Who Is Chic Harley? The Book

ACROSS GENERATIONS

The book The One And Only: Chic Harley - America's Great Athlete is a story that took more than three decades to piece together with personal interviews of many of Harley’s teammates, never before seen letters, archival information, medial records, and fond recollections of family members who knew him well.

Across Generations Image

The first epiphany of a book about athletic wonder Chic Harley had to surface sometime in the 1960s.
Richard Wessell, Sr., Chic’s nephew, was an accomplished newspaper owner and editor in Des Plaines, Illinois. His interest in newspapering may have come from Chic’s father, Charles W. Harley, who worked as a Linotype operator for many newspapers in Illinois and Ohio. As a young boy, Richard likely picked up on family talk around the dinner table about the sights, sounds and smells of the machine shops where his grandpa labored for many years. His mother and Chic’s youngest sister, Ruth, encouraged her son’s interest.

Later in life, Richard frequently talked about Chic and his determination to write a book about his famous uncle. Richard told about many conversations he had with sportswriters and others in Columbus who were sure that the Life of Chic Harley would make for a wonderful movie as well.

Finally, in 1975, one year after Chic Harley died in Danville, Illinois, Richard took a major step toward his goal of writing a book. He gathered a small group of about four of Harley’s teammates in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Columbus where they sipped on coffee and reminisced. All the while, a tape recorder was on preserving the historical conversations. Other interviews by Wessell were held a year later.
During the next 15 years, even though Richard remained optimistic about the book, he never found the time to actually begin writing. He kept talking, though, to friends, family members and anyone else who was listening about his dream. Always listening was one of Richard’s sons, Todd, who had made the decision to help with the book and if Richard couldn’t do it, he would.

In 1993, Todd’s first notes on the book that would be named The One And Only were taken. Those notes came from reading published material about Uncle Chic and sifting through a huge scarlet and gray family album stuffed with Harley memories. A few months later, copies of the Staley Manufacturing Company newsletter arrived detailing the fact that Chic Harley had signed to play professsional football with the Staleys, which were later renamed the Chicago Bears. Over the next 15 years, more and more documents and records were found, read and filed, and from there, detailed notes generated that would become the basis of this full length biography.