User talk:Brian Knight Bishop/Herb Ruby

Herbert E. Ruby II (1918–1990) was a minor league baseball player, a pitcher, for one season (1941) with the Staunton Presidents of Staunton, Virginia in the Virginia League. He went on to become a high school football, basketball, and track coach in Carroll County, Maryland.

Ruby was born in Champaign, Illinois on August 27, 1918. He originally attended the University of Illinois, then transferred to Bridgewater College in 1938, where he played baseball and basketball for the Bridgewater Eagles. While a student and athlete at Bridgewater, Ruby was awarded three letters in baseball and two in basketball.

Following his graduation, during the summer of 1941 he pitched for the Staunton Presidents of the Virginia League, based in Staunton, Virginia, a city near Bridgewater and the birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson. He was a teacher during the 1941-1942 school session in Rockingham County, Virginia.

Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor, he finished out his teaching term and enlisted in the military on May 23, 1942. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, where he was a B-24 pilot with the 15th Expeditionary Mobility Task Force reaching the rank of first lieutenant. He completed 50 bombing missions over Europe.

After the war he became a high school teacher, football, basketball, and track coach; starting out in 1946 at the Manchester High School (the 1932 building is now known as the Manchester Elementary School). In 1947 he took a teaching and coaching job at Westminster Senior High School in Westminster, Maryland, where he would continue to work until his retirement and where he eventually became a school administrator. In his first year of coaching he took the Westminster High Owls basketball team to the 1947 Maryland state title in the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association Championship. In 1951 he led the Owls football team to a bitter loss against Baltimore City College in the semi finals for the Maryland State Championship. Notable football titles included wins of the Cumberland Valley Championships in 1957 and again in 1959. He went on to build a 78-61-11 win-loss-tie career record in football coaching.

The football field at Westminster High School was named Ruby Field in his honor on November 6, 1964 and was posthumously rededicated on September 7, 2007 at the field that had been relocated in the 1971 move of the high school. In 1989 he was inducted into the Maryland Football Coaches Hall of Fame. He was also honored by the Greater Baltimore Chapter of the National Football Foundation's Herb Armstrong Service to Football Award. He died in Westminster, Maryland, on April 21, 1990. He was inducted into the Carroll County Sports Hall of Fame (as a charter member) in 1994  and the Bridgewater College Athletic Hall of Fame in late 2000. The Carroll County Times newspaper bestows an annual Herb Ruby Award to a male and a female high school senior student athlete who "best feature a balance of academics and athletics".