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Last Updated on 8/11/00 By Tom
Prefling
| TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Longtime football coach Rollin T. Gridley,
whose players included Frank Borman of the U.S. space program, died
Tuesday. He was 96. Gridley served as football and basketball coach variously at Tucson High from 1927 through 1947. He later held administrative positions with a number of Tucson schools. Borman, who circled the moon as commander of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, praised Gridley in his autobiography as having been a pivotal person in his life. "He just stood for all the right things,'' Borman, the former president of Eastern Airlines who now resides in Las Cruces, N.M., said in an interview this summer. ``Discipline was a hallmark.'' Gridley is a member of the Arizona Basketball Hall of Fame and the Arizona Coaches Association Hall of Fame. In June, the Tucson Unified School District governing board voted to name the football stadium at Tucson High Magnet School after Gridley. A middle school already bore his name. That he stayed in Arizona was almost happenstance. He had been en route to University of California at Berkeley in 1924 but became caught up in University of Arizona coach J.F. ``Pop'' McKale football program and stayed. Gridley is survived by daughters Anderson and Jeanette Johnson, both of Tucson, and five grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were pending Wednesday. |