A True Trailblazer
July 24, 2006 05:10 PM | General
July 29, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Garrett Ford remembers like it was yesterday his first visit to Morgantown, West Virginia. It was an eye opening experience for a young black man from Washington, D.C., growing up in the mid-1960s.
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| This fall marks Garrett Ford's 36th year of service at West Virginia University.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
“We drove across that old bridge at Cheat Lake and it was shaking and then we came up the hill, around the bend and we were in Morgantown,” Ford said. “It wasn’t that impressive when I came here. There was nothing for blacks to do.”
The West Virginia University athletic program was already integrated with Roger Alford and Dick Leftridge starting on the Mountaineer football team, and George King bringing in five African-American basketball recruits in 1965, but there were still only a handful of blacks on campus at the time. When Ford arrived in Morgantown in the fall of 1964, the country was still only 10 years removed from the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision forcing schools to abolish segregation.
“There was no place to get haircuts and no black music on the radio,” Ford remembered. “There were only four black girls on campus and no one even thought about doing interracial dating back then.”
In spite of that, West Virginia University was well protected from the racial strife that the rest of the country was enduring at the time. The freedom marches and the police dogs of Birmingham, Ala., were just distant images on television. What enamored Ford so much about Morgantown was the friendly nature of its inhabitants and the poverty he witnessed from both races.
“You’d go to a store and people would say ‘thank you.’ That’s what sold me on coming here. In a big city like Washington, D.C., you don’t care about the person next to you. Here people speak to you.”
Ford also encountered something he had never seen before.
“I had never been in a place where I had seen poor white people,” he admitted, mentioning that all of the whites he came into contact with while growing up in D.C. were in positions of authority. “I never saw white garbage collectors.
“There were poor white people living with poor black people up in those hills and they were eating off the same plate,” he said. “They were in the same situation.”
It was then that Ford realized that even though there were not many blacks living in Morgantown in 1964, the residents here had a real sensitivity toward people of color.
DeMatha Star
Garrett Ford was the star football player at DeMatha High School in Washington, D.C., at a time when powerhouse Catholic schools were just starting to recruit black athletes from the inter city. Morgan Wooten coached both the football and basketball teams then and he was in the process of developing DeMatha into one of the nation’s premier high school programs, particularly in basketball with players like Bernard Williams, Sid Catlett, Kenny Carr and Adrian Dantley.
“I went 20 miles a day to DeMatha,” Ford said. “They arranged for me to get a ride. Guys would come from Georgetown and pick me up from my neighborhood. It cost me $5 a week in gas. Morgan arranged that for us.”
Even though Ford was getting noticed by big-time schools, he had no clue he was one of the top prep players in the country and the recruiting target of schools like Syracuse with its great running back tradition.
“Morgan’s thing was you never got your letters until your senior year,” Ford mentioned. “I didn’t know if I was hot or cold. I didn’t even know Syracuse was interested in me.”
His first face-to-face meeting with West Virginia University coach Gene Corum was in the kitchen at DeMatha High School.
“I was getting phone calls from a guy from West Virginia named Gene Corum. I never answered the phone,” Ford laughed. “When I was at DeMatha I had to work in the kitchen washing dishes to pay for my lunch. Then I went to class during second period.
“One day I was washing dishes and putting them through the machine and Coach Corum and Coach (Dick) Ware just showed up and told me they were from West Virginia University.”
Ford knew next to nothing about the school.
“I knew about Jerry West but I didn’t know anything about West Virginia and I didn’t want to go and visit,” he said. “A guy named Bob Gallagher called me and asked if he could pick me up. They told me I could bring some buddies with me so I picked about five of my friends and we drove all the way to Morgantown.”
Equipment manager Carl Roberts met Ford at the Hotel Morgan.
“He showed me around town,” Ford said.
Once Ford decided to attend WVU, he came to school completely unprepared for what he was to encounter when the Mountaineers traveled to other places in the Southern Conference.
“No one here prepared us for anything,” Ford said. “I wasn’t prepared for the name calling that we got. Richmond was very bad. They were the Richmond Rebels and they ran through a Confederate flag.
“They would sing, ‘I wish I was in the land of cotton …;’ we went to Citadel and a guy told (the black players) we couldn’t be out after six o’clock,” Ford recalled. “Virginia Tech -- we called it VPI back then -- it was bad, too.”
Ford remembered Morgan Wooten giving his high school team some advice before they traveled to play schools in Pennslyvania where they encountered name calling and racial epitaphs. It was advice he used at West Virginia when the Mountaineers played at those old Southern Conference schools.
“Morgan would say to us, ‘Now you know what’s going to happen -- they’re going to call you names. What you do is you go out there and bust out an 80-yard run and shut them up,’” Ford said.
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| Garrett Ford became the school's first 1,000-yard rusher with 1,068 yards in 1966.
WVU Sports Communiations photo |
After sitting out his freshman year in 1964, Ford played one season for Corum in 1965 before the coach stepped down. Replacing Corum in 1966 was Jim Carlen and his offensive coordinator Bobby Bowden – two young men from the Deep South.
WVU's first-ever 1,000-yard rusher was especially suspicious of Bowden, a native of Birmingham – at the time infamous for being the nation’s most unfriendly city to blacks.
“This is the mid-1960s, Bull Connor had his dogs in Birmingham and you’ve got the Freedom Marchers,” Ford said. “Coach Bowden had never coached a black kid until he came here. The first thing he’d say to us was, ‘How ya doin' boy?’ He had that Southern accent and back then Black Power (Nation of Islam) was getting popular.
“Well, he’d say ‘boy’ and he meant nothing by it,” Ford continued. “My attitude was like, ‘You’re a white man from the South and you don’t know me.’ That was the way I was coming at him.”
Bowden, in an effort to win Ford over, invited him to dinner with his family.
“I had never been in a white person’s house for dinner and here was this man from Alabama and he wanted me to come over to his house to eat with his family. I didn’t want to go but I had to because he was my coach,” Ford said. “I went to the house and I’m bouncing Terry and Tommy on my knees – they were just little kids. They turned out to be the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.”
It was a relationship that blossomed and has continued to this day.
“If Maryland is playing Florida State tomorrow I’ve got four tickets and I’m sitting next to Ann Bowden (Bobby’s wife),” Ford said. “That’s how they are.”
A True Trailblazer
Just as Gene Corum helped integrate WVU athletics in 1963, Bobby Bowden became the first Mountaineer coach to hire an African-American assistant when he asked Ford to join his football staff in 1970.
Ford was working in Boston at the time after a brief one-year professional stint in 1968 playing with the Denver Broncos in the old AFL.
“I sent him a note congratulating him and he called me back and asked me if I was interested in coming back to be an assistant coach,” Ford recalled. “I came here in February of 1970 for $9,600.”
It was Ford’s plan to stay just a couple of years until his children reached school age and then he would move his wife Thelma, his daughter Tracie and son Garrett Jr. back to Washington, D.C.
“Then they got to school and we said, ‘OK, when they get to junior high we’re going back.’ We lived in an apartment for a long time and moved two or three times within the complex and then my wife said, ‘We’ve got to get a house.’”
Making the decision easy for Ford to stay was the fact that Bobby Bowden was such a wonderful man to work for.
“You did your spring recruiting and then you were off all summer,” he said. “You came back in August and you prepared for the year. He is the person who set the tone for me.”
Still, Ford admits there was a passing of the culture when it came to black assistant coaches.
“I didn’t have a lot of authority and I couldn’t put my guys into the game. They brought me here because it was the time to bring blacks into coaching,” he said. “That’s just the way things were then.”
Ford also remembers some uncomfortable moments at fundraisers traveling throughout the state in the early 1970s, especially at functions where alcohol was involved.
“Some guys would get drunk and they would say cruel things,” he said. “I was the only black person at some of these things and I had to be subjected to that.”
Those moments remain permanently etched in his mind.
“Those things draw you closer to your family,” he says.
Ford decided to enter athletic administration in 1978 when he convinced WVU athletic director Leland Byrd that the football program needed a full-time academic counselor. This season marks his 28th year in that role.
“We’ve graduated some kids here,” he says proudly. “Penn State didn’t want them and they couldn’t get into Pitt so they came to Morgantown. We’ve made a good living off those kids.”
Ford has made his living helping others.
“It’s amazing just how many kids have gone through here during the past 36 years,” he said. “There have been so many and I’m getting old -- it’s getting hard to remember all their names. But I’ve really enjoyed it.”
Ford says Morgantown is a much more diverse place than it was 42 years ago when he first arrived in 1964.
“Things have changed a great deal,” he says. “It’s a great place to raise a family – and live.”
