Family and friends said goodbye to Carol Warmath Dillow on Friday. The funeral service at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Edina was near the family home where she grew up as the daughter of former Gophers football coach Murray Warmath.
Those who attended the service and later the reception at Edina Country Club remembered Carol for her love of family that includes husband Dick and their children. They also recalled her passion for football and knowledge of the game.
Family friend Peter Franzen has heard stories of a young Carol seeing light flickering from a movie projector late at night in the Warmath home on Bruce Avenue in Edina. Her father was analyzing football film while most people were sleeping. “She would crawl up on his lap,” Franzen said.
Warmath had a high football IQ and some of that was passed on to Carol who was a Gophers fan for six decades. Franzen said she understood the technical side of the game and could see a big play coming before it developed.
“She should have been a football coach,” Warmath said. “She knew more about football than most anyone I’ve ever met.”
Carol even made her wedding come after football. She and Dick were married on a Gophers football Saturday in October of 1967, FOLLOWING the game.
Carol, who died from ovarian cancer last month, wasn’t hesitant to express herself and was protective of her dad. If someone was bashing her father’s coaching, the critic might receive an earful from Carol.
That loyalty was at least partly forged during her teenage years when she and the family endured intense criticism of their father. In the late 1950s the Gophers were losing Saturday after Saturday. There was a movement to fire Warmath, and the lunatic fringe dumped garbage on the coach’s lawn in Edina while on campus he was hung in effigy.
The story turned from garbage to roses, though, when Warmath followed a 2-7 season in 1959 with a national championship in 1960 and a trip to the Rose Bowl. He coached the Gophers to another Rose Bowl in 1962 and a Big Ten championship in 1967, the school’s last title.
Warmath coached his 18th and final season at Minnesota in 1971. Although Carol had moved away by then, she returned for each of her father’s final home games.