By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

SHENANDOAH, Iowa, October 19, 2025 — We Offenburgers do love our sports, as most of you know.

In our immediate family, we have mostly been sportswriters, student managers, cheerleaders, band members and others on the periphery of the games. Great fans, nevertheless.

But through marriages, we’ve mixed in the gene pools of other families.

And thus, we’ve been able to brag that we also have produced a Major League Baseball pitcher, Tony Watson, who retired in 2021 after a 10-year career in the bigs. Watson was also an All-Stater for Dallas Center-Grimes High School in the Des Moines area, and an All-American for the University of Nebraska.

Even earlier, we produced a high school All-American football player, Don Ginger, a lineman who was one of the all-time greats for our Shenandoah Mustangs before his graduation in 1950. He was my second cousin.

Don Ginger, one of Shenandoah High’s best ever. (Photo by Valley News Today)

On Saturday afternoon, Ginger was one of 10 new inductees into the KMA Radio Sports Hall of Fame here in our ol’ hometown in southwest Iowa. And, believe me, I felt honored when his family asked me to deliver a brief reflection on his athletic career and life during the ceremony. His induction was posthumous, since he died at 70 years old in 2002 from cancer complications.

“Now, I don’t actually remember seeing cousin Don Ginger play in high school,but I’m sure I did,” I told the crowd. “That was from the fall of 1946 to the spring of 1950. I wasn’t born until 1947, so I was only 2 or 3 years old in Don’s last couple years of high school. But as I was thinking about that, I realized that of course I saw him play, because taking a toddler out to see cousin Don starring in football, basketball, track and baseball is exactly what my parents, older brothers and sisters would have done! That’s what we Offenburgers have always done — go to the games!”

Later, my parents and siblings told me all about him, too.

And since I’ve had a long career in journalism, many times I’ve gone back in newspaper files, radio archives and sports record books to learn just how good Don Ginger really was.

So in January, 1950, when he was named a high school All-American by the “Wigwam Wisemen of America.” That was an Oklahoma-based lodge that from 1947 into the early 1960s promoted high school football. Each year they pickedtwo All-American squads, and, for several years, sponsored a summertime football game featuring the All-Americans they’d selected. They worked with coaches and sportswriters across the nation in picking those all-stars, and often sent representatives to see games in their hometowns, too.

Ginger, at the time of the All-American game in Memphis, Tenn., was a 6 ft., 190-pound center on offense and a nose guard or linebacker on defense — the positions he played for four years for Shenandoah High.

For our Mustangs, he’d been the first player in 20 years to be in the starting line-up of the football team all four seasons he played. He was a 4-year all-conference selection in the Hawkeye Seven Conference, a 3-year All-Southwest Iowa pick by the Omaha World-Herald, and a 2-year All-State first team choice by the Des Moines Register.

A salute when Don Ginger was featured in the hometown newspaper. (Valley News Today)

And let me give you a real understanding of how tough he was back in that era when football helmets did not have protective face masks.

In the Saturday, Oct. 15, 1949, the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel, had a 25-inch-long story about how the previous night, the Mustangs had beaten the Villisca Bluejays 58-13 in a conference game at Villisca. Ginger was praised in that story for both his blocking on offense and his tackling on defense. Then at the very bottom of the story, below the box score, there was this humorous note from the sportswriter:

In the Classifieds

LOST: One shining white, right-central bicuspid. Was lost Friday night on gridiron at Villisca, when Don Ginger threw the block that put Gordon Johnson into the clear on his 38-yard touchdown run to open scoring in Shen’s 58-13 victory. Ginger’s tooth was kicked out clean to the edge of his gum. After football season, Ginger plans to get a four-tooth bridge, as this is number three of his front uppers that bore the brunt of flying shoes.

By the way, the Shenandoah Mustangs went undefeated in both the 1948 and ’49 football seasons, and in ’49, they were named “Mythical State Champions” by the Des Moines Register and their legendary coach, Don Tebbe, was named Iowa’s high school football coach of the year.

In January of 1950, word arrived that Ginger had been named an All-American.

The “Shen-Hi-Can,” which was the student newspaper that filled one-page of the hometown Sentinel each week, broke the news with a banner headline: “Don Ginger All-American!”

