Mickey Spagnola
FRISCO, TexasWhen you have been here for 25 years, you have seen a lot and met a lot of people, some still here, some who have moved on.
Made a habit of collecting these funeral memorial handouts over the years, attaching many of them to the walls of my cube. Ones for Larry Lacewell, Bob Ward, Phil Whitfield, Marylyn Love, Gil Brandt, Wade Wilson, Marshawn Kneeland. Others tucked away in folders like Joe Avezzano, Wade Livingston, John Weber, Pat Summerall, Murphy Martin, Dr. Pepe Zamarano, Bill Hitt and Frank Luksa, just to name a few.
But this next one adding to my collection is personal. Real personal, the guy starting his career with the Dallas Cowboys organization about the same time as me. He wasn't a player or a coach. Wasn't an executive. Wasn't a media colleague.
He was a bus driver. The bus driver. Maybe the most popular bus driver ever in the nation, and that is no hyperbole. He was the Dallas Cowboys bus driver. My bus driver as I liked to call him.
Emory Charleston Tyler, born Oct. 7, 1956, passed away on Jan. 17, 2026. But 69 years old. His wake was held this past Wednesday at Peaceful Rest Funeral Home in South Dallas. His funeral church service was Thursday at a small, out of the way Sure Foundation Baptist Church on the southeastern edge of Dallas. Never would have found it without Google Maps.
Maybe 75 people were in attendance, a mere fraction of the thousands of people who knew my man Emory. All those knew him as the Dallas Cowboys bus driver. The majority of those in the church knew him as husband, dad, father-in-law, granddad, brother, uncle and friend. Many a tear was shed. My multiple ones, too, over the past two days.
See, Emory saved my life. His own life. The lives of Cowboys TV department colleagues Foster Naylor and Jacob Walraven. By all accounts, when riding to training camp in Oxnard, Calif., and involved in a fatal crash when the Cowboys bus was knocked off the road by a van failing to yield the right of way 10 years ago this coming July 24, the bus should have turned over and thrown the four of us around like ragdolls. Emory would not allow that.
I digress.
See, Emory and I spent countless hours on the bus together, the majority of those driving cross-country to Cowboys training camps in Oxnard. Once, just the two of us crisscrossed the state of Texas on a roundabout way to training camp in San Antonio, turning what could have been like a four-hour trip into a three-day, two-night drive going through the likes of Mineral Wells, a stop at Fort Hood in Killeen, The Hill Country, the tiny town of Bandera, Laredo, Kingsville, Corpus Christi and finally Austin. You get the idea.
For sure, people along the way recognized the Cowboys custom tour bus, the blue star plastered on the side. But somehow, all new who was driving the bus. Emory. See, Emory spent a 22-year career driving the Jones family around. He drove first-round draft choices from the airport to the Cowboys' facilities. He drove the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders to appearances. He drove front office executives during training camps out to evening dinners. The bus is omnipresent.
And Emory used to drive solo out to training camps. Until 2008, when Jon Ingham in the TV department came up with this idea of myself and videographer Bill Curruthers riding along to document the trip to California, making stops along the way on the old Route 66 path at the Amarillo 72-ounce steakhouse, to Grants, N.M., to standing on the corner in Winslow, Ariz., to standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, to spending a night in Las Vegas. Emory driving. Bill shooting. Me writing,
Then after that trip to San Antonio, we expanded our excursion going out west to making stops at Cowboys Pro Shops and cities with Cowboys fan clubs along the way. We made stops to greet fans in cities such as Abilene, Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix and Los Angeles before ending with touching the Pacific Ocean waters on the shores of Ventura.
Just Emory, myself, Foster, who doubled as Rowdy during the appearances, and Jacob, our camera guy. Just us. And fans knew as much. Just us.
Nevertheless, hundreds would show up at our stops, and at every one Emory was the star of the show. The fans wanted his autograph. He had pictures of himself standing an arm's length from the bus he would sign. At one shopping-mall stop at a new Cowboys Pro Shop in El Paso, we started signing the same items together to save time. A policeman told us they estimated 400 people coming through. Got a picture of Emory and I signing a guy's two $1 bills. Another guy his recently, as of that morning, casted arm. Parents brought little girls dressed as Cowboys cheerleaders along. You name it, we signed it. Rowdy, too, was a hit.
Remember on one of the trips we were pulled over by a sheriff's patrolman just north of Vernon, Texas. Said we were "weaving." In reality, he was just nosy. Wanted to know if there were any players on the bus. Nope, just us. Were there any coaches on the bus? Nope, just us. Was Jerry Jones on the bus? Nope, just us. Cheerleaders? Nope, just us.
Emory was used to such inquisitions. Happened repeatedly. And before I knew it that afternoon, there was Emory, handing out T-shirts, hats and a cheerleader calendar to the patrolman, the middle-aged man asking to have his picture taken with Emory, arm in arm. That was Emory, America's bus driver, a true Cowboys goodwill ambassador. All fun and games.
Until that Sunday afternoon, as I documented back then.
The only four of us on the bus heading to our next appearance with Cowboys fans in Las Vegas on that gosh-awful Sunday, July 24 day, riding up Highway 93 between Kingman, Ariz., and Vegas eventually told one of the most dangerous highways in America when the bus got involved in a vicious accident, regrettably claiming the lives of the four people in a minivan that, according to the Arizona Highway Patrol, failed to yield the right of way while trying to cross two lanes of the highway and onto Pierce Ferry Road, the one that leads to the Grand Canyon.
This all has come flooding back to me, sitting there at the visitation, talking to Emory's son Edward on Wednesday. He knew some of the details his dad told him afterward, but not all of it. Sometimes traumatic events are too hard to recount. I learned that about my dad, who not only landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day II during WWII but was a POW four months in German prison camps. He spared us the details, maybe even to himself, when we were growing up.
So, I continued late Wednesday afternoon, paraphrasing what I had written three days after of our crash back then:
