d go to dinner you could get more out of him, but Perian always had lots of personality and great conversation and kept us up-to-date on what was happening in the Delta.”

With his youngest son, Eli, now in charge of the franchise that the Conerlys helped groom and build into a champion, Archie recalls Perian’s confidence during their 2007 season Super Bowl win. “She called Olivia and me a week before the game and she just said, ‘You know we’re gonna win’ and I said, ‘Gosh, I sure hope so, Perian.’ She said, ‘Oh, no. They’re gonna win because this is Super Bowl 42 and Roach (Charlie) was number 42.’ She was a prophet because the Giants did win.”

And the Manning ties to Perian are weaved through Rebel great Eli, explains Archie. “Eli has a new home in Oxford and he has a picture of Charlie that Perian provided of Charlie at Ole Miss with no face mask on his helmet and in his 42 jersey.”

Still in Charge

Though she’s long since retired from her daily reign in The Big Apple, Conerly still travels about the country and takes in several Giants games at the stadium and on the road, all from the luxury of the owner’s box. “Lulu [her goddaughter] and I go up a couple of times a year to see the Giants play and we enjoy that,” she says.

And she continues to enjoy life and the people that come with it. “She never met a stranger,” Summerall says. “Once in a while you encounter people in life’s journey that you remain friends with no matter if see them or not. I’ve always felt like she was a very good friend and if I needed something, she’d be here in a minute.”

Still caring for her kingdom, is Perian Conerly, the Delta Queen of New York. DM