Making History: Interviews with Etta Moten Barnett and Sid Luckman

M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
Stars of Chicago: Interviews with
Etta Moten Barnett and Sid Luckman
T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
Editor’s Note: The Chicago Historical Society bestowed its Making History Award on Sid
Luckman in 1998. Soon after the award ceremony, Timothy Gilfoyle interviewed the football
great, only two months before Luckman’s death.
he lives of Etta Moten Barnett and the late Sid Luckman embody
the history of entertainment, sports, and race relations in the
United States. Moten, known throughout her career by her maiden
name, was one of America’s leading vocalists between 1930 and
1950. Despite overt racial discrimination on Broadway and in Hollywood, she
became an icon for her era. When Moten became the first African American
woman to perform in the White House in 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked, “I am thrilled beyond words.” Four years later, a critic
declared, “Perhaps there is not a more outstanding personality on the stage or
screen than Miss Moten.”
As quarterback for the Chicago Bears, Sid Luckman dominated professional
football during the 1940s and led the team to more championships than at
any other time in their history. Nearly a half-century after Luckman’s retirement, one sportswriter in 1995 insisted that Luckman was “as famous an athlete as Chicago has ever known.”
They experienced dramatically different upbringings. Luckman was born to
Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York, on November 21, 1916.
The fourth of five children, Luckman’s childhood was happy but impoverished. His father worked as a truck driver and died when Luckman was a
small child. “The first place we lived in was on Bushwick Avenue in
Brooklyn,” remembered Luckman. “It was sort of a tough neighborhood, a lot
of snowball fights. Sometimes,” he added, “guys put rocks inside.” By contrast, Moten’s childhood was secure and middle class. Born on November 5,
1901, in Weimar, Texas, Moten was the only daughter of Ida Mae Norman
Moten and Rev. Freeman Franklin Moten, an African Methodist Episcopal
(AME) minister who quickly moved up the church hierarchy with his family
to Texas, Los Angeles, and Kansas City.
T
60 | Chicago History | Fall 1999
Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago and is
the author of City of Eros: New York City,
Prostitution and the Commercialization
of Sex, 1790–1920 (W.W. Norton, 1992).
Etta Moten Barnett (above), recipient of
the Theodore Thomas History Maker
Award for Distinction in Performing Arts,
and Sid Luckman (below), recipient of the
George Halas History Maker Award for
Distinction in Sports, with Mike Ditka at
the 1998 Making History Awards.
Making History | 61
For both Moten and Luckman, the
seeds that blossomed into their successful careers were sown when they
were small children. Unlike many of his
peers who gravitated to baseball and
“stickball,” Luckman played football.
“We played baseball and stickball, but
for some reason I loved playing football,
just loved it. There was hardly a night
when Mom wasn’t calling me in, and
all the mothers calling in their sons.
‘Come in and have dinner.’ There were
some great, young kids who I played
against, and we had some very competitive, wonderful games.”
Moten learned to sing in the choir of
her father’s church at age nine, standing
on a box beside her mother. Eventually,
she sang solo in her father’s church.
“That was my first musical training. We learned Latin and we sang in Latin, as
well as other languages,” she remembered. As a child, Moten performed in
almost any form of musical production, from church plays to musicals.
Despite being part of racial and ethnic minorities, Moten and Luckman
experienced little overt discrimination while growing up. Moten was never
subject to the blatant insults of Jim Crow segregation, even while her
father was active in the early years of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored Persons. “I didn’t hear about those—the lynchings—until later . . . when I could read.” Similarly, Luckman was never
victimized by antisemitism. “We had the Temple a block and a half away,
and we used to go there when we were younger.” He attended programs
regularly, which ultimately gave him a strong sense of his Jewish identity,
“and it’s never left me.”
