Red Grange

The Full Biography

Red Grange. Football player. The Wheaton kid who made a college Saturday into a profession, then spent the long remainder as the man who had proved a league could pay.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a ghost in an Illinois jersey, five touchdowns in an afternoon, a nickname that sounds like a pulp novel. The Galloping Ghost. What the still cannot show is Harold Edward Grange of Forksville, Pennsylvania, a father who moved the boys to Wheaton after a mother died, an ice-hauler who built the legs on a wagon, and a man who signed with the Chicago Bears the day after his last college game and made professional football a thing a crowd would buy.

He was born on June 13, 1903, in Forksville, Sullivan County, in the lumber country of north-central Pennsylvania. His mother, Lillie, died when he was five. His father, Lyle, a foreman who had worked timber, took Harold and his brother to Wheaton, Illinois, and became the town’s police chief. The house was small. The job that formed the body was not football. It was ice. In the summers he hauled seventy-five-pound blocks for a local company, up stairs, onto wagons, into iceboxes. The Wheaton Iceman was a paycheck before it was a nickname. The legs that would look like weather on a Saturday were built on a weekday delivery route.

At Wheaton High he scored seventy-five touchdowns in four seasons. He was already a local climate: halfback, defender, a redhead the town could point at. He also ran track and played basketball; the body was a weekday tool before it was a Saturday one. The University of Illinois, under Bob Zuppke, took him in 1922. Zuppke’s teams were precision and misdirection, the Notre Dame shift answered with a Midwestern geometry. Grange was the thing the precision was built to spring. As a sophomore in 1923 he scored twelve touchdowns and was named All-American. In 1925, his last college autumn, he was All-American again and the country already knew the number on his back. Three seasons, thirty-one touchdowns, a Heisman era that had not yet invented the Heisman. The country had seen the afternoon that ate his government name and wanted another.

October 18, 1924, Memorial Stadium, Champaign. Illinois against a Michigan team Fielding Yost had made into a fortress. Four touchdowns in the first twelve minutes: 95 yards, 67, 56, 44, each a different kind of run, each a different angle through a defense that had arrived undefeated. A fifth rushing score came in the third quarter. A sixth, on a short pass, finished the day. Illinois 39, Michigan 14. Grantland Rice and the rest of the sporting press needed a noun. They made a ghost. He was a junior. He was already a product. Three-time All-American. Thirty-one college touchdowns. Number 77, which Illinois would retire because there was no honest way to issue it again.

The door to the paying game was C. C. Pyle — “Cash and Carry” to the men who watched him count — and George Halas of the Chicago Bears. College football in 1925 was a civic religion. Professional football was a Tuesday business in half-empty parks, a league that could not yet explain itself to a man who had Saturday tickets. Grange played his last Illinois game against Ohio State on November 21. He signed with the Bears the next day. The college authorities were appalled. Zuppke was appalled. The amateur church treated a paycheck as a stain. The gates were not appalled. They were curious.

Thanksgiving Day, 1925, ten days after the last college snap: 36,600 people filled Cubs Park — the yard that became Wrigley Field — to see him debut against the Chicago Cardinals. He scored on a touchdown run that afternoon. That was the first proof. A second Chicago date followed, then the East. December 6 at the Polo Grounds in New York: estimates ran to 70,000, some higher. The Giants had not known a gate like it. Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit — eight games in twelve days, a human knee treated as a renewable resource. Then south and west: Coral Gables, Tampa, New Orleans, a Los Angeles Coliseum that filled like a college Saturday, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle. Some weeks they played four times. He collected something on the order of $100,000 that winter, a fortune a college god was not supposed to touch. He had made a Saturday into a business. That is the career, more than any single run. The league that now fills Sundays sits on a 1925 signature.

In 1926, when Pyle and the Bears could not agree on terms, Pyle and Grange founded a rival American Football League and put a team called the Yankees in New York. The league lasted a year. The rest of it failed; the Yankees had enough of him to limp. In 1927 Pyle’s club was absorbed into the NFL. Midway through that season, against the Bears, a pileup wrecked Grange’s knee. He tried to finish the year. He could not. He sat out 1928. The ghost was gone. What came back in 1929, in a Bears uniform again, was a professional who had to learn a second job. He became a defensive back of real seriousness, a man who could still run a little and could now take a ball away. He was not the 1924 weather. He was a player who had already changed the ledger and was willing to stay on it.

The Bears of the early 1930s were Halas’s argument that the league could be a city institution. Bronko Nagurski was the other climate in the backfield: a fullback who ran as if the line were a suggestion. Grange, no longer the 1924 weather, became the man who could still take an angle and, on defense, find the ball. In 1932 they won an indoor championship at Chicago Stadium against the Portsmouth Spartans, a strange, fogged game on a shortened field laid over a hockey rink, 9–0. In 1933 they won the first official NFL Championship Game, 23–21 over the New York Giants at Wrigley Field. Late in that game, with the Giants driving, Grange knocked down a pass intended for Dale Burnett in the end zone that would have beaten them. The save is less famous than the Michigan afternoon. It is the file on the man after the knee: not a ghost, a professional who still knew where the ball was going. He retired after the 1934 season. He was thirty-one. The legs that had hauled ice and then hauled a league had done their work.

