HALAS, George Stanley

(b. 2 February 1895 in Chicago, Illinois; d. 31 October 1983 in Chicago, Illinois), one of the founders and prime movers of the National Football League (NFL) and for sixty-three years the owner of its Chicago Bears, for which he was known as "Papa Bear."

George Stanley Halas was born in Pilsen, a Czech community on Chicago's West Side, the youngest of eight children of Frank Halas, an immigrant tailor from Pilsen, Bohemia, and Barbara Poledna, who ran a grocery store. Four of the children died in infancy. Frank Halas cleaned and repaired rented apartments to earn additional money. He also reported for a Bohemian-language newspaper.

Halas's earliest memories were of playing seventeen-inch softball with his two older brothers, using manhole covers and sewer grills as bases. Life centered on the Sunday mass at the Saint Vitus Church and the Pilsen social center, the Sokol, where the Halas brothers led neighborhood boys in indoor baseball. By the time he was ten he had become an avid fan of the Chicago Cubs, who then played only a mile from the Halas home. He fought the Fourteenth Street gang to get to the games before learning to outrun them. His persistence paid off; first baseman Frank Chance frequently took "the Kid" to the game through the pass-gate.

Halas learned the value of hard work and a dollar at an early age. He toted coal for the family's nickel-plated stoves, rode a horse-drawn wagon to the South Water Street vegetable market, stopped at the rail station for fresh milk from suburban farms, and then delivered his morning newspapers on foot. Critics later claimed he "threw dollars around as though they were manhole covers," and Halas admitted as much. Though weighing only 120 pounds, Halas played baseball, basketball, and lightweight football at Crane Technical High School, patterning himself after the fictional Frank Merriwell. When he was fifteen his father died, and his mother increased his weekly allowance to seventy-five cents while urging him "to save heavily for college." He graduated from Crane Tech in 1913, worked for a year in the payroll department of Western Electric, and began dating a neighborhood girl named Wilhelmina Bushing, whom he called Min, who also worked there.

In the fall of 1914 Halas enrolled at the University of Illinois. He majored in civil engineering and, at 140 pounds, played reserve halfback. That summer he worked for Western Electric. By the next fall, having shot up to six feet and 170 pounds, he made Bob Zuppke's varsity team as backup wide receiver and sustained a broken jaw. As a junior Halas started before breaking a leg, and also won letters in baseball and basketball. On crutches, he took careful notes on how Zuppke prepared his team. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1918 and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, where he played for the Great Lakes Bluejackets. Halas was voted the Most Valuable Player when he caught two touchdown passes and returned an interception seventy-seven yards, pacing the Bluejackets to a 17–0 win over the Mare Island Marines in the 1919 Rose Bowl. After graduating from college, Halas, a switch hitter, played eleven games with the New York Yankees, "full of spirit" but "unable to hit the curve ball." He injured his hip in a slide at third and later observed that he was replaced in right field by Babe Ruth.

After the baseball season Halas took a $55-a-week job in the bridge design department of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, but he longed to play football. He played on the fourteen-man, semipro Hammond, Indiana, Bulldogs for $100 a game. Halas's team defeated Jim Thorpe's Canton Bulldogs for the championship after a six-game season. A. E. Staley, owner of the Staley Starch Works, paid Halas to come to Decatur, Illinois, in March 1920 to coach the company's football team. Halas liked players with great desire—he called it "mental heat"—and recruited former Notre Dame center George Trafton, Great Lakes halfback Jimmy Conzelman, Canton end Guy Chamberlin, and Illinois teammate Edward "Dutch" Sternaman to star on the Decatur Staleys.

Over the objections of Amos Alonzo Stagg and other college coaches who decried athletes who played for money, Halas aggressively lobbied for a professional league that would charge for tickets and pay its players. Ralph Hay, manager of the Canton Bulldogs, shared his enthusiasm. Representatives from twelve teams met in Hay's Hupmobile dealership on the evening of 17 September 1920. Within two hours the American Professional Football Association was formed, and Jim Thorpe was elected its president without pay. Franchises from Cleveland to Rock Island were awarded for $100 apiece.

