Centennial Scrapbook chronicles Bears history

Staley Da Bear

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Mar 16, 2019
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As a toddler, she accompanied her father and the team during the Red Grange barnstorming tour in 1925-26. In the book, she recalls Grange carrying her in front of him through train stations so fans would not recognize him and mob him for autographs.


In 1932, Mrs. McCaskey attended the NFL’s first indoor game, watching the Bears win the league championship by blanking the Portsmouth Spartans 9-0 at the Chicago Stadium. In the book, she remembers the unpleasant smell that permeated the building, saying: “The circus had been there the week before, and it still smelled of animals.”


The Centennial Scrapbook is not a chronological history of the Bears. It instead consists of five sections, with chapters on 1) Owners, management and coaches; 2) Seasons, games and championships; 3) Innovations and milestones; 4) Rivalries; and 5) Players.


“If you wanted to tell the line-by-line history of the Chicago Bears, you’d have to write a book the size of the old Encyclopedia Britannica,” Pompei said.


“We didn’t want to get bogged down in, ‘This happened in 1941 in April, this happened in 1941 in May.’ We kind of looked at it in a different way and said, ‘What are the most important things and the most interesting things in the team’s history, the most significant happenings and people?’ We tried to highlight those and we tried to present them in a form that was kind of lively and unpredictable so that people didn’t quite know what they were going to get when they turned the page.”
 
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