BRITAX FRONTIER CARSEAT

Ken Griffey Sr., seated at center, with the Donora High School Dragons 1967 basketball section champions.

By Scott Beveridge, Staff writer
sbeveridge@observer-reporter.com
DONORA – Donora High School’s basketball team hit the courts in the 1968-69 season looking grim after being undefeated the previous year in its section.
Senior Ken Griffey Sr. was the only returning player, and he showed up with a broken nose.
In a jiffy, the school’s industrial arts students built him a mask to protect his injured nose in hopes that he might be able to play out the season, said Fran LaMendola of Donora, who coached the team.
“He played with that the rest of the year and broke the rebounding record at Donora,” LaMendola said of the 6-foot-tall athlete who would go on to make professional baseball history.
“And also, he was the one who led us when we upset Monongahela for the section title,” he said of Griffey, 56, who will be making a rare public appearance in his hometown area this weekend to be honored by his alma mater.
“That was 1969. One thing about him, he was a tremendous competitor,” LaMendola said.
Griffey was drafted in the 29th round in the 1969 amateur draft by the Cincinnati Reds. The left-handed right-fielder made his career debut Aug. 25, 1973.
Griffey and his son, Ken Jr., made history in 1989 by becoming the first father and son to play in the Major Leagues at the same time. The younger Griffey, at age 19, became the youngest player in professional baseball when he was drafted as the No. 1 pick straight out of high school by the Seattle Mariners.
A year later, the elder Griffey joined the Mariners and they became the first father and son to appear in the same starting lineup. That same year, the father and son made history again by hitting back-to-back homers in a first inning.
George Kenneth Griffey Sr. was born April 10, 1950, into a large, poor family in what then was a booming steel town along the Monongahela River. Like many borough streets, McKean Avenue Extension, where he grew up, has become lined with rundown houses and empty lots three decades after the mill closed.
Donora became part of Ringgold School District in a 1964 merger with Monongahela and other neighboring municipalities. The school, which has no shortage of graduates who have played professional sports, will induct Griffey Saturday into its sports booster club’s hall of fame. Joining him for the same award will be Joe Montana and Fred Cox. Ringgold also will honor Stan Musial, a baseball hall of famer, whose poor health will not allow him to be present at the ceremony.
Montana, a Monongahela native who graduated in 1974, was quarterback for the world championship San Francisco 49ers, and Cox, a Carroll Township native and 1957 graduate, is the all-time leading scorer as a field goal kicker for the Minnesota Vikings. Cox also invented the Nerf football. The former athletes will speak to Ringgold students today in a series of assemblies.
The Griffey family lived directly behind Loretta Manus, and Manus said Griffey has long considered her to be his “adopted mother.”
“He’s one of the most humble, low-key men I know,” said Manus, 74, who now runs a program that helps to keep teenagers in trouble with the law off the streets.
Many of Griffey’s relatives followed him to Cincinnati at the start of his career. But he often quietly returns to his hometown when his son, who now plays for the Reds, plays in Pittsburgh, said Karen Polkabla, who was a year ahead of Griffey in school and now works as principal of Donora Elementary Center.
He also plays in a local golf tournament every year, Manus said, and attends the Cook family reunion each summer in the Mon Valley. But, she said, his last public appearance in Donora was in the late 1970s or early 1980s when the borough dedicated a new baseball field in his name.
Recently diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer, Griffey has had a long reputation for being shy.
“He’s not about fanfare,” Manus said. “He is just Kenny, the sweet, lovable man who went off to Cincinnati.” Neither money or fame tarnished his character, she said.
“This leopard never changed his spots.”

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