Biography|Doug Parker — A Tight End Until the Knee Gave Out on This Campus

William Douglas Parker is often introduced as the man who put three airline brands together. The first place that trained him to take a hit was not a hangar. It was this small Methodist campus in Albion, Michigan.

He grew up moving with a Kroger manager father across Midwestern towns and finished high school in Farmington, Michigan. Football got him onto Albion College's roster as a tight end for the Britons.

A knee injury in his sophomore year ended the playing career. The campus stayed. He completed a B.A. in economics here in 1984.

Albion sits on land given in the 1840s for a Wesleyan seminary. Robinson Hall, rebuilt in 1907 on the site of the first Central Building, still faces the quad. Sprankle-Sprandel Stadium, a short walk south of the hall, is where the Britons play.

Parker has said, in later campus talks, that he left Albion unsure what work looked like. That uncertainty sent him two states south to business school instead of into a first job.

The pin is the college itself, at Robinson Hall, not a private house. The observatory on the east side of campus is a later building; the football field and the 1907 hall are the structures a 1980s student would still recognize.

No birth building is published for him. Farmington High and this campus are the earliest addresses that can be walked without guessing.

Photo: kennethaw88, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Josh Freed, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.