Here was the opening paragraph:

“Ginger does it again! After he is a repeated number of All-Hawkeye Seven, All-Southwest Iowa, and twice a unanimously elected All-State, he has now won an All-American status.”

The story told how he would be invited to play in the All-American game in August of 1950, and then did this snapshot of his overall high school career:

“Don is an active member of all high school athletics and he participated in football and basketball four years, track two years, and is planning to go out for track and baseball this season. He has been a member of the ‘S’ Club for four years and has just been elected president. His sophomore year he was a member of the Hi-Y and was vice-president of his class. Another of his activities is the National Guard. With all the activities and a job, too, he still finds time to referee junior high games.”

He was recruited by several major football teams — Iowa, Nebraska and Tennessee — and played a freshman season for the Iowa Hawkeyes. But having already married his high school girlfriend Pat Mondt Ginger and starting a family, he decided he needed to forego college and work full time to meet his family responsibilities.

The Gingers, who’d been married 53 years when Don died, had three children — daughters Rita, now of Lincoln, Neb., and Donna, who is deceased, and son Tebbe, who is named after his dad’s coach Don Tebbe and lives in Omaha. Pat died in 2019, after a lifetime in Shenandoah and the neighboring town Essex.

Tebbe Ginger holds his father Don Ginger’s trophy from the KMA Radio Sports Hall of Fame. Behind him his wife Beth Ginger and his daughter Kirsten Ginger (right), all from Omaha.

Tebbe Ginger was a good athlete himself at Essex High School, and he later coached and administered high school athletics. Of course, he never saw his father play football or other sports. But I asked him recently, based on his own knowledge of athletics and his observations of his dad as an adult, what kind of player he imagines Don was.

“I think he was probably pretty intense,” Tebbe said. “I think he studied the game of football, and had a real high knowledge of the game. I’m pretty sure he would’ve been a good teacher and coach, but that opportunity didn’t work out for him. But he was always very competitive, even in his later years. He always wanted to do his best in every situation. And he didn’t mind telling you what you needed to do, too — straight up.”

Don Ginger’s life was obviously about much more than his prowess in football.

He was a man who was dedicated to whatever he started.

There was his long marriage. Plus, he worked 41 years as a lineman and later equipment manager for the old Iowa Power & Light Company, now MidAmerican Energy. He refereed and umpired high school and college football, basketball and baseball for 41 years, one of the best game officials anywhere. He served 33 years as mess sergeant of Shenandoah’s Company C of the 168^th Infantry in the Iowa Army National Guard.

My own ties to Don Ginger go beyond just being second cousins and my being a fan of his.

I was the Shenandoah High catcher in baseball games in which Don was the home plate umpire. I was a National Guard enlistee in 1969 and peeled potatoes on KP duty in Sergeant First Class Ginger’s mess hall. A little later, I was a National Guard public information specialist who wrote stories about Company C’s reputation for providing outstanding meals. And Don’s son Tebbe Ginger wound up marrying my niece Beth Polk Ginger.

I told Don’s son Tebbe the other day that the military meals his dad planned and directed were so good that the Iowa Guard’s top-ranking officers would often arrange to eat with Company C at the unit’s summer camps.

“Was it the food or the beer he’d give them?” Tebbe asked.

Well, there was some of that, too.

Don Ginger was an All-American in everything he did.

Doug McGinnis, 93, of Shenandoah, is the last surviving member of the starting line-up of the Shenandoah High football teams that helped Don Ginger be selected an All-American. McGinnis was honored at the KMA Radio Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony by Mike Tebbe (right), of Shreveport, La., the son of the Mustangs’ legendary football coach in those years, Don Tebbe.

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The KMA Radio Sports Hall of Fame is a project of the 100-year-old home-ownedstation known nationally as one of the best community-focused media outlets anywhere. They cover life in southwest Iowa, southeast Nebraska, northwest Missouri and occasionally northeast Kansas.

Their sports hall-of-fame was started in 2016 by sportscaster Derek Martin, who is now in his 17^th year at the station, currently the manager of KMA sports operations.

To date, 136 individuals and 48 teams have been inducted into the station’s sports hall-of-fame. You can read KMA’s story about Saturday’s ceremony and a video of the whole event by clicking right here.

KMA’s Derek Martin.

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.