Klein's love of Blue Streak football turns into new book

SANDUSKY — He may never attended Sandusky High School, but has been a Blue Streak all his life.Such is the case for Sandusky native Jim Klein who has authored a highly interesting book.Volume 1 of Sandusky Blue Streaks Football goes on sale Saturday morning with the book signing at the Sandusky Library, from 10:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. at a cost of $25 (cash only).The book covers Sandusky football from 1950 through 1979 with a total of 224 pages jam-packed with profiles on past players and coaches.Volume 1 centers around the "Sensational Sixties" when the Blue Streaks compiled a 10-year record of 87-10-3 under four coaches — Earle Bruce, Bob Seaman, Bob Reublin and Gene Kidwell.There is much more on the Blue Streaks success in the years that followed, and individual profiles on numerous players, who not only excelled in high school athletics, but went on to star in college, and for some, in professional football."My dad was the inspiration for me," Klein said. "He constantly talked about Sandusky football to the point I went to game at the age of 10 with my neighborhood buddies. That started it all."My dad was a boxer in his days and I eventually started going to the library with the intent of re-searching his accomplishments in the ring, along with the likes of Beebe Bennett, Earl Tye, Gene Swain and my godfather, Frank Steinhauser," he added. "It was during that time I found so many articles about Sandusky football players of the past, such as London Gant and the Gant brothers, Johnny Bettridge, Geno Balconi "King" Karl Krueger and many others. Since I was an American history teacher for 29 years in the middle school system at Bellevue, it was just natural for me to follow that trail of Sandusky football. I kept going back to the Sandusky Library looking for information on Blue Streak football and suddenly it was getting bigger and bigger. It became a huge project, but I had the time and the care needed to do it right, and I'm quite proud of the book. I went to St. Mary's with one of my sisters, but my dad and another sister WENT TO Sandusky High."I remember dad talking about the Thanksgiving Day games Sandusky played way back in the 1930s and growing up I was mesmerized by the way Sandusky teams played on Friday night and I call myself a true Blue Streak," Klein continued.Klein was a coach in the Blue Streak grade school football program for eight years, then started teaching in Bellevue and was also involved in coaching on the freshman level at that time.He dedicated this book to his nephew, Bryan McCarthy, a "Little Blue Streak" quarterback who died at a young age.Klein writes in the book's Foreward, "I hope this book will inspire you, a new generation of young men, to carry on the tradition started long ago by your grandfathers, fathers, uncles, and brothers, who grew from boyhood to manhood on 100 yards of grass we called Strobel Field."It took Klein more than three years to put the book together and the labor of love surfaces reading page after page of his first book.Klein is already deep into gathering information on Volume 2, which is scheduled to come out in 2018, in time for the city's 200th birthday celebration.That span covers some 80 years of the Sandusky-Fremont Ross rivalry, as well as SHS football from 1980 until 2016.Jim Klein, author of a new book, ÒSandusky Blue Streaks Football, Volume 1/1950-1979,Ó will be the guest at 1:30 p.m. Thursday on ÒBetween the Lines LiveÓ at sanduskyregister.com.Jim Klein sits in the Market Street Studio for an interview on Between the Lines with Matt Westerhold on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017.Sandusky's Cavon Croom is tackled during a Division III second-round playoff game on Nov. 12, 2016 in Bellevue.