Charline Dauphin loves young folks, football, and big, good-looking coaches and athletes. So when she met Lamar University’s head football coach, Ray Woodard, last year at a function in Silsbee, where he has family and where she has lived for more than 40 years, she immediately had a soft spot for him. “He’s just a sweetheart,” Dauphin said. “I loved Ray immediately.”
She loved Ray Woodard so much that she and her daughter, Robin Dauphin, decided to make a donation to help revive the Cardinals’ football program after a 20-year absence. In honor of their gift through the Sidney and Charline Dauphin Foundation, LU’s new athletic complex will include the Charline and Robin Dauphin Football Office Suite. The $200,000 gift is part of LU’s $100 million Investing in the Future comprehensive campaign.
“I’ve known her family a long time, and I’m excited about having her be a part of our family here at Lamar,” Woodard said. “Any contribution is appreciated, but the fact that she’s already well connected to the program through the McGallion and Woodard families makes it very special.” Dauphin and her late husband, Sidney “Chief ” Dauphin, enjoyed attending Cardinal football games with friends years ago. He was a big, good-looking football coach and former player, too.
Chief Dauphin left the Silsbee High School gridiron in the late 1960s to concentrate on the business the couple created and built together for ore than 30 years, Texas Home Health. She had tucked away $10,000 from grocery money to start the business, recognizing the value of home health after seeing how it improved the life of her father, a double amputee. After Chief Dauphin’s death in 2000, Charline Dauphin sold the company that they had expanded from a single Silsbee office in a very young industry to a network of 37 offices across Texas employing more than 12,000 people. Their hard work for many years led to phenomenal business success and allowed her to generously support causes she cares about, including cancer prevention and programs to benefit high school and college students.
The Dauphin family has been fortunate not to have been touched by cancer, Dauphin said. She knows, however, that not all families are as lucky. A close friend of Regina Rogers, she has been an active supporter of the Julie Rogers “Gift of Life” program, which provides free mammograms and prostrate cancer screenings throughout Southeast Texas. Dauphin created the Charline & Sidney “Chief ” Dauphin Cancer Screening & Prevention Center at Memorial Hermann Baptist Beaumont Hospital. She also has generously supported M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where she serves on the University Cancer Foundation Board of Visitors with former president George H.W. Bush. She and other board members have been guests of the Bush family in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Along with her gift to LU’s football program, Dauphin last year provided support to Silsbee High School to build the Sidney “Chief ” Dauphin Silsbee Tiger Field House, a gift she knows would have pleased her husband, who coached at the school. “I hadn’t even planned that,” she said. “I’m pretty spontaneous.”
Dauphin sees athletics as an important part of education at both the high school and college levels. “I have seen so many kids as my daughter was growing up and when Chief was coaching that if they didn’t participate in sports, then they were out on the streets—smoking, drinking, whatever,” she said. If students play a sport, they will learn some discipline and, with any luck, be too exhausted to get into trouble, she said. Dauphin had no interest in playing sports when she was a student, but her lengthy practices as a Rangerette at Kilgore College had the same effect. “We would have done the same thing, but then we worked out for three hours every day . . . ” she said, recalling being too tired to move, much less run out to party. Athletics—whether football or some other sport—also teach high school and college students how to lose gracefully and “then they get a taste of that high when you win,” she said. “Many a time I’ve been out on the football field with tears rolling down my eyes right along with the boys.”
She hopes to be able to join in cheering on the Cardinals before long.
