Book on Goessel athlete to be launched

A book launch for Greg Peters’ “The Galloping Goose from Goessel: How My Father Broke the Legendary Glenn Cunningham’s Mile Record and Other Stories from a Life Well-Lived” will be 1 p.m. Thursday at Bethesda Home in Goessel.

Peters will be available at Bethesda Home for a meet and greet during which he will give a book presentation.

Main St. temporarily will be renamed Galloping Goose Way during this weekend’s Threshing Days celebration, and the governor has proclaimed Sunday “Galloping Goose from Goessel Day.”

Randy Woelk, born Aug. 4, 1921, in Goessel and raised in a farmhouse with no electricity or running water, earned his nickname by excelling in high school athletics.

In the spring of 1939, he broke Glenn Cunnigham’s mile-run record for high schoolers at the Kansas Relays.

A second-generation Mennonite immigrant, Woelk could have claimed conscientious objector status in World War II but instead served in the Signal Corps in the Pacific theater.

After the war, he taught in Montezuma, Wichita, and Beloit. He was part of a project that remade the way chemistry was taught in American high schools in the 1960s and 1970s and received a Fulbright grant to teach for a year in Kenya.

An avid ham radio operator and born salesman, he also went door-to-door peddling Compton’s encyclopedias and Fuller Brush housewares.