A precocious, husky boy with cowlicky hair, Gregory “Seckatary” Hawkins first appeared in print in a 1918 issue of The Cincinnati Enquirer Sunday Magazine. The story, written by Robert Franc (R.F.) Schulkers, told the tale of chubby Seck Hawkins as he set out to form the Fair & Square Club.
With the club slogan, “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits,” Hawkins and his brave group of childhood friends served as officers for the group whose rules included “don’t try to hide your mistakes, no fighting, always leave word with your mother where you are going so you be found if wanted in a hurry, always tell the truth and stick to your friends and they will stick to you.”
Clearly, Hawkins and his Fair & Square Club were a thinly veiled moral code for kids, particularly schoolboys. Indicative of the times (the turn of the 20th century), Schulker’s Hawkins stories were so well-received that they leapt from the pages of local Sunday magazines to national publication and a popular radio show which ran until 1935.
The last Seckatary Hawkins reprint was published in 1942. By then, it’s more than likely that young men had turned to flashier heroes in aviation, space and superhero genres for their lessons in truth, honesty and the ethical way. Even so, Seck Hawkins and his Club remain a glowing vestige of simpler times, when an average boy could prove himself extraordinary simply by following his sense of what was right.