Pack Attack Host Once Did Laundry for... (gasp!) the Bears

Hey everyone.  I'll let you in on a little secret.  Ready?  Little closer.  I, the host of Pack Attack the last six years, once worked for the Chicago Bears.  People ask if that was part of my tv career.  Nope.  I once spent a summer washing the uniforms (and a few loads of personal laundry) for the hated, despised, rival Bears.  Yes, I was born and bred in Wisconsin and taught to loathe the thought of those so-called Monsters of the Midway.  But there I was dumping jocks and the jerseys into an industrial washing machine. 

It was the summer of 1994 and I had just finished my sophomore year at UW-Platteville.  A few buddies and I were ready to move into an off-campus house.  I planned to take a few summer classes and I needed a part-time job.  Well, I found one at Kentucky Fried Chicken.  But I had time for another and thought working for the Bears would be ok.  This is when the Cheese League was going strong in Wisconsin and the Bears practiced right there on the UW-Platteville baseball field with Wednesday nights inside the football stadium.

There were two different laundry shifts.  In one you had to wash their uni's following the morning workout, get it dried and back into their lockers by the afternoon practice.  At night you followed the same routine.  We also went through the dorms and picked up bags of bedsheets.  Every once in a while a player would send off their personal clothes and we'd take care of that.  Tom Waddle had a "world's best daddy" t-shirt.

Let me tell you it was actually a good time.  Dave Wannstedt was the head coach.  Steve Walsh and Erik Kramer were the quarterbacks.  Current ESPN analyst Merril Hoge was on that team but I don't remember him (unless of course he's reading this then I hope he enjoyed his clean, fresh-smelling jersey every time he walked up to his locker.  In that case he would ask me to work with him at ESPN).  Jim Flanigan and Curtis Conway were on that team.  A couple of us in this laundry group were Packer fans so we would look through a program while sitting in the laundry room and see who exactly we were working with.  We once gave assistant coach Mike Shula a ride to practice.  He went on to other NFL jobs and was the head coach at Alabama for a while.  We welcomed DC Everest's own Dave Krieg to Pack Attack a few years ago and I told him I missed washing his underwear by two years.  He played for the Bears in 1996.

Each time I stepped in the dorm I could look at their depth chart hanging on the wall.  It was cool to see the players walking through the local grocery store.  Or they'd stop into KFC for that matter.  Just like you and me.  Imagine that!

The Bears no longer practice in Platteville but their money helped improve the UWP football field in many ways.  Right now UW-Stevens Point is in the mix for landing the Rams.  So any of you young Pointers looking for summer job, take it.  So what if you're not a Rams fan.  They're not even a real Packers' rival.  I look back on those days with fond memories.  I even got a pair of receivers gloves and a t-shirt (I just don't wear them with that orange and blue all over). 

The economic impact is great for the city and, hey, it's football.  Point has a proud NFL tradition dating back to when the Packers practiced there in the '50s and the Jaguars in 1995.  If the Rams practice anywhere near Green Bay they'd be all for combining workouts with the Packers.  (I actually covered a Rams-Bears scrimmage in Platteville in '96 with Governor Tommy Thompson in attendance.  That was part of my budding tv career).  Maybe the Cheese League will rise again.