By his early teens, Luckman was a star athlete. He attended Brooklyn’s
Erasmus Hall High School, quarterbacking the football team to two city
championships. His talent soon attracted scholarship offers from more than
thirty colleges, including the service academies that were among the leading
football powerhouses of the era. In fact, Luckman originally wanted to play
for the U.S. Naval Academy. But in 1934, he changed his mind after meeting
Columbia’s head coach Lou Little at a Columbia-Navy football game at Baker
Field in Manhattan. “In the few minutes I met him, I wanted to go to
Columbia University. He was one of the most outstanding human beings I’ve
ever known,” stated a still-awestruck Luckman. “He had a look about him
with his pinched glasses, immaculate dress, and tremendous personality. He
never asked me about going to school; his mind was on the football game.
However, after I met him, I made up my mind that that would be the one
school that I would really love to matriculate to.”
Since Columbia offers no athletic scholarships, Luckman worked his way
through college, assuming a variety of jobs, including washing dishes in a fraternity and working in a government-sponsored National Youth Association
program. By the time of his graduation in 1939, Luckman had earned three
letters in football, and was the starting shortstop on the baseball team for
three seasons. During his senior year (1938), Luckman was named All-American, averaging 4.6 yards per run while completing 66 of 132 passes for 866
yards and 9 touchdowns. Although Columbia finished with a record of 3–6,
62 | Chicago History | Fall 1999
Legendary Chicago Bear quarterback Sid
Luckman looking for a receiver for one of
his famous spiral throws.
Luckman came in third in balloting for the Heisman Trophy and appeared
on the cover of Life magazine under the headline “Best Passer.”
Moten followed a more unconventional route to college. In 1919, she met
Curtis Brooks, a young World War I veteran and a business teacher at Western
University. “We looked at each other and fell in love,” remembered Moten.
They married, moved to Oklahoma, and had three children. Although Brooks
was financially successful, Moten was unhappy. “I soon learned that my husband was a philanderer. He always promised to change but he never did.” In
1926, she returned to her parents’ home in Kansas. “My parents offered to
keep my children. Papa insisted, ‘You go on now and finish and get yourself a
degree and we will take care of your children for you.’” So began the odyssey
of one of the most successful singers of the century.
Moten enrolled in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas and
studied music, beginning a career as a working mother before the term was
ever invented. At Kansas, Moten sang with the Jackson Jubilee Singers, and
performed an individual recital to an audience of more than twenty-five
hundred. After graduating in 1931, she decided to move to New York. She
clearly remembered Dean Donald M. Swarthout’s advice: “This summer
you should go to New York and try your luck at singing and acting. You
would be very good at that.”
On her way to New York, Moten stopped in Chicago to attend a reception. Someone in Kansas had sent a clipping of her recital to the Associated
Negro Press (ANP), which was headquartered in Chicago. At the reception,
she met Claude Barnett, the founding director of the ANP. According to
Moten, Barnett “knew all about” the recital and soon befriended her. “I had
a handful of letters of introduction when I left him to go to New York,” she
noted. Moten served as an informal correspondent for the ANP while she
lived in New York. The relationship between Moten and Barnett soon blossomed, and they married in 1934.
In New York, Moten lived at the 137th Street YWCA. Shortly after her
arrival, she appeared in concert with the Eva Jessye Choir. Her
singing talents attracted considerable attention, and from
1933 to 1936, Moten performed in the musical
comedies Fast and Furious and Sugar Hill. Her fluency in French landed her a leading role in
Zombie. On July 24, 1936, Moten sang at the
famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. Her vocal
success soon put her in contact with the
leading figures of the “Harlem Renaissance,” such as Ethel Waters, Mary M.
Bethune, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Van
Vechten, Walter White, Langston
Hughes, and Claude McKay.
