EPCHS Alum In The Spotlight: Joe Ziemba, Class Of 1967

EVERGREEN PARK, IL — When Joe Ziemba transferred to Evergreen Park Community High School from Brother Rice in 1965, little did he know then the move would bring about an opportunity for him to try out for a Chicago Bulls team that boasted several household names more than a half-century later.

“Sure, it was the chance to play basketball… but also to be around the guys I grew up with. It was great to hook up with those folks from grade school again,” Ziemba said of why he switched 99th street schools midway through his high school career.

“Plus (living at 101st and Kedzie), it was only a two-block walk during the winter instead of over a mile.”

Ziemba’s basketball playing time saw a sharp uptick after he became a Mustang. It was then Head Coach Richard Dystrup, Ziemba said, who kept his basketball career alive. Just before his senior year, Ziemba had back surgery and was told by doctors that he couldn’t play until he could touch his toes.

“Coach Dystrup was always so supportive of all his players and really kept the door open for me,” Ziemba said, crediting the coach for helping him earn a basketball scholarship to the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota.

Ziemba’s game took another leap forward in college, so much so that he was offered a rookie camp tryout with a Chicago Bulls team that included the likes of Norm Van Lier, Bob Love, Jerry Sloan, Chet Walker, Bob Weiss and Jimmy Collins in 1971-1972.

“As my body grew and skills developed, I played a lot more in college,” Ziemba said. “Once I got to Bulls camp though, I knew I didn’t really belong there at that level, but I will always have that memory.”

That memory was made possible by Coach Dystrup, even multiple years after Ziemba’s high school graduation, he said. The Evergreen Park coach helped land his former player the tryout at the highest level.

With basketball in the rearview mirror, Ziemba began a career in publishing that, over the years, morphed into manufacturing, and finally commercial fire suppression.

His career in fire suppression led to Ziemba taking a particular interest in environmental issues, namely global warming. He would regularly work on trying to “find alternatives to products that cause global warming,” he said.

Before his retirement, Ziemba was the global marketing manager of the 3M Company.

Throughout his professional career, Ziemba has been a writer. He took on part-time jobs with The Star newspaper in the 1970s reporting on basketball, 16-inch softball and rock n’ roll. Eventually, he found his passion for researching and writing about the history of football.

“I was always intrigued by the early NFL,” said Ziemba, whose dad was drafted by the Chicago Cardinals in the 1940s. It was the history of those same Cardinals, the NFL’s oldest franchise that now calls Arizona home, that inspired Ziemba’s first book, titled “When Football was Football: The Chicago Cardinals and the Birth of the NFL.”

“There’s quite a bit of history in there, and I have always enjoyed researching that history,” Ziemba said.

A football topic on a more local level, he later published “Cadets, Cannons and Legends,” a book about the history of the football program at Morgan Park Military Academy, now known as Morgan Park Academy, in the nearby Morgan Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Ziemba actually lived on the MPMA campus as a child while his dad served as the Athletic Director for the school. The school was “very cooperative” in allowing Ziemba access to their historical records while researching the book, he said.

His next book project will be on the dynasty the Chicago Bears had in the 1940s, with a working title to the effect of “When the Monsters of the Midway Ruled the NFL.”

Ziemba hosts the “When Football Was Football” podcast on the Sports History Network (which was one of eight global finalists in 2022 for the sports team podcast of the year) and is a frequent guest on numerous pro football podcasts.

He was recently a speaker at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, on the origins of the NFL as the league celebrated its 100th anniversary.

And in 2022, Ziemba was the recipient of the prestigious Ralph Hay Award presented by the Professional Football Researchers Association for “lifetime achievement in pro football research and historiography.”

With so much accomplished in the more than a half-century since his graduation, EPCHS remains a special place for Ziemba. And not just because he was inducted into the school’s Hall-of-Fame last spring.

He met his wife, Carol, during senior year and the two married after Ziemba returned to the South Side from college in South Dakota. The couple now reside in Frankfort.