John from St. Paul, MN
What are your thoughts about the Wisconsin Historical Society book on the history of the Packers? How accurate is it, considering you've contradicted numerous points made in that book?
Based on my experiences writing books, errors will make it into print no matter how committed an author is to getting everything right. I've got my own short list from my four-volume history “The Greatest Story in Sports.”
Here it is.
On page 20, I stated that when Curly Lambeau was a senior Green Bay East snapped West's eight-game winning streak in their rivalry. It was seven games. On page 78, I wrote the Packers opened the 1921 season with a non-league game at Duluth. It was in 1922. On page 575, I noted that the Packers lost their 1975 Lambeau Field opener to Tampa Bay, a third-year expansion team. The Bucs were in their fourth season. Page 647 mistakenly claimed Charles Martin body-slammed Jim McMahon following an incomplete pass in 1986. It followed an interception. On page 897, the Baltimore Colts were credited with having the oldest helmet logo in the NFL. Not true. It was the Los Angeles Rams.
Here's a type of mistake that I need to be constantly on guard against.
On page 789, I wrote that Fred Akers kicked a game-tying field goal for Philadelphia in a 2003 playoff against the Packers, when it was David Akers. Somewhere in the subconscious of my noggin, I tend to incorrectly type first names that I associate with last names from my distant past without even realizing it. The name Fred Akers, former football coach at Texas and Purdue from 1977-90, triggers my memory before the NFL kicker from 1998-2013.
Every one of those errors is still fresh in my memory.
As for the book "Green Bay Packers: Trials, Triumphs and Tradition," written by William Povletich and published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2012, it's an extreme example of a Packers book being littered with errors and false narratives. And it was all due to sloppy research and a reliance on disreputable sources.
The first three paragraphs of the first chapter, believe it or not, were incorrect and unsourced.
The first graph reads in reference to the Packers being admitted to what is now the NFL: "APFA president Joe Carr had been kind in his reception of the Green Bay team, but he stressed that if the newcomers were to remain in the professional ranks, they would have to win" their first league game in 1921 against Minneapolis.
There's nothing more irresponsible than putting words in someone's mouth that can't be properly sourced, and this was a classic example of that.
There's no mention in the Aug. 27, 1921, American Professional Football Association minutes, when Green Bay was granted a franchise, to even suggest that. And as Chris Willis stated in his 2010 biography of Carr, his philosophy and that of others in the room was "the more franchises the better."
Yes, prominent local historian Jack Rudolph wrote in the Green Bay Press-Gazette on Sept. 13, 1955, "Unless the club made a satisfactory showing in its early league games, Green Bay wasn't going to last long."
A year later, in another nostalgic article on the game, Rudolph wrote "the story has never been verified, but it was generally believed at the time that the Packers' membership was conditional and if they didn't show well in their first league encounter" their existence in it might have been short-lived.
What Rudolph wrote was basically true but applied to all 21 teams that played at least one APFA game in 1921.
On the other hand, what Povletich wrote – it being the ultimate "must win" game – was clearly an exaggeration of what Rudolph wrote. Plus, to start a non-fiction book with an unconfirmed story not listed in the footnotes should have raised a red flag for an editor.
What the history of each of the APFA franchises, from 1920 and '21, that eventually folded tells us is this: Yes, it was essential to be competitive in order to stay in business, especially in view of most games being scheduled from week to week during those two seasons.
But survival was all about money, based on a team's gate appeal, not the size of the cities.
Four teams folded during the 1921 season for financial reasons – Detroit, Cincinnati, Muncie and Tonawanda – and three others – New York, Cleveland and Washington – dropped out before the 1922 season.
New York was the largest city in the league; Detroit, third; Cleveland, fourth; Washington, sixth; and Cincinnati, seventh.
Plus, at the meeting where the Packers were admitted to the APFA, the Rock Island Independents, a team organized in 1910, agreed to play in Green Bay on the final weekend of October, according to that city's newspaper, the Rock Island Argus. The Minnesota Daily Star also reported that Minneapolis manager John Dunn planned to schedule a game against Green Bay and within four days of the meeting the Packers received a signed contract in the mail. Thus, the Packers already had a second game scheduled when they played Minneapolis.
The first sentence of the second paragraph of the WHS book starts with a reference to the Packers' participants against Minneapolis: "Featuring a lineup that included local favorites Herman Martell, Nate Abrams, Wally Ladrow and Martin Zoll, the Packers struggled until there was about two minutes to play."
Not one of those four local products played that day. Not a single one was listed in the box score.
