"Blue Streak" Sports Section

Pick up a copy of Sunday's paper and check out The World-Herald's commemorative throwback "Blue Streak" sports section, celebrating Nebraska's 300th consecutive sellout. Need to find the nearest location to buy a newspaper? Click here to find the closest place you can pick one up, or call The World-Herald at 444-1419 and we can send you one. Interested in buying prints of any of the coaching retrospectives, or any other page in today's flashback section? Call The World-Herald's Library Link at 402-444-1014 or e-mail at link@owh.com.

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Welcome to Sunday morning, 1962.

World-Herald readers of a certain vintage most likely will ease into today's Blue Streak Sports Section with a twinge of nostalgia.

For those whose first taste of Nebraska football was a Tommie Frazier option play, allow me to explain.

In the spirit of Nebraska's 300th consecutive sellout celebration, we dug into the archives to redesign our Husker coverage for the occasion.

Today's 12-page “throwback” section does not replicate exactly the World-Herald style of 1962, the year Nebraska's sellout streak began, but it does incorporate many of the design features of the time, as well as the period's writing flair in headlines and photo captions.

And for the first time since Aug. 30, 1981, the Sunday paper has the Blue Streak Sports Section.

And that, as much as anything for today's section, prompted the most research. Why Blue Streak Sports?

Finding the answer seemed as simple as an Alex Henery extra point. Indeed, it was easy to find when the name started and when it went the way of the typewriter. But why the name existed in the first place and why it was shelved may be lost in time.

Used only on Sundays, the name was launched Sept. 20, 1959, with the announcement of, “It's Blue Streak Start for Sports.” If the name were simply a bit of marketing panache, that would be understandable. Big Red wasn't exactly helping sell papers. At the time, Nebraska was stumbling through the Bill Jennings era.

The first Blue Streak Sports edition had coverage of the 1959 Husker opener, a 20-0 loss to Texas. Nebraska would win only four games that year, four the next and three in 1961.

In 1962, it was bye-bye Bill and hello Bob Devaney and the birth of a fan following that has led to an amazing 300 consecutive sellouts with no end in sight. During that time, it's safe to say The World-Herald has pumped more resources into the coverage of Nebraska football than any other entity since, much of it under the heading of Blue Streak Sports.

In 1981, with Nebraska and Tom Osborne in the process of assembling the pieces of the “Scoring Explosion,” the Blue Streak name, after 22 years in many different forms, was retired — suddenly and unceremoniously — when the newspaper was resized and redesigned.

On Sunday, Sept. 6, 1981, the page banner was simply “Sports.” There's not a story in World-Herald archives that addresses the Blue Streak's passing. Nothing past sports editors and staffers can recall, nothing a publisher remembers — other than being pleased to have it go away.

“I don't know why it was called Blue Streak Sports, and I don't recall when it ended. But if it happened on my watch (it did), I'll take credit for it,” said retired publisher Harold W. Andersen. “That blue never made much sense to me, especially on Big Red game days.”

We suspect readers will welcome it back for a day. And with it, it's likely we'll hear from someone who knows what spawned the Blue Streak.

If so, we'll pass it along. Until then, a streak of a different kind survives, adding to a Nebraska-flavored slice of Americana born in 1962 that now sets its sights on 400.

— Thad Livingston, World-Herald sports editor

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