Remembrances: Joe Goddard First Made News as Palatine High Athlete and Writer
Legendary Sun-Times Baseball Beat Writer Passed Away Friday at 85
Joe Goddard was a cub reporter for Palatine High School sports nearly 20 years before he became a Cubs reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1973.
Goddard also found his name in print as a Pirates’ baseball player with a couple of future major leaguers two decades before he started his legendary 27-year career writing about big-league baseball players.
Goddard, who was known as “Young Joe” within the baseball writers fraternity during his career covering the White Sox and Cubs for the Sun-Times, passed away Friday at age 85. Sun-Times’ White Sox beat writer Daryl Van Schouwen wrote an excellent tribute about Goddard’s life that included 42 years at the paper known as “The Bright One.”
He truly was young Joe Goddard when he got 1 of 3 hits for Palatine in a 5-0 loss to Ela-Vernon (now Stevenson) in a May 1954 baseball game. The same report in Paddock Publications’ Palatine Enterprise on Northwest Conference baseball also mentioned winning pitcher Jay Hook hitting a double and homer for Grayslake in a win over Bensenville and Grant’s Bob Klaus homering in a victory over Glenbrook.
Jay Hook went 29-62 in his eight-year pitching career that featured a unique transition of going 1-3 with the 1961 World Series-losing Reds to 8-19 with the 1962 Mets, the worst team in baseball history with 120 losses. Hook was also part of a 1964 trade that included player to be named later Adrian Garrett, who had brief tours with the Cubs from 1973-75 when Goddard was in his early years on the baseball beat. Bobby Klaus hit .208 with 6 homers in 1964-65 with the Reds and Mets.
Goddard, who grew up in Inverness, also started showcasing the skills that would get him to the bigs as a writer when he covered Palatine sports during his senior year of 1955-56 and in the summer before he went to DePauw University. Goddard was covering basketball, wrestling and baseball and one of his stories was on Len Rohde winning a state wrestling title with a perfect record. Rohde went on to a distinguished 15-year NFL career as an offensive lineman with the San Francisco 49ers.
Even while Goddard was busy on the baseball beat, he wrote more than 2,000 “Time Out with Goddard” columns in 44 years for the Hinsdale Doings that were mainly about Hinsdale Central athletics. He was inducted into that school’s Hall of Fame in 2009. He also covered the Northern Illinois football beat for the Sun-Times and had a baseball field he played at as a kid named Joe Goddard Field by the Inverness Park District in 2011.