All four were members of the 1919 and '20, pre-APFA sandlot Packers. And all four had played in at least three of the Packers' four non-league games prior to the Minneapolis game. But just days before the league season started, the Packers began replacing their homegrown players with new recruits that had played major college football.
Before the game against Minneapolis, the Packers added former University of Notre Dame starter Dave Hayes and Syracuse dropout Billy DuMoe as ends to essentially replace Abrams and Martell. By also signing Grover Malone, former George Gipp backup at Notre Dame, Ladrow became dispensable.
By the last league game, the Packers were starting six former Notre Dame players. As a result, the only Green Bay native still in the lineup was Curly Lambeau.
The third paragraph of the WHS book was about the birth of the Packers on Aug. 11, 1919. It stated that George Whitney Calhoun and Lambeau "had presided over a group of nearly two dozen enthusiastic men" that had gathered at the Press-Gazette to form a football team.
Here again, there's no primary source to support how many people were there or who they were.
On Aug. 13, the Press-Gazette confirmed that a meeting had been held two days earlier but didn't name anyone who was there and offered no specific details about what was actually accomplished at the meeting. From what I've been able to uncover, Rudolph was again the first to write in any detail about it on the Packers' 35th birthday in 1954.
"No roll call was taken at that meeting, so nobody is sure exactly who was there, but it appears that most of the gang that eventually made up the first team were present," he wrote.
Seven years after that, the Milwaukee Journal's Chuck Johnson specifically named 11 players who were at the meeting in "The Green Bay Packers: Pro Football's Pioneer Team," a book, by the way, that Rudolph described as "a once-over-very-very-lightly job."
In 1982, former Press-Gazette newspaperman and longtime Packers executive committee member John Torinus, who was also a pupil and friend of Calhoun's, wrote that the first meeting was held Aug. 14 – not Aug. 11 – and some 25 players attended.
Based on the Press-Gazette's Aug. 15 coverage of the Aug. 14 meeting, Torinus had his facts correct. But his date of the Packers' birth differed from what the Press-Gazette reported in 1919.
The National Geographic magazine titled, "Memory," states that precise recall of long-ago events is "rarely 100 percent accurate." And the full body of evidence when researching the Packers' birth strongly suggests nobody remembered any of the details.
The errors in the WHS book don't stop there.
Page 2: A caption under a picture of Lambeau states that he was the team's quarterback until 1928. The Packers used the Notre Dame Box, the offense Lambeau learned at Notre Dame, and he started only seven of his 77 NFL games at quarterback. He started 35 at right halfback. Plus, following a 1925 knee injury, Lambeau started only 12 games in his final four seasons.
Page 4: The WHS book states that Lambeau enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1917, but then "dropped out less than a month later when the freshman football program was canceled."
Years ago, when I first read that and was suspicious because the details didn't mesh with college football eligibility rules back then, the university's office of the registrar told me in a phone interview that "there's no record of Earl or Curly Lambeau enrolling at the UW." In 2017, two emails from the registrar's office provided further confirmation of that, stating, "our records go back to the very beginning of our university," and "we do not have any files on Mr. Lambeau."
At UW's Steenbock Library, where I did my research almost 10 years ago, copies of the Daily Cardinal were available on microfilm. In the fall of 1917, when Lambeau was supposedly in Madison, the student newspaper reported almost daily on freshman football practice, which started on Sept. 26 and ended with the annual Freshman-Sophomore Game on Nov. 17.
On Sept. 28, the Daily Cardinal noted Lambeau had arrived on campus the day before. Three days later, on Oct. 1, the paper reported that more than 50 freshmen had passed their physicals and 43 had appeared on the practice field. It then listed them by name, and Lambeau was not among them.
On Oct. 3, the freshman team scrimmaged the varsity for the first time and continued doing so on a regular basis, often more than once a week until the third week of November. The Daily Cardinal regularly listed the lineups for the scrimmages, and Lambeau's name never appeared.
A day-by-day search of the Wisconsin State Journal for those nine weeks didn't offer any mention of Lambeau practicing with the freshman team, either. At the time, all freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition, although they were then allowed to compete in 1918 due to a player shortage because of the war. Also, the school yearbook, "The Badger," subsequently ran a picture of the 1917 freshman team and Lambeau was not in it.
Page 7: The WHS book states, the Packers wore "blue and gold sweaters" for their first game on Sept. 14, 1919. The Packers wore plain blue sweaters in 1919 and '20. They didn't wear blue and gold until 1923. That subject was addressed in a May 14, 2026 post.
Page 8: The WHS book states: "Before the Packers began their sophomore season, the Indian Packing Co. was sold to the Acme Packing Co….."
