Charles Richards Gordon, known as Dick "Scoop" Gordon, was an Americansportsjournalist whose works were a regular feature in venerable sports magazines like The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, and Baseball Digest. After earning his nickname "Scoop" in 1930 by reporting for The Daily Princetonian that golfing legend Bobby Jones would be retiring from active competition, Gordon went on to a sports reporting career which ended in 2008.
Childhood
Charles Richards Gordon grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of Charles William Gordon, the proprietor of the fur clothing manufacturer Gordon & Furguson, Inc. His mother, Charlotte Bishop Gordon, was a native of Connecticut. At the time of the 1920 United States Census, Gordon was living with his parents, an older sister, and two servants at 378 Summit Avenue in St. Paul, in the home of his grandfather, Richards Gordon, a deacon of the Episcopal Church and a board member of the new "St. Paul Institute". The younger Gordon attended St. Paul Academy and wrote for the school newspaper Now and Then. The school's headmaster reportedly opined that Gordon was a better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been a student at the St. Paul Academy from 1908 to 1911.
Princeton and early career
Gordon later attended Princeton University, graduating in 1933. While attending Princeton, he was a reporter for The Daily Princetonian. He received the nickname "Scoop" in 1930 for being the first to report that professional golfer Bobby Jones was retiring from the sport. After graduating from Princeton, Gordon returned to Minnesota and became a sports writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In January 1939, he joined the Chicago Daily News as a sports writer.
During World War II, he served in the United States Marine Corps for 26 months. He served as a Marine Combat Correspondent in the Pacific Theater of Operations. In November 1943, his story about a U.S. Army baseball team that endured six months at Guadalcanal was published in The Sporting News. After over two years of combat action, Sergeant Gordon was returned to Minneapolis and worked for a time as a U.S. Marine recruiter. On April 26, 1945, Gordon married Adelaide Washburne, a Smith graduate who had been teaching at the University of Minnesota and worked in the American Red Cross during World War II. After the war ended, Gordon returned to his job as a sports reporter for the Chicago Daily News.
Post-war career
From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Gordon was one of the leading sports writers in the United States. Between 1946 and 1976, almost 250 of Gordon's works were published in The Sporting News, an American-based sports magazine established in 1886. From 1949 to 1970, Gordon's baseball writings were a recurring feature in Baseball Digest, the oldest continuously-published baseball magazine in the United States. When Sports Illustrated magazine launched in the mid-1950s, Gordon was one of the budding journal's first writers. On a daily basis, Gordon worked the sports desk for the Minneapolis Star, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Villager newspapers in the Twin Cities. He wrote articles about the Minnesota Twins baseball team, the Minnesota Golden Gophers, and the Minnesota Vikings. Gordon covered the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California where the U.S. men's ice hockey team won gold. He continued to write for the Villager until he retired after a long career in early 2008.
Family and death
Dick Gordon and his wife Adelaide spent 61 years together, their marriage producing three boys. Adelaide died in early 2007, and Gordon followed on December 8, 2008. Sports Illustrated, the Star Tribune and his college newspaper all reported the passing.
Selected works
As an active sportswriter for almost eighty years, Gordon wrote thousands of articles on subjects ranging from baseball to hockey. The following are a small sampling of his works, listed chronologically:
