| Cruisin' the Past |
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| Cruisin’ the Past by Ed Dooley |
The following is an excerpt from an article entitled "Dunbar School Alums Gather To
Remember The Bad Old Days Of Segregation". It appeared in a Tucson Weekly called
"Color Bind" and was written by Tom Danehy. The article was dated December 7, 1999:
.... One of the students of that time, Morgan Maxwell Jr., the son of the principal,
remembers the odd contrasts.
"We had a nice house; Dad made the same amount of money as the principals of the other
schools in the district. But there were a lot of things we couldn't do. Couldn't eat at
restaurants, and I do like to eat".
"But there was a strip of black-owned businesses down on Meyer Street. There were
restaurants we could go to there, but we couldn't go to Chinese or Mexican restaurants.
Seems kinda silly, but that's just the way things were back then. Those were the rules of the
game."
When Maxwell got to Tucson High, one of his football teammates was Frank Borman, who
would go on to become an Apollo astronaut and head of Eastern Airlines. Borman and
Maxwell were roommates on the road and worked summer jobs together at Yosemite
National Park. In his autobiography, Borman tells of the time the Badger football team went
down to the border town of Douglas to play the DHS Bulldogs.
Arriving in town that day, the team went to the ornate and historic Gadsden Hotel on G
Avenue for a pre-game team meal. As the food was being prepared and served, someone
from the hotel noticed that the light-skinned Maxwell was actually, as they said back then,
"of African descent," and told the coach, Rollin T. Gridley, that Maxwell, the only black on
the team, was unwelcome in the restaurant.
Without making a fuss, Gridley told the entire team to get up from where they were seated
and to walk out of the restaurant and hotel. They went and grabbed some meat and bread
at a store and had a little picnic in a park before waxing the Douglas team on the gridiron.
It was an episode that Borman says shaped his entire life in terms of race relations and the
dignity and strength of conviction with which his coach handled the matter.
Gridley, who also has a local school named for him, is still alive and will turn 96 this month.
Note: My Gridley passed away in 2000.
| Rollin T. Gridley |