Moten’s triumphs in New York also
generated attention from the other side
of the continent. From 1933 to 1936,
Moten “doubled” for various Hollywood
actresses in vocal film roles, notably
Ginger Rogers (in 1934’s 20 Million Sweethearts) and Barbara Stanwyck. Since
Southern motion picture exhibitors forbade
showing African Americans, Moten’s only opportunities came in dubbing songs for established
screen stars who could not sing. She made cinema his-
Above: According to this
Chicago American clipping describing Etta
Moten’s 1938 presidential visit, First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “liked the
spirituals” Moten
sang. Left: Etta
Moten, MezzoSoprano, from a
1930s program.
Making History | 63
tory when she appeared as an “ordinary” black woman in Busby Berkeley’s
Gold Diggers of 1933. Previously, the only roles available to African American
women were those of servants, maids, or laborers. In Gold Diggers, Moten
sang “My Forgotten Man” and starred with Joan Blondell and Dick Powell. To
one reviewer, she was nothing less than “the new Negro woman.” Moten
soon joined Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their first picture together,
Flying Down to Rio, where she sang the Oscar-nominated “Carioca.” In 1936,
she sang “De Glory Road” in The Bride Comes Home, which starred Claudette
Colbert, Fred MacMurray, and Robert Young. The song became one of her signature works. Yet, Moten’s racial ancestry proved to be a career roadblock.
According to critic Nora Holt, Moten “was never given an opportunity in
movies again.”
By 1935, Moten was a staff artist and singer on the National Broadcasting
Network. In 1938, she regularly sang in the Quaker Oats–sponsored “Cabin
at the Crossroads” broadcast on NBC’s early radio networks every weekday
morning. Critic Eugene Stinson of Chicago Daily News described Moten as
“far more than a vocalist; she is a personality and she has a faultless technique in seizing and holding the
public’s interest.” Stinson added that
her talents extended beyond her vocal
chords: “her humor and sophistication and wisdom sparkle as brilliantly
as her voice while she projects her
songs with all the simplicity, intenseness, and economy that mark a true
and distinguished art.”
While Moten was challenging the
racial landscape of American entertainment, Luckman changed American football. Before 1940, nearly all
college and professional teams used
the single-wing formation. Quarterbacks received the ball deep behind
the center, then ran, passed, punted,
or handed off to a runner. Luckman
vividly remembered that “all the
teams, every single one of them were
in the single-wing formations. The
Chicago Bears were the only team
using the T formation.” Bears
owner–coach George Halas recognized that the team lacked a quarterback capable of running the T
formation. Sid Luckman was the
answer. Halas drafted Luckman and
offered him a contract of five thousand dollars, then the highest salary
ever in the National Football League
Top right: Moten’s husband, famed American
Negro Press leader Claude Barnett. Right:
This advertisement for a 1942 Etta Moten
concert describes her as the “Original Carioca
Girl” from the film Flying Down to Rio.
64 | Chicago History | Fall 1999
(NFL). “You and Jesus Christ are the only two that I would pay five thousand dollars,” Halas told Luckman.
In Chicago, Halas was indeed changing the game. The T-formation introduced new positions—split end, tight end, flanker—while putting running
backs in motion before the play began and the quarterback directly behind
the center to receive the snap. The formation transformed football from a
slow, ponderous game with short movements, much like rugby, to a wideopen contest with longer, more spectacular plays. Whereas the Bears in the
1920s and 1930s were known for devastating runners—Red Grange, Bronko
Nagurski, Bettie Feathers—Luckman introduced a strong passing attack
around the split-T formation that became the standard for professional football. Halas later admitted, “In Sid, we created a new type of football player,
the T quarterback. Newspapers switched their attention from star runners to
the quarterbacks.” Halas wrote in his autobiography that because of Sid
Luckman, “football was completely revolutionized.”
Above left: Chicago Bear Sid Luckman,
about to unleash a pass in a 1943 game
against the New York Giants. Above: Bears
coach George Halas ruffling the hair of one
of his favorite quarterbacks, Sid Luckman.
Halas offered Luckman the then-highest
salary in the National Football League—
five thousand dollars.
