Editor's Note: This is the third and final part on important figures in Packers history with ties to Ireland (Part 1), Germany (Part 2) and the United Kingdom, where the Packers hold international marketing rights.
From cantankerous and colorful co-founder George Whitney Calhoun to affable and unpretentious modern-day savior Bob Harlan, some of the most important figures in the history of the Green Bay Packers have deep roots to the United Kingdom.
Football fans across the UK countries – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – where the Packers have been granted international marketing rights won't find another NFL franchise more indebted to your countrymen.
Any top 10 list of Packers non-football figures who were most responsible for forming the team and keeping it alive in the NFL's smallest city for more than 100 years would include Calhoun, who was the great grandson of Daniel Whitney, founder of the city of Green Bay and from a family with deep lines to British Colonial America and further back to England; Andrew Turnbull, whose father and mother were both born in Scotland; Dr. William Webber Kelly, whose parents were Irish, although he was born in Kingston Jamaica, when it was a Crown colony of the British Empire; and Harlan, whose family tree at the FamilySearch website goes back eight generations to an Aaron Harlan Sr., born in 1685 in the province of Ulster in what is now Northern Ireland, and his wife Sarah, born in Cheshire, England.
Any top five list of the most important people in the Packers' football operation would include former general manager Ron Wolf, whose mother's family – her maiden name was Martin – included a mix of Irish, Scottish and Welsh.
Arguably, three of the top 10 greatest Packers players were Don Hutson, Verne Lewellen and Bart Starr.
Hutson's family, according to a 1944 Collier's magazine story, "came from solid English pioneer stock…" The Lewellens, according to the family tree at the FamilySearch website, traced their roots to Wales, but Verne through ancestral marriages also was a mix of Irish, Scottish and English. In the 1956 Packers Press, Radio and TV Guide, Starr's nationality was listed as English, and Bart Starr Jr. said it was his understanding, as well, that the Starrs came from England.
Let's start with Calhoun, who had a fondness for quaffing beers, chewing on the stubs of his cigars and lunching on Limburger cheese.
He and Curly Lambeau organized the Packers in 1919 as a sandlot football team. While Lambeau received all the glory as star player and captain, Calhoun managed the team and basically handled all other duties.
In 1919, the Packers' first season, they played on an open field with no fence or bleachers, while Calhoun and a few of his cronies passed a hat to collect enough spare change to pay the bills. "They'd come and go," Calhoun later said of those early fans. "Some of 'em would ride up in a horse and rig and watch from the buggy."
Over the Packers' first 25 seasons, he didn't miss a game, home or away. And from 1919-56, Calhoun never missed a home game.
"There wouldn't have been a Packer team without George Whitney Calhoun," Fritz Gavin, a high school teammate of Lambeau and one of the original Packers, said in 1951. "He was the prime mover."
Calhoun was 28 and working as city editor of the Green Bay Press-Gazette when the Packers' first organizational meeting was held in the newspaper's offices. While he was born in Green Bay, Calhoun spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Buffalo, where he had played high school football and been an inveterate organizer of teams in many sports.
Walter A. Calhoun, his father, had moved to Green Bay in the late 1800s to lay out the city's water lines and led a nomadic existence as an engineer for large companies throughout George's youth. The name Calhoun is Scottish in origin, according to Mary Jane Herber, local historian and genealogist at the Brown County Library.
George Calhoun's mother, Emmeline Henshaw Whitney was a descendant of John Whitney, who came from London, England, to Watertown, Mass., in 1635.
As was true of many newspapermen of his time, Calhoun was as grumpy as could be around the office, whether he was running the sports department, the city desk or the telegraph desk, as he did for most of his 40 years at the Press-Gazette. His newsroom exchanges with Art Smith, older brother of the more famous sportswriter Red Smith, "were classics of invective in their time, never to be forgotten by those who listened in," according to a colleague.
Having been a bachelor for all but a short marriage that took place in 1911 and ended before Calhoun moved back to Green Bay, the love of his life was the Packers. He was their ex officio publicity director until 1947, and both their corporate secretary and unofficial traveling secretary into the 1940s. Calhoun also was an original member of the board of directors when the Green Bay Football Corporation was created in 1923 and was still on the board of The Green Bay Packers, Inc., at the time of his death in 1963.
