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Davenport man finds a letter his dad wrote to Iowa great Nile Kinnick
Quad City Times ^ | 12/6/2011 | Don Doxie

Posted on 12/06/2011 9:16:36 AM PST by JohnBovenmyer

link only


TOPICS: Military/Veterans; Sports
KEYWORDS: iowa; kinnick
Local man discovers his father's letter to Nile Kinnick and Kinnick's reply, both written the week after Pearl Harbor. Link to (faint) scan of the letters at the source.

If you're looking for a name to use in a protest vote Nile would make a great write-in. Many who knew him expected him to become president. He was an active Republican, having campaigned for Wilkie. I have three patients who knew him. The first, unaware of my long interest, volunteered "Nike Kinnick was the finest person I'd ever met." My patient, who'd lied about his age to enter the Navy as an enlisted man after Pearl, met Kinnick in basic training. During his alleged spare time from flight training Kinnick went to the enlisted men's mess and played the piano for them, quite well I'm told.

As an aside, in an un-, or at least, under-reported scandal, the inaugural Big 10 Championship game did NOT use a Nile Kinnick headed coin for the toss, unlike every other Big 10 game for decades. Instead it had the Big10 logo on one side and both participating schools' logos on the other.

1 posted on 12/06/2011 9:16:45 AM PST by JohnBovenmyer
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To: JohnBovenmyer
Thanx. I've been a huge fan of Nile Kinnick since reading this Sports Illustrated featured account back in 1987. Read everything I could find on Nile, collected all manner of commemorative items, memorabilia, including college yearbooks and even an autograph. I'm not particularly a Big Ten, or Iowa fan, but the story and the character of Nile Kinnick are transcendent.
2 posted on 12/06/2011 11:02:31 AM PST by steelyourfaith (If it's "green" ... it's crap !!!)
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To: steelyourfaith

Yes, transcendent...
Makes me weep for what we’ve lost.


3 posted on 12/06/2011 11:05:30 AM PST by spankalib (The Marx-in-the-Parks crowd is a basement skunkworks operation of the AFL-CIO)
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To: steelyourfaith

I used to work with people from Iowa and one time one of them told me some stuff about Kinnick. But after reading this article, I had to get on you tube and look at old clips of Kinnick. On the clips, he looked to be a big, fast back who was also very evasive. I was somewhat shocked to read that Kinnick was only about 5:8 and 180 lbs. He was supposedly the slowest back Iowa had. He certainly looks awful fast looking at the video clips. Those were also the days when players played offense and defense. No resting for five to fifteen minutes. Kinnick played virtually every minute of every game. He also was a high school basketball star and star player on the university team. Another little sidenote, he played with Bob Feller on an American Legion baseball team. Had to have been one heck of an athlete.


4 posted on 12/06/2011 11:23:24 AM PST by driftless2
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To: JohnBovenmyer; spankalib; driftless2
Nile Kinnick---

I just finished re-reading the Sports Illustrated article linked in post #2, and noticed that Loren Hickerson is cited in it, the same Loren Hickerson from the original link of this thread.

It dawned on me that this Sports Illustrated article from 24+ years ago is almost as old as the total number years Nile Kinnick was granted on earth.

I haven't been on eBay for a few years now, but back in the day I found a bunch of Nile Kinnick items there.

The Pat Tillman story offers a number of parallels to Nile Kinnick.

5 posted on 12/06/2011 4:34:48 PM PST by steelyourfaith (If it's "green" ... it's crap !!!)
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To: JohnBovenmyer

As an aside, in an un-, or at least, under-reported scandal, the inaugural Big 10 Championship game did NOT use a Nile Kinnick headed coin for the toss, unlike every other Big 10 game for decades. Instead it had the Big10 logo on one side and both participating schools’ logos on the other.

It is to weep at such a loss of understanding. Thank you FRiend.


6 posted on 12/06/2011 6:06:07 PM PST by spankalib (The Marx-in-the-Parks crowd is a basement skunkworks operation of the AFL-CIO)
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To: spankalib
The statue of Nile at Kinnick stadium, unveiled in 2006, is beautiful and displays him not as player but as a student. There are wonderful quotes around the base. I took good pictures at its inaugural game and was going to post the quotes here, but they appear to be amongst my losses in a subsequent hard drive crash. Dang! I hadn't realized I'd lost them. I'll have to retake them next time I'm there.

The actual unveiling, the day before, included a flyover by an F4F Wildcat, the kind of plane in which he died. It may have been a later model. I wasn't able to attend and I wish I could have seen that. Wiki claims only one of Nile's model is still airworthy, although 16 newer ones still are. They only had modern jets flyover for the game.

7 posted on 12/06/2011 7:13:34 PM PST by JohnBovenmyer (Obama been Liberal. Hope Change!)
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