The Green Bay Packers Original Golden Girl - Hardcover

by Nancy S. Lind (Author), Michele Ozkan (Afterword by)

Everyone knows Go Pack Go. Almost nobody knows the woman who built it.

On a frozen November afternoon at Wrigley Field in 1959, a drum majorette from Door County dropped her baton mid-routine in front of a full press corps - then cartwheeled over it, swept it off the turf, and finished as though the slip had been choreographed. The next morning the Chicago Tribune, the Bears' own hometown paper, christened her the Packers' Golden Girl. The name followed Mary Jane Van Duyse Sorgel into the Lombardi dynasty and never left.

For more than two decades she organized and led the Golden Girls, the cheerleaders who ringed Lambeau Field through the team's golden age - unpaid, buying their own pom-poms, twirling through the thirteen-below cold of the Ice Bowl while history remembered only the quarterback sneak.

Drawing on letters, press clippings, a Governor's commendation, and the decades-long archive of one of her own recruits, The Green Bay Packers Original Golden Girl recovers a story the official record let go. It is the portrait of the woman behind the chant - and a case for finally putting her name on the wall.