In the 1920s and '30s when the Packers survived largely on their gate receipts on the road and newspaper coverage was critical to drawing large crowds, nobody made more important friends for the team than Calhoun.
Unlike other publicity hounds, he didn't stop in the newsrooms of the large metropolitan newspapers and plead for coverage, he got the writers to come to him.
"Arriving in another city, Cal would get a hotel room, fill the bathtub with ice and beer and then call the papers to let the sports writers know where he was," Jack Rudolph, Green Bay's preeminent 20th century historian, wrote in the days following Calhoun's death. "They all came flocking, too."
Calhoun also was famous for his malaprops or "Calhounisms" as close associates called them. "He collared him around the ankles," was one example.
In 1947, Calhoun had a falling out with Lambeau, when the Packers coach replaced him as publicist without telling him. Calhoun learned the news when he was scanning the Associated Press wire while working his regular job in the Press-Gazette office. John Torinus, who later became a member of the Packers executive committee, was Calhoun's assistant at the time and later wrote that his mentor turned the slight "into a smoldering hatred."
In fact, so much so, Calhoun yearned to outlive Lambeau for one reason. "I hope to live so I can piss on his grave," Calhoun told then colleague and later longtime Packers public relations director Lee Remmel. As it turned out, Calhoun fell short by a year-and-a-half.
On the other hand, George Halas of the Packers' bitter rivals, the Chicago Bears, made a point of visiting Calhoun on his trips to Green Bay up until the end. "I have lost one of my oldest and dearest friends," Halas said upon Calhoun's death.
Bert Bell, commissioner of the NFL from 1946-59, was another who never forgot what Calhoun did for the NFL through his early record-keeping and unofficial league notes columns that he sent to newspapers in other NFL cities. "I want you to know that for myself and the members of the National Football League we deeply appreciate everything you have done for us; and this is from the hearts of all of us," Bell wrote to Calhoun in 1954.
In fact, when the Pro Football Hall of Fame listed 16 non-players – what today are considered contributor candidates – on its ballot for the charter class of 1963, Calhoun and Turnbull were both included.
Turnbull, who was born in London, Ontario, Canada, in 1884, was the driving force, along with local lawyer John Kittell, in creating the original non-profit corporation that turned the Packers into a community property in 1923. Again, if not for Turnbull's efforts, the Packers almost certainly wouldn't exist today.
Turnbull served as the first president of the Green Bay Football Corporation from 1923-28 and was also, as documented in minutes of league meetings, one of the most influential voices in the league over that period and beyond. In fact, Turnbull was elected to the NFL's five-man executive committee in February 1928, at his final league meeting as team president. Turnbull remained a member of the Packers' executive committee until 1949.
In fact, Turnbull was so well respected that in 1926, the year before the NFL reduced its membership from 22 to 12 teams and eliminated most of its members from smaller cities, he was appointed chairman of the committee that redrafted the league's constitution and bylaws.
"He was a wonderful man," said George Burridge, a prominent Green Bay businessman, as well as an author and local historian, and a fan of the Packers from their first season in 1919 until his death in 2007. "He has never been given proper credit for all he did to keep the Packers alive in Green Bay. Time and time again, if it hadn't been for Mr. Turnbull, the Packers would have had to fold up."
Kelly, too, played a leading role in the creation of the Green Bay Football Corporation and was one of five members on its original executive committee. In addition, he, too, served for a time on the NFL's executive committee. Kelly remained a board member through the life of the original corporation and then its successor, The Green Bay Packers, Inc., until 1949. Kelly served one year as team president and also as team physician from 1921-43, when he had his falling out with Lambeau.
"With the development of the 'Packers' in the National League, came a universal support of the team by the citizens of Green Bay and surrounding territory," Dr. Harry March, labeled "The Father of Professional Football" by legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, wrote in his 1934 book, "Pro Football: Its 'Ups' and 'Downs.'"
"Everyone was interested; the splendid local newspaper, the Press-Gazette, gave and gives more space to football than to either state or national politics. 'Andy' Turnbull and his sporting editor, W.J.(sic) 'Cal' Calhoun, with Dr. Kelly and Leo Johannes(sic), are the men behind 'Curly' in the open, but every resident of Brown County and all neighboring counties are part and parcel of the organization. Few teams are as well managed in all details as are the 'Packers.'"