Making History | 65
Halas and Luckman, surveying a game,
1947. Luckman tried to get Halas to name
the new T-formation the “Halas” formation, but the coach refused.
When the T formation proved successful, “the whole nation wanted to
know more about it, so Coach Halas had some of his players go to different
places,” Luckman remembered. Luckman traveled around the country to
teach coaches how to implement the formation because “they didn’t know
what to do with it.” Luckman urged Halas to call the T formation the “Halas
formation,” a suggestion Halas quickly rejected. The adoption of the T formation in the 1940s, “the biggest revolutionary change in the history of any
sport,” according to Luckman, set the stage for professional football to bypass
baseball as the nation’s most popular sport.
After establishing herself on Broadway and in Hollywood, Moten embarked
on a concert career that spanned nearly two decades. From 1934 to 1942, she
toured throughout the United States and South America; the highlight was a
recital at the residence of President Getulio Vargas of Brazil in 1936. Moten’s
standard program consisted of French, German, and Italian compositions,
African American spirituals, and several popular numbers such as “De Glory
Road.” A typical performance might include pieces from Handel, Hayden,
DeBussy, Afro-Hispanic folk songs, and spirituals. “To an extent I developed it
on my own because it was varied,” according to Moten. She wanted to display
her versatility, “to show all of it,” from the classical to the spiritual.
66 | Chicago History | Fall 1999
Moten’s concerts almost always sold out, even during the Depression. Her
success stemmed, in part, from the ability of Claude Barnett and his associates to successfully survey each site, insuring that the sponsoring organizations were large, active, and organized. Usually the groups were Baptist or
AME churches, local sororities (like Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Moten was
a member), high schools, colleges, and civic associations. Sponsors were
urged to sell tickets not only to cover Moten’s contract, but to raise additional
funds for their own local charities.
Moten broke racial barriers when she sang in the South, where she was
often referred to as the “Brown Thrush of Song.” White-owned newspapers
covered her concerts. She sang before racially integrated audiences, such as
those at Monroe Colored High School in Louisiana in 1937. A year later, she
gave eight concerts in North Carolina sponsored by the State Department of
Education. In 1940, she met with Gov. Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina and
claimed she “found improvement in racial relationships all over the South.”
Moten’s most famous role was Bess in Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s
folk opera based on the 1925 novel Porgy by DuBose Heyward. Set in a
Charleston, South Carolina, tenement in 1912, the opera portrays the tragic
romance of the handicapped Porgy and his wanton sweetheart Bess. For more
than half a century, writers, critics, and historians have debated whether
Gershwin created the character of Bess for Moten or for Anne Wiggins Brown,
who played Bess when the opera premiered in 1935. Moten admitted that
she had conversations about Bess with Gershwin, but she was never the
model for the character. “Anne Brown was a soprano. I went and sat on the
same piano with [Gershwin] and heard his version of Bess. I said, ‘Oh, that’s
too high. You’ve written it all above the staff and I’m not a soprano. I’m a
Above: This program from a 1938 concert
displays Moten’s creative versatility: from
African American spirituals to German
odes to a Hopi Indian cradle song. Below:
“Happy New Year” from Etta Moten and
Claude Barnett, 1964.
Making History | 67
Right: Etta Moten starred as Bess in the Studebaker’s 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess.
Above: Anne Brown also portrayed Bess in various productions.
mezzo and on the contralto side.’ He said, ‘But you look like the Bess I want.’
That’s the difference—Gershwin wanted Bess to look like me. And I couldn’t
sing it because it’s too high. That is the way that happened, but some overanxious publicity people wrote and said it was written for me. But that isn’t
true. [Anne Brown] had the voice.”
Ironically, Moten gave up concert work to take the role of Bess, while
Brown abandoned Bess to assume a concert career. In 1942, when Brown
tired of the role, Moten replaced her as Bess on Broadway, starring in the role
for thirty-six weeks at the Majestic Theater before traveling through the
United States for several months. The New York Herald Tribune wrote that
Moten “has a remarkable voice, in power and quality; it gives an impression
of color as well as of volume, and proved to be a notable vehicle for the realization of the emotional hues of the music.”
