Philadelphia Daily News from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 71

I Thursday July 13. 1989 PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS Page 71 White's Until Peal An I 40 Years with Club Rate Gallagher Chapter in New NFL History Book probably be a 41-year man with the railroad," he said. "I'd probably have my own train." The NFL in those times was a different animal entirely. The league offices were in Philadelphia back then. The whole business was run pretty much out of commissioner Bert Bell's breast pocket.

Nobody had dreamed of anything as grand as the Super Bowl. All the Eagles dreamed about was breaking even. They needed 22,000 fans at home games to cover their expenses. With maybe 10,000 season tickets, it was often a struggle. "Our office was at 17th and Ludlow," Gallagher said.

"It was a little storefront, really. We only had five men working rrsa orty years. Fifteen head 3 coaches. Four sets of owners. Two NFL championships.

One man. Jim Gallagher. 'There's been a lot of losses," said Gallagher, who is about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his first job with the Eagles. "A lot of buses, too. But there have been great wins.

It's a colorful life. It's glamorous. It has all of those nifty things attached to it. It's nice. And it's Philadelphia.

I'm a Philadelphia guy." Gallagher has worked in the Eagles' background for four decades, but now he has been immortalized in a chapter of a new book called "Iron It is an oral history of the National Football League's middle ages, written by By there. And there was a dental lab over us where a guy bnade false Hed be grinding away during the day. And in one of our rooms they really weren't offices, just rooms the dust would come flying in -from the guy grinding those teeth." In his first years with the. club, Gallagher Stuart Leuthner. The stories are wonderful.

Former Eagle Mike Jarmoluk tells about his last pro game, when an opponent's errant heel caught him in the chin and drove his teeth through his lower lip. At halftime, when he was supposed to be honored on his retirement, Jarmoluk killed time waiting for Ss Reached, Agent Says By Tim Kawakaml Daily News Sports Writer With the negotiations for his much-desired contract extension apparently stalled once again, Eagles defensive lineman Reggie White has decided that he will skip coach Buddy Ryan's two-week "voluntary" camp completely. And now White's agent is saying that the real issue isn't how much injury protection White receives it's just getting the deal done. "Even if they give him $40 million worth of insurance tomorrow, he's not coming," White's agent, Jimmy Sexton, said last night. "He's got to have a new contract." On Tuesday, according to a source close to the situation, Sexton sent several three- and four-year proposals to the Eagles that cut White's asking price from about $1.8 million a year to a little more than $1.6 million.

According to the same source, the Eagles rejected all of the proposals. The Eagles are standing by their last offer, made in May, which would pay White slightly more than the five-year, $7.5 million deal that made Buffalo Bills lineman Bruce Smith the highest-paid defensive player In the league. "I was optimistic that we might get this all done," Sexton said. "But that was Tuesday. You know how these things are, they change all the time." There are no new talks scheduled.

QUICK UPDATE The agent for unsigned receiver Mike Quick says he is not dragging his feet on the negotiations to sign the five-time Pro Bowler. The agent, Jim Solano, did confirm reports that he told the Eagles weeks ago that Quick deserved to be the highest-paid Eagle. Solano also confirmed that be suggested a delay in negotiations with the Eagles until after Reggie White's contract was settled. But Solano emphasized that he sug-gested the delay back when he thought White's signing was imminent. Now that he sees that White is far from agreement, he says be has scheduled talks for Monday.

"When I told the Eagles that, I thought Reggie was just days away from signing," Solano said. "What Reggie White gets would affect my client, just like any deal does. So I wes going to wait and see what happened. "Now that it doesn't look like It's going to happen soon, I wont wait It's not like I'm just delaying and delaying, waiting for what Reggie gets, then saying, 'We want a dollar more than If Mike gets an offer we think is right, that's what we'll sign for." Solano did express surprise that Eagles president Harry Gamble, the source of the reports, would release details of the proposal. "I'm miffed that Harry would do llMt that." Solano, said.

