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Who's Hickok?

My greatest claim to fame, I guess, is that I'm probably the only person ever to interview both John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon in the Green Bay Packer dressing room. (At different times and places. I interviewed Kennedy, then a U. S. Senator from Massachusetts, when Green Bay's Lambeau Stadium was dedicated in 1957. Just about a year later, I interviewed Nixon, then the vice-president, at Nickerson Field in Boston, after the Packers had beaten the Giants in an exhibition game.)

Ralph Hickok I grew up in Green Bay and graduated from East High School, which had earlier produced Curly Lambeau, the founder and long-time coach of the Packers, and "Sleepy Jim" Crowley, one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame and Vince Lombardi's coach at Fordham.

After majoring in English at Harvard, I worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Massachusetts, as a reporter, sports editor, feature writer, book and theater reviewer, and Sunday magazine editor. Then, much to my surprise, I became an advertising copywriter and computer programmer.

In the meantime, I've written five books on sports and magazine articles on a variety of subjects, including a piece on the 1926 Duluth Eskimos that appeared in Sports Illustrated. Doing research for my first book, about 1970, I discovered that there simply wasn't much reliable sports reference material out there. Sports history, insofar as it existed at all, was largely a morass of myth and legend, misinformation, misspelled names, and misplaced dates.

That frustration led directly to my second book and eventually to three others. And it has now brought me to this Web site.

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Books by Ralph Hickok

Who Was Who in American Sports
(Hawthorn Books, 1971)
Basically, obituaries of about 1,500 sports figures. And not one of them complained. Now out of print, and Hawthorn Books is defunct, but I didn't do it.

The New Encyclopedia of Sports
(McGraw-Hill, 1977)
Chosen by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding reference books of 1978. A year late, but it was still nice.
The Encyclopedia of North American Sports History
(Facts on File, 1992)
Obviously, it took fifteen years of research. (Not really.) Again chosen by the ALA, but this time they got the year right.

The Pro Football Fan's Companion
(Macmillan, 1995)
This tells you something about the publishing world nowadays: I signed the contract with Prentice-Hall, it says Macmillan on the spine, and my royalty statements come from Simon & Schuster. And so it goes.
A Who's Who of Sports Champions
(Houghton Mifflin, 1995)
My third entry in the ALA Outstanding Reference Book sweepstakes, which unfortunately pays nothing. I can't wait for someone to buy the movie rights. Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe. Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig. Ronald Reagan as George Gipp. Ernest Borgnine as Vince Lombardi. And Shaq, of course, as Shaq.

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