Hopkins Bros. Baseball Team Des Moines

 

Hopkins Bros. Baseball Team

Top of letter: “Smoke” Madigan, Thomas, Bowman, Parsons, Honska.
Bottom of letter: Franklin, Evans, Fahey (manager).
Left side: Crandall, Mendenhall.
Right side: Wilkinson (captain), Wasson.

(Des Moines Register. June 17, 1906.

Iowa State Cyclones Cross Country Running Team 1922

 

Iowa State Cyclones Cross Country Running Team 1922. 

(left to right): Brown, Rathbun, Holcomb, McIntyre, Coach Art Smith, Hollowell, and Seaton.

Quaker Oats Baseball Team Cedar Rapids 1929

Quaker Oats baseball team champions of the M and J league.

Top row (left to right): S. Dale, manager, W. Heck, J. Bunting, M. Koch, Ed O’Connell, C. Prabel, G. Cronkite, and T. Hardiman.

Bottom row (left to right): F. Kerres, H. Gallagher, E. Bishop, H. Michaels, G. Garden, and E. Smith.

Cocker, the team mascot, in foreground.

Picture: Cedar Rapids Gazette. September 8, 1929.

Willis “Bill” Glassgow Iowa Fottball Standout

Iowa Stadium in the late 1920s wasn’t a cozy field. It was a cold, bruising arena built for impact, and fans packed the place to watch Willis “Bill” Glassgow deliver it. He treated every carry like a personal accusation. When he lowered his shoulder, it wasn’t grace or style. It was force, and people in the stands felt the shock of it.

He arrived in Iowa City in 1927 looking like a kid who had taken a wrong turn. He came from Shenandoah with no bulk and no shine, but he carried something in his eyes that earned him a place. He survived practice the same way a man survives a riot: by staying on his feet and refusing to back up. Teammates said he worked like someone trying to break out of a locked room. He didn’t juke or dance. He pushed forward because that was the only direction he trusted.

By 1928, the Big Ten knew Iowa had something dangerous. Glassgow made third-team All-American not because he tricked defenses but because he rushed through them. Football then was closer to open-air combat. Helmets were thin leather, pads barely existed, and every snap felt like someone’s bad idea of a street fight. Coaches tried traps and shifting fronts to catch him, but he hammered through whatever they drew up.

Italian Boxer Primo Carnera in the Tri-Cities

Primo Carnera (left), Al Singer (right)

Primo Carnera hit the Tri-Cities like a runaway circus elephant that suddenly decided to walk upright and take questions. People had whispered about him for months—the giant from Italy. He was built like a locomotive—six-foot-eight, two-eighty-five, wearing size-23 shoes that looked less like footwear and more like state-issued pontoons.

The papers printed a photo of Carnera looming over Al Singer, the Bronx firecracker who usually strutted into a ring like he owned the joint. Next to Carnera, he looked like some doomed newsboy drafted into mythology by mistake. Singer was coiled and ready. Carnera looked like he was debating whether to punch, or simply let gravity do the job.

He wasn’t here to fight. Just an exhibition match on July 10, 1930, at the Palmer School’s open-air arena. A chance for the locals to gawk at something their brains refused to classify as normal. Crowds swarmed him. They wanted to touch the hands, measure the shoulders, stare at the monstrous shoes and swear they weren’t hallucinating.

For a few days that summer, the Tri-Cities felt wired with electricity—like the whole place had been plugged into some great brutal engine. Carnera wandered through town, enormous and unhurried, and people followed him just to make sure the giant was real and not something conjured out of heat, rumor, and American hunger for spectacle.

Duke Slater Iowa Football Player

Duke Slater came out of Clinton, Iowa, like a walking thunderclap. Big shoulders, bigger presence, a man who made coaches straighten their backs when he walked past. Reporters called him “a human barricade.” Players called him worse. None of it slowed him down.

He grew up in a world that didn’t expect a Black kid to go anywhere. Slater ignored the script. He pushed through it the way he pushed through defensive lines—head down, legs driving, no apologies.

 

His high school couldn’t afford helmets. Most players hesitated. Slater didn’t. He played bare-headed and kept doing it for the rest of his life. A rival said, “Hitting him was like running into a stone wall.” Another said, “I hit him once. That was enough.”

 

When he got to the University of Iowa, everything changed. The Hawkeyes already had a team. Slater gave them a force of nature.

