Don Mohr had already lived a full life of accomplishment when he joined Wright State’s athletics staff in 1968 and was named the school’s fist athletics director in 1971. Not that he hadn’t been acting in that capacity already.

He was a tough guy to miss, and when he talked, you listened.

He played football, basketball and baseball and ran track at Cincinnati’s North College High high school. He was a Marine sergeant in World War II.

He coached high school teams, scouted for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds, became a school principal and joined the WSU staff in 1966 as head of financial aid, placement and veterans offices.

Mohr died last week at age 89.

“He was old school,” said Abdul Shakur Ahmad, who was Ricky Martin, a star of the third men’s basketball team in 1972, the first player on full scholarship. “And when I say old school, I mean he listened. That was old school. And, he had direction.”

Not everyone listened to Mohr, but he had a jolly personality and did the best he had with a budget today’s athletics directors carry as loose change in their pockets.

The Raiders didn’t even have a home gym (Mohr was in charge when one was built), and those postgame bag meals were often stale or soggy, and Ahmad remembers his sophomore year when the $15 monthly laundry money was taken away.

“You could do a lot with $15 in those days,” Ahmad said. “And there were no fast food restaurants around campus.”

Mohr directed the whole deal until 1981, when he retired (he previously had given up coaching the baseball team while initiating 14 sports at the school, including five for women.).

Rightly, he was the first inductee into the WSU athletic Hall of Fame and, until he fell ill a few years ago, was living a good life with wife Marian on Martha’s Vineyard. The two then moved to Atlanta to be with children (there were seven, plus 13 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren).

He left plenty behind, in all phases of his life.