March came in rainy and chilly, which I don't especially like. It's going to be an extremely busy month for me, for multiple reasons, although the panic has not quite set in. Not yet. Probably next week, when it hits me that Zenkaikon is coming up fast and I need to be ready to present. Did you ever hear that advice about how, if you get nervous when public speaking, you should picture audience members in weird costumes? At Zenkaikon I don't have to picture anyone, because half the audience is in costume. I don't get very nervous anyway, but the costumes make it a little easier to relax.
But before I head to Lancaster and prattle about historic buildings and Japanese cherry blossoms and samurai visiting the White House (yes, those are my topics this year), we'll take a run up to lovely Sullivan County and talk about a guy who played football. That is, of course, putting it mildly.
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| The marker stands in Forksville near the intersection of PA routes 154 and 87. |
What I had never heard was that he was native to Pennsylvania.
Harold Edward Grange was born in Forksville on June 13, 1903, to John "Lyle" Grange and the former Sarah "Sadie" Sherman. The Grange family seems to have been big on nicknames. Lyle was the foreman of three lumber camps. In those days, that's pretty much what Forksville was - approximately 200 people living in various lumber camps, felling the timber with which Sullivan County is so abundantly blessed. Red, as he came to be known, had two older sisters named Norma and Mildred, and was joined three years later with the addition of younger brother Garland. The family was relatively comfortable in Forksville.
Unfortunately, when Red was five, his mother died from complications of typhoid fever. Lyle, devastated, packed up the three younger children and returned to his home state of Illinois, so that they could stay with members of his family while he saved up money to buy a home. I'm not sure why eldest daughter Norma remained in Forksville; I can't find any information on the matter. She died just six years later, though, so it may be that she was too sickly for the relocation, or maybe she just wanted to stay with her mother's family. In any case, Lyle eventually did buy his younger children a house in the community of Wheaton, where he became the police chief.
It was in Wheaton that Red began to discover his athletic gifts. He earned a whopping sixteen varsity letters at Wheaton High School, in football, baseball, basketball, and track and field. (And here I've always been pleased with my one!) His junior year, the Wheaton football team was undefeated, thanks in part to Red's 36 touchdowns. His senior year was almost a repeat of this, but he was knocked out in one game and that probably threw off the whole vibe. In fact, he was left unconscious for two days after that game, which must have terrified everyone who knew him. He also did exceptionally well in his track and field events of high jump and running, winning state championships and coming close to breaking the world record at the time for the 100-yard dash.
Somehow, while he was doing all this, he still found time to help support his family financially. He worked part time delivering ice, which not only gave him great core strength for his athletics but also led to his first sports nickname - "the Wheaton Iceman."
Red continued to dominate athletics when he enrolled at the University of Illinois. He did a little amateur boxing, and played basketball and ran track, but he shone on the football field. Among the highlights, during his sophomore year he played in seven games and led the team to an undefeated season, just like back in high school. In 1924, he came to widespread attention when his team took on the Michigan Wolverines, who were then the national champions. Red scored five touchdowns, four in the first twelve minutes of the game. In his coverage of the event, Chicago American's sportswriter Warren Brown dubbed Red "the Galloping Ghost," because his speed and his agility, which some compared to that of a dancer, made him almost impossible to catch.
Nevertheless, his first season with the Bears was moderately spectacular. On Thanksgiving Day, he made his Bears debut, bringing with him the single largest crowd ever to attend a professional football game up to that point. The Galloping Ghost's admirers came out by the thousands to watch him take to what we now call Wrigley Field, and anyone who had previously doubted the validity of the NFL was silenced by the ticket earnings. The game was an unusual tie - neither team scored a single point - but Red's impact on the sport was already indelible. The Chicago Bears were propelled into the national spotlight. One writer described him as "four men rolled into one for football purposes."
Red himself had a very modest philosophy about his gifts. "If you have the football and 11 guys are after you, if you're smart, you'll run." And run he did. He was also making bank; his lucrative contract guaranteed him a whopping $3,000 per game, plus a percentage of the tickets sold. That sounds pretty good to me even now, but in 1925 dollars that was one gargantuan paycheck.
Red continued his professional career until 1934, although a severe knee injury caused him to sit out the 1928 season. He didn't play for the Bears all of those years, due to an attempt to create a new team called the Yankees, but most of his pro years were played for Chicago. Arguably his greatest play came during the 1933 championship, when he made an impressive tackle; it prevented a touchdown run by one of his teammates from being interrupted, and thus saved the game for the Bears. Upon retiring from play in 1934, he spent a few years as the team's backfield coach.
Off the field, Red had a few other things going. He appeared in a pair of movies, One Minute to Play and A Racing Romeo, leveraging his fame to generate box office revenue. He also starred a series called The Galloping Ghost and a vaudeville tour called C'mon Red. He found performance to be more challenging than athletics, as he was a bit shy and unused to speaking publicly, but wrote in the first of his two autobiographies that he loved the experience and that it gave him something football didn't.
In private life, Red romanced a young woman named Helen Morrissey. They never married, but they did have a daughter together, Rosemary, born in 1928. She ended up being Red's only child, although she seems to have died before him; she's not listed as a survivor in his obituary. He later met Margaret "Muggs" Hazelberg on a plane, when he was a passenger and she was a flight attendant. They married in 1941 and remained together for fifty years. After leaving his football career entirely, he worked as an insurance broker in Chicago and spent two years as commissioner of the National Girls Baseball League - yes, the one from A League of Their Own. He also served on the board of trustees of the University of Illinois for four years. In 1978, he became the first person other than an actual referee to make the coin toss at the Super Bowl. He and Muggs eventually retired to Florida, where Red eventually developed Parkinson's disease. He died there on January 28, 1991, at the age of 87; he was cremated, so there is no grave where fans can pay their respects. Muggs died in 1997 and was also cremated.
Today, Red is remembered as possibly the greatest Chicago Bear ever and one of the best football players in both collegiate and professional history. ESPN ranked him #1 on their Top 25 list of college football players. Illinois hosts a junior college bowl game every December known as the Red Grange Bowl in his memory, and at the University of Illinois, a 12-foot statue of him stands outside of their Memorial Stadium. At his old high school in Wheaton, the football field is named in his honor, and is home to the Red Grange Tigers. And in the Chicago Bears lineup, his old number of 77 has been retired, so no one needs to try to live up to the untouchable legacy of the Galloping Ghost.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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