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 One
of the best known American soccer writers, McSkimming began
his career as a reporter with the old St. Louis Star in 1913,
when he was still a student at Yeatman High School
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Personal Information |
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Class of 1951 |
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Born:
1897
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St. Louis, MO |
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Died:
July 13, 1976
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St. Louis, MO |
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He moved to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1922 and
retired in 1961. A
linguist and world traveller he was responsible for keeping
soccer in the public eye in St. Louis for nearly half a
century. He was
often teased for his style in covering soccer games,
habitually retreating to the far corner of the upper stands,
far away from other sports writers and spectators. "I couldn't cover a game while listening to a
political argument, a baseball discussion or anything
else," McSkimming once said. He was the only American reporter at the 1950 World Cup
in Brazil, but was only there on vacation. He once described the result of the U.S. win over
England in that year "as it would be if Oxford University
sent a baseball team over here and it beat the Yankees." He served as a pharmacist's mate on a Navy gunboat in
World War One, attended Stanford University for a year and
worked a year as a police reporter for the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat. He
worked for an English-language newspaper in Mexico City in
1931 for a while and served as a Red Cross field
representative in Puerto Rico and the Canal Zone in World War
II.
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