Background
William Julius Champion Junior. was born on June 15, 1880 in Trinidad, Colorado to United States Civil War veteran William Julius Champion Senior and Elvira Hellen Gammons, a descendant of Mayflower passenger Thomas Rogers.
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William Champion, Junior.
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Education
Champion graduated Cum Laude from Yale University in the class of 1905 after walking from his childhood home in White Cloud, Michigan to Yale"s campus in New Haven, Connecticut (over 850 miles), and "earning all of his expenses" as he put lieutenant His major was geology. The jobs he worked to pay for school included a sales agent for the Saturday Evening Post and a summer on the road with the Barnum and Bailey Circus (which later became the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus).
Career
Willie married Alice Viola Brown on June 15, 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts. He died on February 12, 1972. Willie experienced wild swings in fortune throughout his long life.
In addition to various business ventures and investments he held full or partial interest in a gold mine in Colorado and the Champion Lead Mine in Niranda, Ontario Canada.
A local newspaper obituary called him a "radio pioneer" saying that after graduating from Yale William moved to the Boston area and went to work with Lee DeForest, inventor of the vacuum tube and goes on to say that he "helped setup and operate Boston"s first radio transmitters". He long held that the game has intrisic educational value and held other benefits as well.
Family history has it that in 1910 Willie first read about ancient games like He started manufacturing game sets in Mystic, Connecticut about 1940 and later in Salem, Massachusetts, Brockton, Massachusetts and finally Holbrook, Massachusetts, in around 1960.
Achievements
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Champion graduated Cum Laude from Yale University in the class of 1905 after walking from his childhood home in White Cloud, Michigan to Yale"s campus in New Haven, Connecticut (over 850 miles), and "earning all of his expenses" as he put lieutenant Champion invented the board game of in 1940 and worked for years to popularize the game in the United States.