68 | Chicago History | Fall 1999
Gershwin believed he was creating a new art form by combining opera with
theater; he composed his own spirituals and folksongs, casting them in operatic
form. Moten believes this complexity of Porgy and Bess made the production
hard to understand, even though the work is highly regarded today. “That’s the
reason that it couldn’t make it on the road. It’s not a movable thing; it’s not a
nightly thing at all. That’s the reason it didn’t last.” Gershwin, she says, “was
determined that it would be an opera,” but the public had little appreciation of
the form. Moten herself admits that Bess “was hard for me to sing. My voice
never did fit it well.” In the end, she confesses, “I just didn’t enjoy it.”
As Moten always will be remembered for her portrayal of Bess, Luckman always
will be remembered for three games. In his second season, Luckman led the Bears
to the NFL championship game against the Washington Redskins at Griffith Stadium in the nation’s capital. The contest pitted the traditional versus the modern,
namely the Redskins’ single-wing formation against the new T formation of the
Bears. Famed sportscaster Red Barber announced this game, which was the first
professional football game broadcast on network radio, and Chicago columnist
Irv Kupcinet was the head linesman (an official who assists the referee). Luckman
dominated the game from the beginning, leading the Bears to a 73–0 victory, the
biggest rout in a professional championship in American history. The Bears
scored so many touchdowns that when the score reached 66, the team had to
stop kicking extra points because too many balls had been booted into the stands
and the officials had only one left. In the 1990s, the Chicago Tribune named the
game “The Most Memorable Moment in Chicago Sports History,” bypassing the
more recent feats of Michael Jordan’s Bulls. For Luckman, it was simply “the
greatest day I ever knew in my career.”
In 1943, Luckman helped defeat the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds
56–7 by passing for 453 yards and 7 touchdowns, the latter a record
that remains unbroken to this day. The yardage total was 100 yards
more than the existing record, as Luckman became the first quarterback to pass for more then 400 yards in a game. A few weeks later, in
the NFL championship game at Wrigley Field, Luckman passed for
508 years and 5 touchdowns, leading the Bears to a 42–21 victory
over the Redskins. 1943 proved to be “Sid Luckman’s year,” as he set
NFL season records in passing yardage (2,194) and touchdowns (28)
and was the league’s Most Valuable Player.
During his career, Luckman completed 904 of 1,744 passes, a 51.8
percent completion rate. He led the NFL in passing yardage in 1943,
1945, and 1946, in overall passing in 1945, and in touchdown passes
in 1943, 1945, and 1946. He led the league seven times in average
gain per completion (1939–43, 1946–47), still an NFL record.
Luckman was All-Pro five times. He remains second on the career list
for the highest average gain per completion (8.2 yards) and second for
the highest average gain per completion in a season (10.86 yards). The
Bears retired his jersey number, 42, in 1954. Sportswriter Paul Zimmerman recently named Luckman (along with Otto Graham, Johnny
Unitas, Joe Namath, Joe Montana, and Doug Williams) one of the six
most important quarterbacks in football history.
Luckman was elected to the professional football Hall of Fame in
Canton, Ohio, in 1965. More than three decades later, he said that the
honor inadequately captured his love of football and Chicago. “There
isn’t anything like it in the world,” he remembered, “the crowd, the
smell of the grass, the people, the scoring, and winning and losing.
The greatest thrill, the greatest feeling a human being could ever have,
was to walk out on the field and say, ‘I’m a Chicago Bear.’”
Above: Sid Luckman entered the legendary
Football Hall of Fame (in Canton, Ohio) in
1965. Below: This 1961 volume on Football’s
Greatest Quarterbacks featured a chapter on
and cover photograph of Sid Luckman.
