Fascinating and entertaining historical tome by Mark Beech out this fall, “The People’s Team: An Illustrated History of the Green Bay Packers.” The formation of the team is quite cool.
Founder Curly Lambeau came from a pugnacious background, shall we say. His grandfather, who emigrated to Green Bay from Belgium in 1873, shot his wife in the neck on a Green Bay street corner in 1891, then turned the revolver on himself, killing himself with a shot to the temple. She survived. Curly was born in 1898. Loved sports. Enrolled at Notre Dame in 1918. Scored at least one TD for the Fighting Irish in a war-depleted 1918 season. But Lambeau came back to Green Bay in early 1919 because of illness and because of financial troubles. He got a job as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company in Green Bay; the business shipped canned meat from Wisconsin to U.S. Service members. That summer, Lambeau, more than smitten with football after his brief stay at Notre Dame, got his boss at Indian Packing to donate $500 for team uniforms and equipment. (Indian Packing was bought by Acme Packing in 1920. Thus the team name “Packers.”) At the same time, per “The People’s Team,” the local paper, the Press-Gazette, became boosters for the team, urging all able-bodied men with any athletic skill to come play for the team, running 15 stories in late summer with little more than organization details printed.
“Footballers on the Indiana Packing Corporation squad will hold an important meeting in the editorial rooms of The Press-Gazette on Friday evening at 7:45. It is of utmost importance that every man be on hand as final plans for the season will be outlined.”
It was a town team, as most of the early pro teams were, with 17 of 25 players on the 1919 Packers being from Green Bay. They finished 10-1. In mid-1921, with Lambeau determined to make the Packers big outside of Wisconsin, the Packers joined the American Professional Football Association, the precursor to the NFL.
Ten years after their founding, in 1929, the Packers beat the New York Giants 20-6 on the road and went on to win their first NFL championship. “The Packers had weapons that the local outfit could not match,” the New York Times wrote the next day. For their efforts, the players all got $220 … and pocket watches.