The Press-Gazette reported on Dec. 22, 1920, 24 days after the Packers' second season ended, that Indian Packing had been sold to Acme Packing. Two days later, the Chicago Tribune reported that Indian Packing stockholders would meet on Jan. 3, 1921, to authorize its sale to Chicago-based Acme. Among many others, Moody's Analyses of Investments also reported the sale took place in December 1920.
Beyond that, the Packers have in their files an Indian Packing Corporation letterhead from 1920 with the officers of its football department listed.
Page 10: After providing details of Acme's sponsorship of the Packers, Povletich wrote about "The Dope Sheet," official program of the team. However, he failed to mention that in the Oct. 30 edition, following the first APFA game, there was a story about how the Packers had cut ties with Acme and it was no longer the team's sponsor.
Page 12: The WHS book states that after what's now recognized as the first Packers-Bears game, played on Nov. 27, 1921, "the Chicago Tribune boasted that Heartley 'Hunk' Anderson and two of his Fighting Irish teammates from Notre Dame had played for Lambeau." It was further stated that George Halas then urged Carr to remove the Packers from the league for their offense.
All it would have taken was a quick check of the Tribune to learn that its day-after-the-game coverage was limited to a five-paragraph game story, and Anderson was never mentioned. Nor was Anderson's name included in the lineup the Tribune published.
The fact was that it was a non-league game against Racine, played a week later, on Dec. 4 in Milwaukee, where Anderson and at least two Notre Dame teammates played for the Packers under assumed names. The Racine Journal-News reported the names the next day.
Further proof that the Packers broke the rules in a game against Racine, not Halas' then Staleys, can be found at the Hesburgh Library on the Notre Dame campus. There, the minutes of the school's Faculty Board of Athletics meeting held on Dec. 9, 1921, note that while in session that day the board was informed that "four players" had participated in a professional football game on Dec. 4 in Milwaukee.
Four days later, the scandal erupted on the front page of the South Bend Tribune.
In the APFA minutes of its Jan. 28, 1922, meeting, a discussion that was covered in greater detail than the reference to Green Bay losing its team was Halas' fight to keep his franchise over an ownership dispute. The minutes noted that he won his case by a "majority of six votes."
Meanwhile, three newspapers in the Quad Cities reported that Walter Flanigan, manager of the Rock Island team, headed the fight to expel the Packers from the league.
Pages 13-14: Those pages covered developments in 1922 when the Packers were reorganized as a private corporation and were not only littered with factual errors but read like a work of fiction.
Examples follow.
"Curly Lambeau now owned the Packers." No, he was president of the underfunded, private Green Bay Football Club that lasted barely more than four months, according to the Jan. 20, 1923, NFL meeting minutes. As background to that, it wasn't until three weeks before the 1922 season started that the GB Football Club filed its articles of incorporation with the state.
The WHS book states the corporation then raised $8,000 (more than $160,000 in today's money) by selling 80 shares of stock at $100 apiece. Yes, that was the goal as stated in the articles.
But it's hard to imagine that was the amount raised.
After all, a year later when the Packers became a community property with the creation of the non-profit Green Bay Football Corporation, they sold stock for only $5 a share – not $100 – and raised less money: $5,545, according to Packers stock records, despite giving away four-game tickets to anyone who purchased 20 shares.
Reality is that in 1923, only 19 individuals were willing to invest $100 in what was a public corporation, and most of them were among the wealthiest men in Green Bay. A year earlier, Lambeau and his other lead investors didn't have anywhere near that kind of money.
After all, Lambeau was working that season as an assistant study room supervisor at East High School. Again, leap ahead a year and all he forked over for the GB Football Corporation, which saved the franchise, was $25 for five shares.
The WHS book further states that in 1922, Nate Abrams loaned the private GB Football Club $3,000 ($60,000 in today's money). And that Calhoun, that same year, was calling the Packers the "Big Bay Blues" in the Press-Gazette, while Stoney McGlynn was writing sports for the Milwaukee Sentinel and refusing to buy into the name.
Where to start?
There is nothing on record or from any reliable source to confirm what Larry Names wrote about Abrams in his 1987 book on "The Lambeau Years," or what Povletich added about him in the WHS book.
Abrams was a man of very modest means, according to credible family members. What's more, when he died in 1941 at age 43, he left an estate of only $1,158, other than a home that was worth roughly $9,500 and a $5,000 life insurance policy, according to Brown County probate records.
