Overview

Before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, there were only nineteen men, throughout history, who played in the Major Leagues of baseball and in the National Football League, in the same season. Only one man from that group, Walter French, can lay claim to having played for a World Series winner and an NFL Championship team. In 1925, he starred for the Pottsville (PA) Maroons in their win over the Chicago Cardinals, in what was believed to be the NFL championship game, only to see the title stripped by a league office decision, a controversial move still being argued about today. Then in 1929, he was on the Philadelphia Athletics when they beat the Chicago Cubs in five games to win the World Series. French played with and against the biggest stars of the 1920s, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and twenty-seven other ballplayers who would eventually wind up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In football, he went up against the likes of Notre Dame's George Gipp, the ""Four Horsemen,"" Curly Lambeau, Geoge Halas, Ira ""Buck"" Rogers, and many more. The top sports writers of his day, from Grantland Rice to Ed Sullivan, made regular mention of him in their columns. Other well-known figures from the period such as Paul Robeson, Knute Rockne, Connie Mack, and General Douglas MacArthur are part of his journey as well, and make appearances in this book.

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Lenny Wagner is the president of the Historical Society of Moorestown, New Jersey, and has been the curator of several of the organization's most popular exhibits, including ""Sports Legends of Moorestown,"" which was presented in 2010. It was during the preparation for this exhibit that he first became acquainted with the story of Walter French. He is also a member of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABRE) and is a contributor to the organization's biography project. He lives in Moorestown with his wife, Cheryl. Jim Denison is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and a Society of Voice Arts and Sciences (SOVAS) Voice Arts Award nominee. He has experience as an actor on a variety of television shows and movies, appearing on Netflix, HBO, the National Geographic Channel, Investigation Discovery, and other networks, as well as appearances and voice-overs in regional and national television and radio ads. A Florida native, he has worked and traveled in many locations within the United States and abroad. For five years he hosted religious programs broadcast from several Caribbean radio stations. He changed careers to voice-over and audiobook narration after forty years of working with Christian churches in Florida, Texas, Trinidad and Tobago, Alabama, South Carolina, Maryland, and Kentucky. Jim and his wife of over thirty-five years, Renee, currently reside in southern Indiana near Louisville, Kentucky. They have two grown daughters. He holds two master's degrees and a doctorate.

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