Norm:
You can submit this to the list on my behalf:
Here are pertinent excerpts from the December 10 feature in the Tribune:
A man for fall seasons
By Don Pierson
Tribune staff reporter
December 10, 2006
George Halas not only witnessed the dawn of pro football. For 62 years he
was pro football.
What Halas did was hire Grange and Bronko and Healey, Musso, Bulldog and
Atkins, Ditka, Butkus and Sayers, Luckman, Fortmann, Trafton, Payton,
Hampton. The names clank off the tongue. They rattle in the memory,
indelible Chicago Bears. George Stanley Halas, native Chicagoan, was not
collecting a ballet troupe. He was putting pads on the City of Big
Shoulders. Mike Ditka later hung the nickname "Grabowskis" on his 1985
version of the Bears because, he explained, "I don't think we go over too
big in Beverly Hills."
Pro football was already "invented" when Halas assembled his first team for
the A.E. Staley Co., starch manufacturers, in Decatur. The Chicago Cardinals
and Chicago Tigers were already playing in Chicago before Halas moved his
"Staleys" to the city at Staley's suggestion: "I think football will go over
big there."
Halas was not the only pro football owner sitting on a running board at the
Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio, when the forerunner of the National
Football League was formed in 1920. Yet it was the 25-year-old Halas who
soon became the face and driving force of the upstart operation, renaming
his team Bears to link them to the popular Cubs, signing the best athletes,
playing, coaching, winning, innovating, conniving, intimidating, exploiting,
surviving, manipulating, renaming the league itself when he thought National
Football League sounded better than American Professional Football
Association . . .
"Halash" was how it was pronounced when Papa Bear's parents immigrated from
Bohemia to the Pilsen neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side. He went to
Crane Tech, became a fan of the Cubs and played baseball better than other
sports, played so well that he signed with the New York Yankees and was in a
dozen games in 1919. He played right field but hurt a hip sliding, and the
Yankees decided they could get along with Babe Ruth.
With his background in civil engineering from the University of Illinois,
Halas got a job designing bridges for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy
Railroad until, he later said, the words of his Illinois coach, Bob Zuppke,
began to echo: "Just when I teach you fellows how to play football, you
graduate and I lose you."
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [CBQ] George Halas.
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:23:02 -0000
From: mikebennidict <mactach@sbcglobal.net>
Reply-To: CBQ@yahoogroups.com
To: CBQ@yahoogroups.com
Couple of weeks ago The Chicago Tribune Magazine had an article about
football, including Bears' history and it mentioned the founder of the
Bears studied architectural design and designed some bridges for the CBQ
before the Chicago Bears' founding .
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