Book review: Days of the town teams By Ray Barrington News-Chronicle Back in the late 1980s, a fellow named Denis Gullickson contacted The Green Bay News-Chronicle. He had some information, he said, on just how football started in Green Bay - long before Curly Lambeau ever picked up a pigskin. It was, he said, a man named Fred Hulbert, who had learned of the game at Beaver Dam's Wayland Academy, who formed the first "town team" back in 1895. Green Bay had several teams of local players after that, eventually culminating in the organization of what became the Green Bay Packers. An article on the finding became part of one year's preseason Packers issue, but Gullickson and his friend Carl Hanson stayed on the trail. This fall, the results of their research will be published in a new book about the history of state football. The title sums it up: "Before They Were The Packers: Green Bay's Town Team Days." Gullickson and Hanson have filled in the gaps between Hulbert and Lambeau with an entertaining, detailed look at just how football became Green Bay's best-known product. It wasn't easy; in their introduction, they bemoan how many times they heard the phrase "you shoulda been here 10 years ago." They admit their research was the best available of a subject on which few records were kept, few newspaper articles written and few memories remained. Still, they have traveled the back roads of Northeast Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula, finding out what they could about those long ago games involving New London, Ishpeming and Stambaugh. And they reprint some of the old writing about those long-ago games, written in prose as purple as the bruises the gridiron figures suffered. The first two-thirds of the book provide details of key games, season wrapups and a look at how the game grew in the area. The final third looks at the inevitable next step - a "town team" that would pay its players (not that there weren't some inducements in the old days) and eventually play teams not from Beloit and De Pere but Chicago and New York. It's probably inevitable the book includes some twice-told tales about the early Packers; let's be honest in saying that a book about local teams probably wouldn't sell as well as a book with some Packers tie-in. But the fun of the book is about neighborhood rivalries, roughneck players and the challenges of establishing a new sport. And the authors have fun showing how the seeds of Wisconsin's obsession with football were planted. You'll have fun, too. The book will be published later this year by Trails Books.