updated 8:59 p.m. ET April 4, 2007

His salary was $63.75 a month when he started.

And even late in Eddie Robinson’s successful, remarkable coaching career at Grambling, his football life was never exactly luxurious — or easy.

His dingy beige office was crowded with memorabilia, awards and pictures stacked in piles on the floor. His hours remained long — from the 6 a.m. cowbell ringing to the interviews he would schedule with reporters as late as 10 p.m. (Ever the gentleman, he was reluctant to say no, and he sometimes answered questions as he scribbled an autograph on programs, football cards and other items fans had mailed him.)

On recruiting trips he promised “the mamas” that their sons would go to class and to church.

He lived up to that promise.

“I remember Coach really, really concerned about graduating his players, preparing them for life,” said James Harris, now the vice president for player personnel of the Jacksonville Jaguars. “He’d come around with that cowbell every morning getting everyone up to go to class, go to church.”

Robinson, who died Tuesday at age 88 after years of battling Alzheimer’s disease, did whatever it took to make his players successful on the field and in life.

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He loved to tell the story about how, in 1945, the father of his two best running backs pulled his sons off the team, explaining he needed them to pick cotton. So Robinson took the entire team to the fields, harvested the crop and got his players back in the game.

Robinson often spoke, without rancor or bitterness, about the early days at Grambling, when there were no locker rooms or weight rooms and he filled coffee cans with cement for the players to lift; when he coached football, baseball and the cheerleaders; when he took care of the fields; built the concession stands; drove the bus for away games; did the work of a trainer; and even wrote game stories for newspapers.

In the end Alzheimer’s stole the present and much of the past from Robinson, leaving the once loquacious storyteller mostly silent. But even as his mind was failing he would light up at the mention of Grambling football; or Doris Robinson, his wife since 1941; or the country in which, until the civil rights movement took hold, often treated him as a second-class citizen.

“People talk about the record I’ve compiled at Grambling,” Robinson liked to say. “But the real record is the fact that for over 50 years I’ve had one job and one wife. I don’t believe anybody can out-American me.”

A month ago, Everson Walls donated a kidney to a friend — a selfless act that the former NFL cornerback said he might never have considered had it not been for the long-ago influence of Robinson.

Like Walls, friends and other former players talked about the personal lessons taught and examples set by a coach who wouldn’t let racism or a tiny budget stop him from becoming one of college football’s winningest coaches.

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Walls donated the kidney to his former Dallas Cowboy teammate Ron Springs, who was losing his fight against diabetes.

“We’re good friends, but if it hadn’t of been for Coach Rob, I wouldn’t have had the mind-set to help him,” Walls said.

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