Investigating the 1919 Black Sox Scandal
Famous faces proliferate in the materials in Chicago Collections, many sports-related, whether as professional athletes themselves or as celebrities lending their caché to a sporting event. Our first image,
a letter detailing a private investigator's undercover operation, showcases how sports can sometimes make players (in)famous. The investigator from Hunter's Secret Service writes to the White Sox team lawyer and describes a fishing trip with "F," code name for Oscar "Happy" Felsch, center fielder on the 1919 White Sox team.
Felsch was one of the eight baseball players banned from the game for life for allegedly conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series by losing on purpose to the Cincinnati Reds. Other team members included Arnold "Chick" Gandil, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and George "Buck" Weaver. A grand jury inquiry led to a criminal investigation in 1921, where all players were acquitted though they were permanently banned from baseball by the MLB's first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. This ban included all post-career honors also, like being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Football in Chicago
Most professional athletes in Chicago have had less checkered careers than the 1919 White Sox team, including our two featured football stars. First, we have an image of
Otto Graham playing football for Northwestern during a game in the early 1940s. Graham had a distinguished career as a
football, basketball and baseball player at Northwestern, and after a brief naval career during World War II played briefly for a professional basketball team in Rochester, N.Y. before being recruited by the Cleveland Browns. As quarterback in Cleveland,
he led the Browns to league championship games all ten years he was there, winning seven times. Graham was deservedly inducted into the Pro Football and College Football Halls of Fame, and went on to a distinguished coaching career after he retired from the NFL in 1955.
You can see another famous Chicago football player, Dan "Danimal" Hampton, in the
Image Gallery below, pictured at the Brookfield Zoo with bears of all sorts. Hampton was a defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears from 1979-1990 and was an instrumental part of the Super Bowl XX team in 1985.
Louis Sullivan: Athletics and Architecture
Other materials in Chicago Collections have celebrities who may or may not have been athletic experts, but they were trying their best! Another very famous Chicagoan participated in a track and field contest in 1876, but that is certainly not why we recognize his name.
Architectural genius Louis Sullivan is featured in a program here from an athletic contest sponsored by the Chicago Football Club. The
Chicago Tribune reported on the event, promising "
the entertainment will be novel and interesting."* As you can see, both Louis and his brother Albert participated in the 100 yard run and 16 lb. shot put, but Albert dominated athletically that day. Louis Sullivan would have been 20 years old at this event, already working as an architect and only four years shy of becoming partners with Dankmar Adler. Adler and Sullivan would go on to design many famous buildings in Chicago and elsewhere,
including the Auditorium Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Carson Pirie Scott Building, the Guaranty Building and many others.
Another piece of annotated sports memorabilia from an artist is Ernest Hemingway's season pass to the 1915 Oak Park High School basketball season, shown in the
Image Gallery.
Hemingway's high school sports career is discussed in more detail on the Academics and Athletics page.
Mike Royko: Journalism Takes a Break
One of Chicago's favorite curmudgeons,
Mike Royko, is pictured here participating in a penny pitching contest in the Chicago Daily News parking lot in 1971.
Royko was a native son of Chicago and started as a journalist at the
Daily News in 1959. After the
Daily News folded in 1978, Royko wrote for the
Chicago Sun-Times until 1984 and then the
Chicago Tribune until his death in 1997. While at the
Daily News Royko both won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary and also published a best-selling book about our subject just above, titled
Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, which led to a short-lived boycott of the local grocery chain National Tea Company (now Jewel Supermarkets) when they refused to stock the book.
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