Ronald Louis Gratz

Ron was born in Morristown, Tennessee on July 16, 1942 to the late James and Josephine Gratz. In his youth he was a Boy Scout, and was proud to have earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

When Ron graduated from Morristown High School, his father had a future mapped out for his eldest son. Step one was to march Ron down the road to Carson Newman College and choose his classes for him. Never one to do what he was told, Ron promptly flunked out and joined the Air Force. Stationed at Rhein Main Air Force Base in Germany for three years, Ron was on hand to see the Berlin Wall go up—no doubt to keep him out.

After the Air Force, Ron returned to Carson Newman, this time paying his own way and making his own decisions about his coursework. He graduated with honors, while also lettering for the varsity football team. While at college Ron met Dorothy Ruth Hull, and they married in 1968.

After graduation, a coaching job took Ron and Dot to Marietta, Georgia, where they lived close to her parents. Two years later, Ron was done with Dot’s parents, but not with football. He happily accepted a job as assistant football coach to his younger brother Bobby at the Webb School of Knoxville, bringing the newlyweds back to East Tennessee.

Ron took his brother’s place in 1973, beginning a thirteen year tenure as head football coach of the Spartans. His crowning achievement was winning Webb’s first-ever state championship in 1981 with an underdog team he lovingly described as “small, but slow.” In 1983, Ron put his winning strategy on paper, publishing his only book: A Coach's Guide to Developing an Explosive, Multi-Set Offense.

Over the years, Ron coached a number of sports and held a variety of positions at Webb, including science teacher, Athletic Director, and Dean of Students. Early on he even drove the late bus, taking home students who had to stay after school for practice. Toward the end of his Webb career, Ron combined two of his great passions—watching football and talking about football—as the first color commentator for Webb’s online game broadcasts.

Among his many hobbies, Ron painted, photographed, and made pen and ink drawings of the places he and Dot visited. Another of his favorite hobbies was turning the television to whatever sport he could find—the more obscure and unwatchable the better—turning up the volume, stretching out on the room’s only couch, and immediately falling asleep. He also enjoyed pretending that his hearing aids weren’t working so he didn’t have to pay attention to what people were saying.

Throughout his life, Ron took up several sports like canoeing, skiing, biking, and golfing, spending a fortune on equipment before moving on to the next sport a few years later. More successfully (and less expensively) he won more than eighty medals in swimming, shot put, discus, and javelin at the Senior Olympics.

If the playing field was Ron’s second home, late in life he found a third home on the stage. His very first role—as Benjamin Franklin in a Webb School production of 1776—brought the house down. Chasing that same theatrical high, Ron went on to perform in many more plays with the Actors Co-op and the Knoxville Children’s Theater. In a brief and surprising television career, he appeared in the background of a few commercials, and narrated and acted in a handful of locally-produced true crime shows that aired on cable. In one, he played a handyman who killed everyone in his building with gas, a role his family can tell you he’d been practicing for all his life.

Ron loved living in East Tennessee and raising his family here. He is survived by his wife Dorothy Gratz; son Alan Gratz and his wife Wendi; son John Gratz and his wife Laurie; and granddaughters Josephine, Claire, and Madeleine, who were the true joys of his life. He is also survived by his sister Rebecca Gratz Hickman, her husband Thomas Hickman, their son Kevin Spiller, and by his sister-in-law, Brenda Gratz. Collectively, they inherit Ron’s large collection of bowties, his roughly 1,000 ball caps, and a lifetime supply of popsicles and animal crackers.

Ron had a habit of keeping a pocketful of pennies and pitching them various places after “rubbing his DNA on them,” with the idea that he was leaving a little bit of himself behind wherever he went. He shouldn’t have bothered. Ron’s real legacy is the joy and humor he brought to the lives of everyone he ever met, from the waitresses he chatted up at Cracker Barrel to the thousands of people he befriended in his thirty-plus years as a teacher and coach.

Receiving of friends will be held on August 25, 2025 from 6-8pm at Berry Highland Memorial Funeral Home.

In lieu of flowers, Ron’s family asks that donations be made in his name to the scholarship fund at Mission of Hope at missionofhope.org/donate, or St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital at stjude.org/donate.