Jr: 1643 books

One sportswriter predicted that the Philadelphia Eagles of 1962 would host the NFL Championship. In a preseason summary a columnist assessed the main weakness of the club as its ground game. The 1960 Eagles had won the NFL title with a victory over the Green Bay Packers. The 1961 team went as far...

Marshall Teague was an early NASCAR driver who drove Hudsons to victory in the early 1950s. My e-book looks at Teague's performances from news clippings that were published in newspapers of the era. Teague and Herb Thomas were teammates in Hudson cars during an era when this American marque was...

Fred Lorenzen was an outsider in the world of stock car racing. A midwesterner, he came from Elmhurst, Illinois, near Chicago. Most all of the stock car racers were southern born, where the tradition was that boys began to drive when they were 10 or 11 years old. Fred became so successful in NASCAR...

Jake Hehl, the subject of my e-book, was a German-American athlete from Brooklyn's Williamsburg section. He was a standout all-around athlete at Brooklyn Prep High School. Hehl's father was a bartender, whose parents were native Germans. Jake married a German-American woman and, in later...

Ed Holley pitched in major league baseball during the years of the Great Depression. He came up with the Chicago Cubs in 1928. However, his best years were with the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1932-1933. In those seasons he accounted for 24 wins, pitching for a team that finished annually in last place....

Nell Stewart was a farmer's daughter from Steele, Alabama. She left a job as a waitress and trained under wrestling veteran Gladys Kill-em Gillem. Nell entered professional wrestling in the late 1940s. The sport was dominated by all-time greats like Mildred Burke, Dot Dotson, Mae Young, and June...

Perhaps no other heavyweight fight elevated the common man as a boxing fan than the Baer-Carnera title bout of June 1935. Braddock had fought on the undercard of the Carnera-Baer heavyweight championship fight in June 1933. Just two years later he was fighting to become world champion. Small bettors...

Juan Zurita followed Aurelio Hererra as one of the fine boxers of Mexican ancestry. A native of Guadelajara Zurita trained in Pennsyvlania. Two of his most noted bouts were against Beau Jack, a former New York N.B.A. lightweight champion, and Ike Williams, who fought Zurita for the N.B.A. lightweight...

Joey Maxim was a veteran of 100 plus fights when he fought a 19-year-old Floyd Patterson at Eastern Parkway Arena on June 7, 1954. Patterson was undefeated but had fought less than twenty times professionally. He gained a chance at Maxim by dominating Jesse Turner in an 8-round bout that spring. Patterson,...

Mae Weston was a noted female wrestler who contended for the world title held by Mildred Burke in the early 1950s. Weston was born in Leavenworth, Kansas. When her mother died when she was 8 Mae's father moved his family to a small mining town in Missouri. Mae's older sister, Wilma Gordon,...

Piers Courage was a brewing family scion from Great Britain. He began his racing career in 1961 after befriending fellow driver Jonathan Williams and racing team manager Frank Williams. Piers was only 28 when he was killed at Zandvoort, the Netherlands in June 1970. His fatal wreck was a result of...

Peter Collins was one of a triumvirate of English drivers who were at the pinnacle of sports car and Formula 1 racing in the late 1950s. The other two were Mike Hawthorn and Stirling Moss. Collins married an American actress, the daughter of an assistant to United Nations' Secretary Dag Hammarskjold....

Jo Siffert combined determinism, youth and great speed as a promising sports car and Formula 1 driver coming along in the early 1960s. He began racing F1 cars in 1962, soon purchasing his own British Racing Motors (BRM) car. He served as driver as well as team manager. From modest means the Swiss...

Alberto Ascari was an elite driver for the Ferari and Maserati factory teams during the early days of Formula One racing. He captured the F1 championship in back to back years, 1952 and 1953. Ascari also competed successfully in motorcycle racing in his youth and won the Italian Mille Miglia race...