George Halas Memorial

George Stanley Halas was born on February 2, 1895 in Chicago. The son of Bohemian immigrants, he grew up on the city’s West Side. After graduating from Crane Technical High School in 1913, Halas worked for a year in the payroll department of Western Electrical Company in nearby Cicero before enrolling at the University of Illinois. There, he majored in civil engineering, joined Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and played football for the legendary Bob Zuppke. In early 1918, Halas left the University of Illinois and joined the U.S. Navy. While undergoing training at Great Lakes Naval Station just north of Chicago, he joined the base’s football team and helped lead them to victory in the 1919 Rose Bowl (then called the Tournament East-West Football Game). Upon receiving his discharge from the Navy following the game, Halas played minor league baseball, quickly earning promotion to the major leagues and a roster spot on the New York Yankees. An abysmal batting average and a hip injury, however, put an end to his professional baseball career after just twelve games. 

In 1920, Halas began working for A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company at its corn starch plant in Decatur, Illinois. While working for the firm, he coached and played for the company’s football team, the Decatur Staleys. That same year, Halas attended the initial organizing meeting of the American Professional Football Association in Canton, Ohio. To draw larger crowds and sell more tickets, he moved the team to Chicago and then renamed them the Chicago Bears in 1922, the same year the American Professional Football Association was renamed the National Football League. 

Halas continued to coached and play for the Chicago Bears until his retirement in 1930. Unable to stay away from the game of football for long, he returned to coach the team three years later. In 1940, using the innovative T-formation, Halas’s Bears routed the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the league’s championship game. Hoping to replica the Bears’ success, other NFL teams adopted the offensive formation, which quickly became the prevailing offense in the league. Three years later, Halas left the Bears again, this time to serve in the U.S. Navy after America’s entry into the Second World War. He returned to coach the Bears in 1946, and continued to do so through the 1955 season. After another multi-year break from football, Halas resumed coaching the team in 1958. Following the 1967 season, he retired from coaching for good, but remained active in the organization’s operations until his death from pancreatic cancer on October 31, 1983. He was eighty-eight years old. 

Roughly two decades after Halas’s death, the Chicago Bears commissioned sculptor Julie Rotblatt-Amrany to design a memorial in honor of the team’s founder and long-time coach. Installed near Gate 15 at Soldier Field in 2004, the memorial consists of a massive, twenty-six-and-a-half-foot-long by fifteen-and-a-half-foot-wide Black granite slab adorned with white bronze bas-reliefs and laser-etched imagery. It features two likenesses of an animated Halas coaching from the sidelines, in addition to those of some of the organization’s most famous players, including Red Grange, Dick Butkus, and Walter Payton. Around, between, and underneath the white bronze figures are laser-etched recreations of historical photographs and a diagram of the T-formation.

"George Halas." Encyclopædia Britannica. Web. 6 April 2021 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Halas>.

"George Halas Memorial." Chicago Park District. City of Chicago. Web. 6 April 2021 <https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/george-halas-memorial>.

"George S. Halas." The Grainger College of Engineering Hall of Fame. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Web. 6 April 2021 <https://grainger.illinois.edu/alumni/hall-of-fame/9650>.

Kirsch, George B., Othello Harris, and Claire E. Nolte, eds. Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

"Tribute to George Halas." The Fine Art Studio of Rotblatt-Amrany. Web. 6 April 2021 <https://rotblattamrany.com/projects/tribute-to-george-halas/>.