Johnny Lujack Notre Dame & Chicago Bears Football Star

Johnny Lujack

Notre Dame, 1943. The war’s taken half the roster, and the star quarterback’s off in uniform. The Irish need someone who won’t flinch. Johnny Lujack is nineteen, straight out of a Pennsylvania coal town, quiet, steady, built from hard work and wintry mornings.

 They hand him the ball. He doesn’t say much—just looks downfield and gets to work. He runs like he means it and throws like he’s trying to prove something, every play tight and clean, no wasted motion, no fear.

 

That fall, he rips through Army like a hot knife through arrogance, and the Irish take the national title. The papers call him “the most complete player ever to wear a Notre Dame uniform.” One writer says, “Lujack doesn’t play the game so much as control it — like he’s got the whistle in his own mouth.”

 

The word Heisman floats around, but before anyone can engrave a trophy, the Navy snaps him up. He swaps the gridiron for a steel deck and spends two years hunting German submarines in the Atlantic. One of his crewmates said, “He never blinked. We could’ve been staring into hell, and he’d just adjust the periscope.”

Riverview Stadium Clinton Iowa

The baseball stadium on Clinton’s riverfront from a 1940s postcard. The WPA finished building it in 1937. The Clinton Owls were the first team to play there.

Clyde Sukeforth, the man who would later scout Jackie Robinson, managed the team. His star player was Sam Nahem—an Arab-Jewish boy from Brooklyn. The reporters couldn’t figure him out. One of them said, “Nahem wears spectacles and talks less like a ballplayer than any diamond star this reporter knows.”

The Owls tore through the Three-I League that summer. Clinton beat Peoria, Springfield, and Davenport. Seventy-five wins. Thirty-six losses. It was a record that made old men start believing in luck again.

Clinton baseball fans wouldn’t soon forget that magic season in 1937.

Des Moines Baseball Team 1906

Des Moines baseball team, 1906..

Top row, left to right: Ben Caffyn, M. E. Cantillion, Louis Mauske.

Second row: Babe Towne, Andreas, George Hogreiver, Mike Welday, Roscoe Miller.

Lower Row: Charles Dexter, George Magoon, Frank O’Leary, Bill Shipke, Eddie Cicotte, Grover Gillen.

Upper right corner.: John J. Doyle, captain and manager.

(From the Des Moines Register. September 2, 1906)

Frank Gotch Iowa Wrestling Champion

Frank Gotch didn't waste any time in the ring. He went straight
for his killer toehold that brought many opponents to tears.

On paper, Frank Gotch didn’t stand a chance. He was just a farm kid from Humboldt, Iowa, the youngest of nine children born to Frederick and Amelia Gotch. Like any Iowa farm boy in the late 1800s, his life comprised hard labor and long days.

His hands grew calloused from milking cows and pitching hay. His breath carried the sour edge of hog pens, and his body ached from endless chores. Still, wrestling was always in him.

Frank squared off against his brothers just for the thrill, never tiring of the struggle. Neighbors shook their heads and laughed, saying he would wrestle a fencepost if nobody else was around.

No one expected him to become the first American wrestling superstar. It was mostly a European man’s game at the turn of the century. Americans might cheer local matches, but world champions were forged overseas. Frank Gotch changed that.

Cap Anson Iowa's First Baseball Star

Cap Anson 
(from 1887 Allen & Ginter tobacco card)

Cap Anson was a restless boy who couldn’t sit still in class. Teachers complained he was lazy with books but quick with a bat. By his teens, everyone in Marshalltown knew the boy could hit. When he connected, it didn’t sound like other kids hitting. It cracked like a pistol shot.

He was only nineteen when he jumped into professional ball. A Philadelphia newspaper called him “a lad of brawn and nerve, swinging a bat with the force of a smith’s hammer.” His teammates noticed something else: he liked to tell everyone what to do. They started calling him “Cap,” short for captain, and the name never left him.

He arrived in Chicago in 1876, and hit .300 every year, scooped throws at first base like it was nothing, and ran the club with a general’s bark. The Chicago Tribune gushed about his “commanding presence,” while the St. Louis papers grumbled about his “constant eruptions.” Either way, he was the center of attention.

Game day with Anson wasn’t just baseball—it was theater. He’d march his men out like soldiers, line them up, and then spend nine innings exploding at everything in sight. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said, “Every inning brought another eruption from Anson’s corner. The umpires in terror, the spectators in delight.” Even his own teammates sometimes cracked jokes about his tantrums.