Starting in 1923 and over all but one of 13 years, George Whitney Calhoun of the Green Bay Press-Gazette polled coaches, other club officials and sportswriters in picking an all-National Football League team. In 1932, the one year that Calhoun wasn’t involved, Art Bystrom, then the Press-Gazette’s sports editor, handled the task.
First, a few things about Calhoun.
He was co-founder of the Packers in 1919, their publicist – albeit, volunteer perhaps – over their first 27 years in the NFL and also official club secretary for most of that time, as well as a member of the team’s board of directors from when it became a community-owned property in 1923 until his death in December 1963.
By trade, Calhoun was a newspaperman.
From 1921, when the Packers joined what was then the American Professional Football Association, through 1927, his duties at the Press-Gazette included at various times: telegraph editor, sports editor, sports columnist and covering Packers games both at home and on the road. Thereafter, he would cover the Packers for the paper only on their annual late-season eastern swings, including writing a game story as late as 1937, while doing double duty carrying out his ex officio job as publicist for the team.
Arguably, nobody in the league at the time had as many influential friends, from owners to coaches to sportswriters. Even after Calhoun’s bitter falling out with Curly Lambeau in 1947 and his retirement from the Press-Gazette in 1957, the likes of NFL commissioner Bert Bell and Bears owner and coach George Halas, not to mention many others, would make a point of visiting Calhoun at his home on W. Walnut St., or at nearby Brehme’s Bar on Saturdays when they were in Green Bay for a game. “I’ve lost one of my oldest and dearest friends,” Halas said upon learning of Calhoun’s death.
Calhoun also was one of 16 contributor candidates on the original Pro Football Hall of Fame ballot in 1963 for his many contributions to the league and its history.
In January 1952, Bell and league owners invited Roger Treat to attend their annual meeting and endorsed his work as editor of the first official NFL encyclopedia, which was published later that year. In turn, Calhoun was the first person that Treat thanked in his preface and suggested the project might not have been possible if he had not forwarded his “precious and massive, files…,” that led to Treat “digging up facts which once seemed … inaccessible.”
Calhoun also has been credited with authoring…
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