Bob Cottrill: Deacon ‘one of the greatest persons’

Bob Cottrill, Class of 1951, who lives in Melbourne, Florida, would put in a call to Harold “Deacon” Duvall, the late legendary Fairmont State football coach, whenever Bob knew he was coming to Marion County.

Bob met Deacon when the Monongah grad was in 7^th grade at Rivesville, where Deacon was a teacher and a football coach. “I wanted to play for him so badly,” Bob said, but his family situation caused him to move to Monongah and Thoburn School.

Bob was back in Rivesville in 8^th grade, then returned to Monongah for high school. There was a year off, too, at Monongah before Bob graduated in 1951.

Deacon wanted Bob to play for him at Fairmont State but, unlike West Virginia University, you had to pay your own way without a full ride scholarship. That just wasn’t going to happen.

Deacon wrote of losing Bob as a Falcon: Bob “was one of the best I ever coached.”

For his part, Bob said, Deacon “was a man who looked after his players. He was one of the greatest coaches, but he also was one of the greatest persons that I’ve known. He was very important to me.”

So Bob went into the service, and the government paid for his college education later.

By then, with a wife and child, football was out of the question for Bob.

So he graduated from Fairmont State in three years, began a teaching career in biology and general science and coaching at Ohio's Wapakoneta High School – astronaut Neil Armstrong’s hometown.

He advanced to helping the State of Ohio Board of Education with school financing and implementation of fair busing, from his office in Parma. Then in 1982-88 he was director of business administration handling such things as bus routing while assistant superintendent of Brunswick, Ohio schools.

Bob’s grandson, Chris Barnes, son of Bob’s daughter, Rhonda, works for Fidelity Mortgage and Title out of Akron. 

Bob also has sons Rob in Atlanta and Randy in Tampa.

Bob’s first wife, Barbara Jean Henderson Cottrill, a 1955 Fairmont Nursing School graduate who was nursing manager for Suburban Cleveland Hospital, which later was absorbed into the Cleveland Clinic system, passed away in 2007.

Bob married again in 2011, to Thelma from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a friend of Bob and Barbara.