Making History | 69
Football: the way it used to be played
(above), with the same players commandeering both the offense and defense
(Cardinals and Bears at Wrigley Field,
December 8, 1935); and today’s game
(left), under lights, with the T-formation
and separate defensive and offensive teams
(Bears night game at Soldier Field,
c. 1960). By helping to introduce the Tformation, Luckman forever changed the
game of football.
Luckman almost single-handedly transformed the Bears into the Yankees of
professional football. He led the team to NFL championships in 1940, 1941,
1943, and 1946, and five division titles. The 1942 Bears went undefeated in
the regular season (11–0), only to suffer an upset by their arch-rival Redskins
in the championship game, 14–6. That one-touchdown defeat prevented the
Bears from becoming the only team in professional football history to win
four consecutive championships. Nevertheless, many consider the Chicago
teams of the 1940s to be the greatest ever assembled in the era of one-platoon
football (when the same players played both offense and defense). By 1948,
the Bears were “America’s team.” As the most popular professional football
team in the country, the Bears averaged more than forty-one thousand fans
per game, far above second-place Washington’s thirty-two thousand.
70 | Chicago History | Fall 1999
When their original careers ended, both
Luckman and Moten embarked on new careers
that proved equally successful. In 1950, Moten
established the Afro-Arts Bazaar with Estelle
Massey Osborne and Ida Cullen, the widow of
poet Countee Cullen. Opening at a hair salon
on 137th Street in Harlem, the bazaar sold art
and handcrafts from Africa, West Indies, and
the Americas. Moten and her friends established the bazaar because “people needed to
know more about Africa,” she explained, as
many African Americans at the time knew little
about Africa and African culture. “We wanted
to do something about that.” Moten and her
husband were among the leading promoters of
African culture in the mid-twentieth century.
After visiting Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast,
Nigeria, French Ivory Coast, Dahomey, and
French Togoland, Moten embarked on a cross-country promotional tour entitled “Africa Today.” The production included a technicolor movie she filmed
with her husband that included her singing African songs and African American spirituals. Moten explained that the “films give a graphic picture of our
African neighbors . . . not from the viewpoint of those who look only for the
bizarre and ludicrous, but through the eyes of two persons who felt a kinship
toward these kindly, courteous, friendly people of many skills.”
Moten also remained prominent in public affairs. During the 1950s, she
starred in “The Etta Moten Show” on Chicago’s WMAQ radio station, which
NBC broadcast to thirty-eight states three times a week. In the 1960s, she
worked with the National Congress of Negro Women on voter registration
and freedom rallies, including the March on Washington. From 1975 to
1985, she helped organize the International Women’s Decade Conferences.
Moten has also served on the board of directors or trustees of the Chicago
Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the African-American
Institute, the Church Women United of Greater Chicago, the DuSable
Museum, the University of Chicago’s Board of Women, the African Diaspora
International Visitors Center, and the Women’s Board of the Lyric Opera.
Luckman was equally successful after retiring from football. During the 1940s,
most professional athletes worked a second job in the off-season, and Luckman
began working for Cellu-Craft Products, a packaging company, in 1940. “I didn’t
have anything to do, and I was living in Chicago and Brooklyn, so I was able to
cover two cities for the company in sales,” he explained. While still playing for the
Bears, he became vice president of Cellu-Craft; in 1946, he purchased half of the
company with Sam Levy. Cellu-Craft started making wrapping materials for Kraft,
Quaker Oats, Sara Lee, and Morton International, and eventually became the
largest independent food-packaging company in the United States. “We had a
great career in business,” reminisced Luckman. “We [later] sold the company,
and then we bought it back again.” Cellu-Craft proved so successful that the company was purchased at different times by Suisse Aluminum and Lawson Mardon,
both of whom retained Luckman as a consultant until his retirement in 1995.
Luckman also became a leading fundraiser for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota. Near the end of his football career, Luckman was treated at the
clinic for a thyroid problem, and he never forgot the doctors who helped him.
