Charley Trippi, football player.
Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.
He was a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mr. Trippi was 100 when he passed, and at the time was the oldest living member of both.
Roger Welsch, tractor guy.
Okay, that’s a little misleading. He was also a regular on CBS “Sunday Morning”, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, founder of the Liars Hall of Fame:
and a honorary member of the Pawnee, Omaha, and Oglala tribes. And a tractor guy.
His practical interest in tractors, especially antiques, became a fixation in his writing and speaking, and for years he maintained a popular website full of geeky farm-implement arcana. In 1988, The New York Times wrote that Mr. Welsch “is to tractor restoration, and the Allis-Chalmers in particular, what Thoreau was to the lakeside cabin.”
He wrote more than 40 books about love, tractors, dogs and women, including “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor” (2002) and “Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration” (1997) — a book as funny as its title is droll.