Hinsdale Central High School

Joe Goddard

Membership level: Hall of Fame

Joe Goddard

Inductee Year 2009
Joe Goddard
Joe Goddard applied with Hinsdale Doings publisher Peter Teschner in Sept., 1970 to ``help out a bit’’ with sports coverage.

He has been there since, helping out with over 2,000 ``Time Out With Goddard’’ columns with an emphasis on Hinsdale Central’s renown athletic department that Harvey Dickinson built after World War II and has been perpetuated by AD’s Gene Strode, Ken Schreiner, Tom Schweer and now Paul Moretta.

Goddard was a two-time runner-up for the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award for 27 years (1973-2000) of Chicago Sun-Times’ beat reporting of the Cubs and White Sox. He also produced the newspaper’s popular Sunday column ``What’s Up With.’’

Joe began his career in 1961 at the Indianapolis Times where in three years he covered everything from spelling bees to the football Rose Bowl to the Indianapolis 500 auto race, plus Saturday nights on the police beat.

His first major sports interview was with boxing great Joe Louis, who didn’t think much of an up-and-coming young fighter named Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali). Joe also wrote about another rising athlete, golfer Jack Nicklaus, and had a 1964 sit-down with Harry Stuhldreher, last of the famed Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in the 1920s.

Joe then served eight years on the Sun-Times copy desk before succeeding Baseball Hall of Fame writer Jerome Holtzman on the baseball beat. He prepared for the opportunity by writing occasional features on such icons as George Halas, Red Grange and Hinsdale’s own Jay Berwanger, the first Heisman Trophy winner who gave the heavy statue to an aunt to be used as a door-stop.

Goddard retired in 2006, but still produces ``Time Out’’ for The Doings.
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