Oh, yeah, I thought, he ended his career with the White Sox so he probably settled in the Chicago area after he retired.
But, apparently, Skowron was originally from Chicago:
“When I was about 8 years old living in Chicago, my grandfather gave all the haircuts to his grandchildren,” Skowron told John Tullius for the oral history “I’d Rather Be a Yankee.” “He shaved off all my hair. I was completely bald. When I got outside, all the older fellows around the neighborhood started calling me Mussolini. At that time, he was the dictator of Italy. So after that, in grammar school, high school and college, everybody called me Moose.”
___
He went to Purdue on a football scholarship and played halfback, punted and place-kicked. But he became a collegiate star in baseball, playing shortstop and pitching, and the Yankee organization signed him in 1950 after he won the Big Ten batting championship.
The obituary doesn't mention where Skowron went to high school in Chicago so I did a little digging. Turns out, he graduated from Weber High School, which closed its doors in 1999.
While many old-time Chicagoans may remember Weber from its location on the Northwest side, above, between Hansen and Blackhawk Parks (Belmont Cragin, for you purists), Skowron attended the original school, below, in its last years on West Division Street in the largely Polish Pulaski Park neighborhood.
Founded in 1890 as St. Stanislaus College, the school changed its name to Weber High School in 1930 in honor of Archbishop Joseph Weber. (If you look hard, you can see the original name on the arch stone over the door.) Weber moved in 1949.
(Further trivia: Archbishop Weber was a member of the Congregation of the Resurrection, which also founded Gordon Technical High School in 1952 due to overcrowding at Weber. The new school took its name from Gordon Hall on the original Weber campus.)
Weber High School, which oddly didn't even have a baseball team in Skowron's time, was nicknamed the "Red Horde." (That must have been a little awkward in the McCarthy Era. But, judging from the picture below, the nickname referred to Native Americans, which would have been even more awkward today.)
The football team, of which Skowron was a star, appeared in five Prep Bowls at Soldier Field, including his senior year, 1947-48. (The Red Horde won the championship in 1961 and '64.) Two of those contests drew over 83,000 fans and are ranked fourth and fifth on the IHSA's list of the most well-attended games in Illinois high school football history.
Where was I?
No comments:
Post a Comment