At twenty-five Halas coached, scheduled, wrote press releases, played end, collected gate receipts, and paid salaries for the Decatur Staleys in their inaugural season. They breezed past the Moline Tractors 20–0 and the Kewanee Walworths 27–0 en route to a 10–1–1 season that climaxed with a 10–0 win over the Chicago Cardinals before a crowd of 8,500 at Wrigley Field. A championship game against the undefeated Akron Indians at Wrigley ended in a scoreless tie and drew 10,800, at fifty cents apiece. Halas earned $2,322.77 that year, enough to give Min a $250 engagement ring he had bought in a pawnshop.

The Staleys opened the 1921 season with convincing wins over Waukegan and Rock Island, but it was not enough to persuade their owner to field the team a third week. Staley felt he could no longer afford the expensive burden of pro football. On 6 October he gave Halas $5,000 in seed money to move the team to Chicago on condition that it still be called the Staleys. Halas took Sternaman in as a 50-50 partner and agreed to give Bill Veeck, president of the Chicago Cubs, 15 percent of the gate receipts and concessions for the use of Cubs Park. Halas and Sternaman publicized the team at meetings with Chicago sports editors and by leafleting in the Loop. Eight thousand spectators paid a dollar apiece to see the Staleys defeat the Rochester (New York) Jeffersons 16–13 on 16 October 1921. A condensed version of Halas's own account of the game appeared in the press the following day. The Staleys finished the season 10–1–1, claimed the league championship, and showed a $7 profit for the year.

The Chicago Bears were incorporated at a league meeting on 28 January 1922. They boasted Illinois's colors of navy blue and burnt orange and were called the Bears because of Halas's passion for the Cubs. Halas married Min on 18 February 1922; they had a daughter in 1923 and a son in 1925. The name National Football League was suggested by Halas at an association meeting in June 1922. The Bears were the league's most successful franchise, winning seventy-five games, losing twenty-nine, and tieing seventeen during the 1920s. Halas's ninety-eight-yard run for a touchdown of a Jim Thorpe fumble in 1922 put him in the record books. His signing Harold "Red" Grange, the "Galloping Ghost" from the University of Illinois, in 1925 to a nineteen-city barnstorming tour drew 360,000 fans and gave the Bears their first sellout game at Wrigley Field. The excitement peaked in a Polo Grounds battle against the New York Giants that set a league attendance record of 73,561 and helped to establish pro football as a national sport.

In 1930 Halas retired as both a player and a coach. His determination and IOU's were needed to carry the Bears through the worst years of the depression. By 1932 only eight teams remained of the thirty-three that had played in the league during the 1920s. Halas borrowed money to buy out Sternaman's interest in the team. With Zuppke's former assistant Ralph Jones, he refined the T formation and added a man-in-motion, which opened up the game and increased scoring and attendance. The football became streamlined to improve passing. Competition was created through Eastern and Western Divisions. After a three-year sabbatical, Halas returned to coaching in 1933. The Bears were 23–2–1 behind the backfield tandem of Bronko Nagurski, perhaps the greatest blocker in NFL history, and Beattie Feathers, the league's first 1,000-yard runner, and appeared in two championship games, winning one.

Halas understood that the viability of the National Football League depended on strengthening its weakest franchises and equalizing their access to college talent. In 1936 he worked with league president Joe Carr to create the first college football draft. Halas chose future Hall of Fame tackle Joe Stydahar and guard Dan Fortmann in that draft. They joined veteran end Bill Hewitt and guard-tackle George Musso, future Hall of Famers as well, in establishing the backbone of a team as hard-nosed and competitive as its coach and owner. Columbia quarterback Sid Luckman joined the team in 1939, followed by running back George McAfee, center Clyde "Bulldog" Turner, and ends Ken Kavanaugh and Hampton Pool a year later. When Washington owner and Halas rival George Preston Marshall called the Bears "crybabies" after their disputed early-season loss to the Redskins, the "Monsters of the Midway" responded by annihilating the Skins 73–0 in the 1940 championship game, going on to win the league title in two of the following three years, while posting a record of 40–6–1.