Harlan – a surname of English origin – worked for the Packers for 37 years and was their top executive from 1989 to 2008. During his years as president, Green Bay reemerged as a league power and a flagship franchise. He also led the effort to redevelop Lambeau Field in the early 2000s and turn it into a year-round moneymaker.
Had Harlan not had the foresight to do so, there's no guarantee the Packers would have survived in Green Bay as long as they have into the 21st century.
Wolf was hired by Harlan as general manager in late 1991 and was the mastermind behind the Packers' revival on the field that continues today. Owners of the fourth-worst record in the league over the 24 seasons before Wolf took full charge, the Packers had the second-best record in his nine years as general manager.
As for Hutson and Starr, they are two of only six players who have had their numbers retired by the Packers. Hutson played from 1935-45 and rewrote the NFL record book. When he retired, he owned 19 receiving and scoring records.
"Don had the most fluid motion you've ever seen when he was running," Bear Bryant, former teammate of Hutson's at the University of Alabama and later the school's legendary football coach, said nearly 15 years after Hutson retired. "It looked like he was going just as fast as possible, when all of a sudden he would put on an extra burst of speed and be gone. Don had great hands and excellent moves, but the thing that made him most dangerous was his ability to run in an open field. He could really move with an excellent change of pace."
Starr was the quarterback for legendary coach Vince Lombardi's five NFL championship teams in the 1960s and was MVP of Super Bowls I and II.
"When I faced Bart Starr, he was always surrounded by tremendous talent and he knew how to use every one of them," said former Baltimore Colts cornerback Bobby Boyd, who faced Starr 17 times in his nine-year career and still holds his franchise's – now located in Indianapolis – career interception record with 57. "What he did better than anyone else I ever played against was to keep you off balance. He would run, run, run … pull the defense in and then throw. He had all the tools and was as smart as they come."
Although overshadowed by John Unitas for most of his career, Starr won more championships: three in the pre-Super Bowl era and two after. Unitas won two NFL titles in 1958 and '59 plus a Super Bowl following the 1970 season.
"Johnny Unitas has been a great, great, great quarterback," Lombardi said in 1970 shortly before his death, "but Starr did the winning in the 1960s and that is the object – to win."
Hutson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1963, and Starr was inducted in 1977, his first year of eligibility.
Although Lewellen has been overlooked in Pro Football Hall of Fame voting, he was the key player when the Packers emerged as a league power in the late 1920s, while other small-town teams were folding. And he was widely recognized at the time as the Packers' star player when they won three straight championships from 1929-31, something no other NFL team has matched other than Lombardi's 1965-67 Packers.
In 2024, Chris Willis, head archivist at NFL Films since 1996, published a book titled: "The NFL's 60-Minute Men: All-Time Greats of the Two-Way Player Era, 1920-1945." Lewellen was listed as the seventh greatest, one spot behind Bronko Nagurski and one ahead of Sid Luckman, the stars of the Chicago Bears' great "Monsters of the Midway" teams of the early 1940s.
Of Willis' top 24 players, Lewellen was the only one not inducted into the Hall of Fame.
During Lewellen's nine seasons, the Packers compiled a 79-26-10 record, a .730 winning percentage topped by New England's Tom Brady (.754) but less than a handful of other NFL greats. Lewellen was an outstanding athlete who led the Packers in big plays based on runs of 10 yards or more and receptions of 20 or more. He also held the NFL record for touchdowns when he retired.
But what allowed him to dominate games was his punting when American football was more like soccer: a game of kicking. Lewellen punted more on first, second and third downs than he did on fourth down.
"His high, lazy punts regularly travel 60 yards through the air," said Red Grange, football's first superstar in terms of filling stadiums and a contemporary of Lewellen's. "I once saw the ball travel between 75 and 80 yards from his foot to the point where it struck the ground. He places the ball to spots where it is almost impossible for the safety man to catch it, so that it usually rolls for many extra yards. He practices punting for hours at a time and can kick within 10 feet of a designated point."
Add it up and Lewellen, Hutson and Starr were stars on 11 of the Packers' record 13 NFL championship teams.
Bottom line: The Packers are one of eight teams to hold marketing rights in the UK. But they are the only NFL team truly indebted to descendants of the UK.
