“Champion Caddy” by Marion Renick with illustrations by John Fulton is a children’s novel published in 1943 by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York. “This is good reading for any boy, whether he wants to play golf or not. Golf’s a great game, lots of fun, Relax and enjoy it, win or lose. Nobody likes to lose but someone always has to. Take your licking and smile about it, that’s the way to lose”. This is a book about golf but more importantly about good sportsmanship. A great read with wonderful characters in 1943 and still a great read today.

Marion Lewis Renick (1904 – 1983) was an avid sports enthusiast from early childhood, playing various games on the sports fields at nearby Wittenberg University as well as on undeveloped fields behind the university. She eventually attended Wittenberg, graduating with an A.B. degree in 1926. Her vocational goal was to become a sportswriter. Her first job was as a reporter for The News, a Springfield newspaper. She married a sportswriter, James L. Renick, in 1930, and spent a good part of the next fifteen years helping him cover sports around the country, meeting athletes, trainers, coaches, and sportswriters, and listening to them share their athletic experiences. In response to these experiences, she is quoted as saying, “How I wished I could share that with my long-ago neighborhood pals! I decided that the next best thing was to share it with new generations of young sports enthusiasts. I began writing books combining sports fundamentals with a story.” The result was the writing of more than thirty books on sports over the next thirty-seven years. Though she wrote her first three books, Tommy Carries the Ball; David Cheers the Team; and Steady by herself, they carried her husband`s name as co-author, because she was advised that no one would buy a sports book written by a woman. The rest of her books were published under her name alone.

John Russell Fulton (1896 – 1979) was a painter-illustrator born in Kansas and best known for his cover and interior illustrations for many magazines that he created in the late 1920s to the early 1950s. When he was in his teens he worked as a newspaper artist for Henry Allen’s (later a Kansas Senator) Wichita Beacon, was a staff artist at the Kansas City Star, and later from 1925-1926 worked for the Chicago Tribune. During 1918-1919, with rank as corporal during WWI, “he painted posters for the Army and organized an art class for wounded soldiers at Fort Sheridan, Illinois”. During his primary working years, he also illustrated a number of books including “Champion Caddy”.