Hollywood had already tried to cash the nickname. One Minute to Play (1926) and a handful of other pictures — A Racing Romeo, a serial called The Galloping Ghost — put the redhead in a costume and asked him to be himself. He was not an actor. He was a drawing card who understood a contract. He sold insurance in Chicago, first as a name on a door and then as a man who actually wrote policies. He went into a booth. The voice that had never needed to explain a run now explained other men’s runs, college on Saturday and the Bears on Sunday. That, too, was work. The amateur church had wanted him to remain a Saturday myth. He chose a living.

I played football the only way I knew how. If you have the football and eleven guys are after you — if you’re smart, you’ll run.Red Grange

The turn is the signature, not the Michigan afternoon. A lot of college gods stay amateur in the official story. He took the money and forced the story to change. Fond memory that keeps only the ghost is a cleaned room. The barnstorm is the file. So is the knee, and the decision to come back as a different player rather than a waxwork of 1924.

He married Margaret Hazelberg — Muggs to the rooms that knew them — on October 13, 1941. The marriage held forty-nine years. Friends from the Bears describe a professional who knew what he had been and what the knee had ended, and who did not require the room to keep calling him a ghost. The Grange in a Florida chair was a man who had already been a climate and was now a founder the league could telephone. Both are the life.

The later years

After he left the field he did not become a monument on a hill. He opened a Chicago insurance office and treated it as a shop, not a hobby for a famous name. He broadcast Bears games and college Saturdays on radio and then television, a calm voice that did not try to outrun the film. The booth was a second career with its own craft: where to put a pause, when to let a crowd be the sentence. He stayed at it into the early 1960s. After the 1963 season he gave the microphone up. He had already had a heart attack in 1951. The body that had hauled ice and then a league was going to be managed, not dared.

He and Muggs made a life at Indian Lake Estates, east of Lake Wales, Florida — golf, fishing, a boat, a house that did not advertise the tenant. They had been in the neighborhood since the late 1950s, a move that looked like retirement and was, in practice, a quieter version of the insurance years. Neighbors got a polite redhead who would talk football if asked and would not if not. He did not tour as the Ghost. He did not need to. Writers who made the drive found a man happy to credit the ice wagon and unwilling to restage twelve minutes in Champaign for a tape recorder. He would say he had just been a boy who could run. He meant it. The Halls came to him anyway. In 1951 he was a charter inductee of the College Football Hall of Fame. In 1963, when Canton opened the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he was in the first class — Halas, Thorpe, Nagurski, the men who had made a Tuesday business into a league — the living proof the new building was about a real commerce and not only a scrapbook. Illinois had already put 77 away. The Bears would do the same. He accepted the plaques the way a man accepts a receipt.

People who wanted the 1924 weather were sometimes disappointed by the old man. He would say he had just been a boy who could run. He would credit the ice wagon when a writer asked about strength. He would credit Zuppke when a writer asked about design. He would credit Halas when a writer asked about the league. He did not perform bitterness about the knee. He had gotten the money, the gates, the second career, a marriage that lasted, and a Florida afternoon that was not a stadium. That was enough. The NFL, by then a Sunday religion, kept telephoning the founder when it needed a sentence about the beginning. Super Bowls, television contracts, a league that no longer had to apologize for a paycheck — he had lived long enough to see the barnstorm become a calendar. He gave the sentence. He went back to the lake.

In the 1970s and 1980s the old film of Michigan still played on winter television, grainy, a ghost in a leather helmet. He would watch if someone put it on. He did not require it. Muggs kept the house. He kept the boat. Canton called when it needed a first-class face. Illinois called when Memorial Stadium wanted the afternoon remembered. He went, he smiled, he left. The amateur church that had hated the 1925 signature had, by then, made peace with the profession. He did not gloat. He had been right in November of that year and had spent the rest of a long life declining to say so loudly.

He was in the hospital from the summer of 1990. Pneumonia, a long decline, a body that had already survived one heart. He died on January 28, 1991, in Lake Wales. He was eighty-seven. Muggs was there. The ghost had been a young man’s twelve minutes. The old man was the signature, the tour, the save in 1933, the booth, and a house that did not need a nickname on the mailbox.

After he was gone

Every Sunday gate still pays him a tax. Every college star who leaves early still walks through a door he cut in 1925. Illinois still claims the afternoon. The Bears still claim the tour. Canton still has him in the first photograph. The ice wagon is the correction.

He came out of Forksville, hauled ice, ran through Michigan, signed a contract the amateur church hated, filled parks, wrecked a knee, won two titles as a different player, sold insurance, called games, and died in Florida as the man who had proved a league could pay. If you only remember the ghost, you have the still. If you remember the wagon, the signature, and the tour, you have him.

Portrait: National Photo Company Collection (Library of Congress) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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