Edison lineman was coach
3/30/2003Edward Lair, a Toledo Edison lineman who coached youth and high school football for 40 years, died of pneumonia yesterday in Toledo Hospital. He was 73.
Mr. Lair, of West Toledo, was an Edison lineman 37 years, retiring in 1990.
From high school onward, football was part of his life. At Woodward High, he received nine letters in sports and quarterbacked the football team. In the Marine Corps he played for the football team at Parris Island, S.C., and for a semi-pro team in Charlotte, N.C.
He became an assistant football coach for the Whittier Trojans of the West Toledo Junior Athletic League in 1956. He became an assistant coach 20 years later at Macomber-Whitney Vocational-Technical High School, working for head coach John “J.J.” Johnson, whom he had coached in the late 1950s at Whittier. The team tied for a City League championship in 1979 and won the title in 1980 and 1983.
He was an assistant coach at Start High from 1991, when Macomber closed, to 1996.
Surviving are his wife, Delaura “Sis,” whom he married June 27, 1953; daughters, Gail Schwind, Karen Cousino, Linda Bilius, Leann Lohr, and Kelle Mahroum; brother, Clarence Lair, and 10 grandchildren.
Services will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday in the Bedford Funeral Chapel, Temperance, where the body will be after 2 p.m. tomorrow.The family requests tributes to Christ Lutheran Church, of which he was a member, or a charity of the donor's choice.