When the clinic wanted to name a new building after him, he discouraged the
idea. Instead, he endowed a series of scholarships for young physicians.
Above: Etta Moten and Claude Barnett visited Africa, one of their many efforts to promote African culture; Moten also performed
many concerts throughout Africa (below).
Making History | 71
“Maybe one of these young men someday will do something for the betterment of mankind,” remarked Luckman. “That was my dream. They were wonderful people. I think it’s one of the great places in the world.”
In their final decades, Moten and Luckman devoted much of their lives to
fostering interracial and interreligious understanding. Moten was active for
many years in the National Conference of Christians and Jews and served as
a trustee of Michael Reese Hospital from 1972 to 1974. Although he
attended Columbia when the university had quotas limiting the number of
Jewish students, Luckman never harbored any ill will. When he worked as
an assistant coach for Lou Little in the 1940s, he always returned his paycheck to the university, writing, “Please ask the college to help out some
worthy student as partial thanks to my former coach and the college.”
Luckman was known for his ecumenical outlook. Raised as a Brooklyn Jew,
he donated religious paintings to St. Joseph’s College in Indiana where the
Bears trained, and he taught the split T formation to players and coaches at
Notre Dame and Holy Cross.
For decades, Luckman and Moten impressed associates, friends, and even
critics with their benevolence and modesty. Somebody was always “saying the
right thing and putting me in the right place at the right time,” Moten noted.
“Just luck and friendship, and that sort of thing. I haven’t ever needed to
jump off any bridges. I have had a good life.”
Time after time, the word “class” was used to describe each of them. In
1989, writer Paul Galloway’s Chicago Tribune feature article on Moten was
titled “Class Act.” One decade later, a leading sportswriter referred to
Luckman as “the million-dollar athlete with a ten-cent attitude.” The
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dave Anderson considered Luckman to be
“the most humble and most polite of all of America’s best athletes.”
Luckman not only “refined the way [quarterback] is played,” Anderson
added, “he also refined the way more athletes should act: with humility and
what is known as class.”
F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best source for information on Etta Moten Barnett, the Etta Moten Barnett Papers, can be found within the Claude Albert Barnett Papers
at the Chicago Historical Society. Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess: The
Story of an American Classic (New York: Knopf, 1990) offers the history of the folk opera
but is inadequate in the coverage of Moten. Recent articles on Moten include Paul Galloway, “Class Act,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 7, 1989, and Good Housekeeping, February 1998.
No existing study of Sid Luckman explains his importance in the history of professional sport in
America. Excellent summaries of his career and life appear in obituaries by Bill Jauss in Chicago
Tribune, July 6, 1998; by William N. Wallace in New York Times, July 9, 1998; and Ray Robinson
in Columbia College Today, Fall 1998. Overviews of the Chicago Bears include Richard Whittingham, The Chicago Bears: An Illustrated History (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979); and George
Halas, Halas on Halas (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979). Luckman is also featured in The Jew and
American Sports by Herbert U. Ribalow (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1948).
I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 61, top and bottom, CHS; 62, from The Jew in American Sports
by Herbert U. Ribalow (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1948); 63, top and bottom, CHS,
Claude Barnett Papers; 64 top, CHS, ICHi-18378; 64 bottom, CHS, Claude Barnett
Papers; 65 left and right, from Bears in their Own Words by Richard Whittingham (Chicago:
Contemporary Books, 1991); 66, CHS; 67, top and bottom, CHS, Claude Barnett Papers;
68, left and right, CHS, Claude Barnett Papers; 69 top, courtesy of the Football Hall of
Fame; 69 bottom, from Football’s Greatest Quarterbacks by Booton Herndon (New York:
Bartholomew House, 1961); 70 top, CHS, SDN-78477; 70 bottom, CHS,
G1989.0152.58.7; 71 top, CHS, ICHi-2286; 71 bottom, Claude Barnett Papers.
72 | Chicago History | Fall 1999