"1 dont like to negotiate contracts through the media. I dont think he does, either." Rich Hofmann MICHAEL MERCANTI DAILY NEWS Eagles official Jim Gallagher views himself as 'a Philadelphia guy did a little bit of everything. In the week before a home game, the ticket' office would stay open late and Gallagher would help man the booth. "Sometimes, you'd sit in there from 5 at night until 9 and no more than about four or five people would come in," he said. "I used to kid that we should rent some people to stand in line." When you compare that to today, when the Eagles can sell more than 55,000 season tickets without a sweat, it seems impossible.

In the book, Gallagher tells a story that comes from an owners' meeting at which he was hired to take down the minutes, a story that really puts the changes into perspective: "There were some very interesting people at those meetings. George Preston Marshall, who owned the Redskins, was along on that trip, and boy, was he a heck of a speaker. He'd get up and make these inspiring speeches about the future of the NFL. I remember him talking about charging 10 dollars for championship game. Half the guys in that room; almost fell off their chairs.

They couldn't believe it because the best seats in the stadium were going for three or four dollars. Marshall said, 'We have a great game and it's worth 10 That was in 1954 or '55, and today they don't bat an eye charging 100 dollars for a Super Bowl ticket." Gallagher sits in an office with a trash can that has a big Eagles helmet on it, with a director's chair. the doctor to sew him up by "standing in front of a mirror blowing smoke through the holes in my chin and Freddie Shuback, the trainer, said, "Stop that, you'll get a There are lots of stories, lots of history. Grazylegs Hirsch. Eddie Le- Baron.

Bucko Kilroy. John Henry Johnson. And James Gallagher. Jimmy Gal. Jimmy G.

He came to the Eagles in September of 1949 as a stenographer. The pay was $45 a week. Other than two years spent, as he says, "driving jeeps around Korea," he has worked for the Eagles ever since. The link has not been merely professional, but personal, too. After all, it was in the Eagles' offices that he met Betty, his wife of 31 years.

And to think, he only went for the Eagles job in the first place because the Pennsylvania Railroad had laid him off after about six months. "Back when I started in September of 1949, on Sunday, well, that was the day when the Philadelphia Catholic League played its football games," Gallagher said. "I tell this in the book: People would go to those high school games with portable radios -they were just coming out then 1 and somebody would yell, 'Hey, Tommy Thompson just threw a touchdown pass. That was pro football back then. The Eagles had attendance, and I followed it, but I was never really into it "If it wasn't for being laid off, I'd Peaks and Billy Barnes in the first two rounds.

When the third round came up, some of our coaches were saying that McDonald was too small, things like that. I said, 'We looked at the film, and all he does is beat "So we took him," Gallagher said. "That's my claim to fame. Now, dont ask me about anybody else I picked. Mostly, I just collated the information." But he has done more than collate' information about the Eagles' past.

He cherishes that information, that history, and many of the people who made it. Gallagher is the club's main link with its alumni. That's what led Leuthner, the author of "Iron Men," to him. "The one thing I learned in life, a long time ago, came from Dale Carnegie, I guess," Gallagher said. "You have to reverse positions with people.

If I was that guy who played in 1954, and I called the Eagles and didn't know anybody, and I wanted to show a picture or a film to my grandchildren of when I played, well, how would I feel if nobody could help me?" For 40 years in which change has been the norm, with the NFL and with the Eagles, Jim Gallagher and that philosophy have been the only constant. that says Eagles on it. He sits in an era in which merchandising and marketing and finding new revenue sources has outstripped the need to sell tickets. Gallagher spends much of his time now arranging the Eagles' travel plans, a job filled with details and fraught with potential disasters. Before that, he was public relations director for about two decades.

And before that, while doing a bunch of other things, Gallagher also was pretty deeply involved in the drafting of players, which was much less of a science in the late '50s than it is now. "I'd gather information, keeping it on index cards," he said. "We paid some scouts. Most of them were college assistant coaches. Twice a year, say, we'd have an assistant on every Big 10 team send us a report on the -best halfbacks, the best quarterbacks, that kind of thing.

We never got to see the players. We almost never got a college film. In the '50s, they considered the pros the bad guys. "Somehow, in the mid-'SOs, we got a film of the University of Oklahoma. Somebody let me and Bucko Kilroy look at it.

Tommy McDonald was an All-American, but this was the first chance we had to look at him. When the draft was held, we took Clarence.