In 1942 Halas, then forty-six, began a thirty-nine-month enlistment in the U.S. Navy, where he used his background in engineering to train aircraft mechanics. He returned to coach the Bears to another championship in 1946. The following year he became one of the first owners to televise all his home games, and set up a twenty-five-station radio network to carry the games. Later he would successfully argue that all television rights be assigned to the league and that revenues be shared equally by both small-and large-market teams.

The Bears finished second in six of nine seasons through the mid-1950s, frustrating Halas and forcing him, at his wife's insistence, to temporarily retire from coaching. At the start of the 1958 season, however, Halas was back on the field again, determined at age sixty-three to win another championship. But by 1960 his hat-throwing and referee-baiting sideline tantrums during a 5–6–1 season convinced critics that the game had passed the irascible field commander by. "My body was on the sidelines," he later explained, "but my spirit was right there with my players." Each loss was "an agony" that would only "dissipate through victory." Halas painstakingly rebuilt his Bears through the college draft and on defense and was ready by 1963 to challenge Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers for league dominance. The Bears beat the Packers twice that year, 10–3 at Lambeau Field and 26–7 in Chicago, and won the NFL championship for the first time in seventeen years by defeating the New York Giants, 14–10, in a moment of personal triumph for the sixty-eight-year-old coach.

Halas's arthritic hip and the sudden death of Min, "the Bears' most avid fan," on Valentine's Day, 1966, led to his retirement from coaching on 27 May 1968. In forty years he had amassed 321 coaching victories, the most in league history, and was inducted as a charter member into the NFL Hall of Fame. He made his son, George Stanley ("Mugs") Halas, Jr., president of the Bears and gave him day-to-day management of the team.

Halas strongly encouraged the merger of the NFL with the competing American Football League. This helped to create the ultimate televised sporting event on fall Sundays and Monday nights, eventually boosting the value of franchises into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Bears, however, struggled on the field. In 1974, after several losing seasons, Halas hired Jim Finks to become the team's executive vice president and general manager. The sudden death of his son, Mugs, on 16 December 1979 deeply saddened Halas. In January 1982 he brought in Mike Ditka, a star of the 1963 championship team, "to return the Bears to our former glory." It happened in January 1986, when the Bears blasted the New England Patriots in an international sports spectacle, Super Bowl XX, 46–10, that led to a tumultuous civic celebration in Chicago. Halas didn't live to see it. His death at age eighty-eight following a variety of illnesses saw him memorialized by longtime NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle for helping to invent a game "very much like George himself—full of wisdom and creativity, vitality and endurance, and above all, intensely competitive." Halas is buried in Chicago.

During Halas's four separate ten-year tenures as head coach, the Bears were 321–148–31 and won seven championships. During that time, Halas helped to transform professional football from a small city, Midwestern sandlot sport to an entertainment industry worth billions. It was Pete Rozelle who observed that "George Halas was the National Football League."

Biographical material on the life and career of George Halas is kept at Halas Hall, the Chicago Bears' administrative headquarters in Lake Forest, Illinois, and at the Pro Football League Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Halas wrote an autobiography with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey, Halas by Halas (1979). Biographical treatments of his life are included in Howard Roberts, The Chicago Bears (1947); George Vass, George Halas and the Chicago Bears (1971); Richard Whittingham, The Chicago Bears: From George Halas to Super Bowl XX, An Illustrated History (1979); Cooper Rollow, Cooper Rollow's Bears Football Book (1985); Larry R. Gerlach, "George Stanley Halas," in David L. Porter, ed., Biographical Dictionary of American Sports (1987); and Richard Whittingham, The Bears: A Seventy-Five-Year Celebration (1994). An obituary is in the New York Times, and an appreciation of his contribution to professional football is in the Chicago Tribune (both 1 Nov. 1983).

Bruce J. Evensen