Nancy Lind’s new book tells the story of Mary Jane Van Duyse Sorgel, the Sevastopol girl who taught Lambeau Field to say “Go Pack Go,” and whose name is still missing from the Hall of Fame wall.
Wrigley Field, Nov. 8, 1959. The baton left Mary Jane Van Duyse’s hand at the wrong moment, the wind off Lake Michigan caught it, and it hit the turf in front of a full press corps. She did not stop. Without breaking stride she cartwheeled over the fallen baton, swept it off the grass, and finished the routine as if the drop had been choreographed. The next day the Chicago Tribune – the Bears’ own paper – christened her “the Packers’ Golden Girl.” She was 26, the Packers’ drum majorette since she was eighteen.
She was a girl from Sevastopol. Born in Sturgeon Bay on Dec. 29, 1932, she grew up in the apartment above her family’s tavern – the building now known as Institute Saloon – over a dance hall and a roller rink. By her junior year at Sevastopol High she was already teaching: in 1949, the Brussels band director Saxe DeNamur went looking for someone to train six twirlers for his marching band and found a 16-year-old. She met the girls on Saturdays at Hanson’s Music Store in Sturgeon Bay, then began driving south herself through the orchard country, a teenager with a carload of equipment. She taught at the Forestville Victory School too; two of her 1953 and 1954 recital programs survived for decades in a Forestville family’s attic scrapbook…