In 1923, members of the Joannes family, owners of what was the largest wholesale grocery company in the state, were involved in creating the public corporation and willing to invest only $225 in the venture. The three owners of the Press-Gazette, the driving forces behind it all, invested $300.
So how believable is it that Abrams loaned the private corporation $3,000? If he did, he also would have lost it all within four months because the GB Football Club was so deep in debt the NFL yanked the franchise away in its first meeting after the season and it soon became insolvent, as noted in a letter published on page 341 of the WHS book.
Did the book's editors not look at that letter?
Nothing in that story makes sense.
As for what the WHS book wrote about McGlynn – in 1922, he was the captain of Lawrence College's football team, according to the school yearbook. He didn't start working at the Sentinel until 1927. Also, I couldn't find Calhoun using the term "Big Bay Blues" in a day-by-day search of Press-Gazette stories in 1922.
In 1923, the Packers and Press-Gazette resumed calling the team the Packers, but it also was that season when Calhoun started to occasionally refer to them as the "Big Bay Blues," more as a term of endearment.
Page 14 of the WHS book ends with a reference to attorney Gerald Clifford helping Turnbull, Lee Joannes and Dr. W. W. Kelly spearhead the creation of the GB Football Corporation.
Clifford played a vital role in saving the Packers in the 1930s and '40s. But corporate records reveal that he had no involvement with the franchise until 1929. He didn't even buy a single share of stock in the 1923 public sale. John Kittell, another local attorney, was the one who worked with Turnbull to galvanize business leaders to create the GB Football Corporation.
A photo on page 16 of the WHS book with Lambeau, Turnbull, Clifford and others meeting at the Beaumont Hotel suggests that was tied to the 1923 stock drive. Not so. When the photo was republished in the Press-Gazette on June 22, 1988, it was identified as a 1930s photo by the owner, Dan Beisel, former publisher of the paper and Packers' board member.
Page 17: The WHS book picked up again on the narrative that Carr wanted to rid the league of its smaller cities. On March 21, 1926, Carr said in an interview with his hometown newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, what he had said on numerous occasions in the past.
"We had some small towns in the league and they're still in it," said Carr. "Some folks say a football league ought to have only big cities. I tell you it shouldn't. Folks in cities like Rock Island and Green Bay back their teams with far more enthusiasm than some of you folks in the city do."
Carr also scheduled the last of three league meetings in 1927, when the NFL was trimmed from 22 to 12 teams, in Green Bay. Yes, several small cities lost their teams, but so did Brooklyn, Detroit, Los Angeles, Louisville and Milwaukee.
Page 18: The WHS book states the GB Football Corporation had become solvent by the end of 1924 and made a profit of $2.20, along with paying off a debt to Abrams that it wouldn't have had to pay off. The entire narrative is not just puzzling but borders on the unbelievable, although nothing can be proven at this point because there are no financial records from the private corporation.
For starters, the Packers have had the same accounting firm since 1923 – albeit the name has changed – and the GB Football Corporation operating statements are available back to then. In 1924, the Packers suffered a net loss of $1,571.97 and wouldn't show their first profit until 1928.
Page 21: The WHS book claims the Packers sold additional stock to survive the NFL's purge of franchises in 1927. Again, that's untrue, according to Packers stock records. What Turnbull did before that meeting was get board members to pitch in the money to pay for the NFL's $1,000 hike of its "guarantee fund," in essence, a security deposit.
Obey the league rules and it was refundable.
There also was another reference on that page to the Packers' "strong financial standing." The GB Football Corporation lost $1,164.86 in 1926 and $1,516.37 in 1927.
Page 22: The WHS book suggests the Packers annual season-ticket drive was again a resounding success and had almost reached its goal of $15,000 in 1929.
The goal, starting in 1927, was to sell 1,000 season tickets. However, according to Packers ticket records, that goal wasn't met until 1936. In 1930, the first year where an exact total is available, the Packers sold 718 season tickets coming off their first NFL championship season.
What I've covered is just the first 22 pages of a 340-page book. The mistakes go on and on.
What's truly a shame about all this is the damage it has done to Packers history. One would expect a state historical society to get its facts right; therefore, these countless errors have been repeated by Wikipedia and other online sources, not to mention other books.
Unfortunately, the Brown County Historical Society also has bought in to some of the falsehoods of the WHS book, and has gotten its facts wrong on guided cemetery walks and in some of last year's pre-draft day presentations at Packers Heritage Trail sites.
It's also why the Packers' great history became a muddled mess, beginning in the late 1980s, when potboilers started writing about it.
Dave from Sister Bay, WI
I am in the process of reading Herb Gould's 's book about Curly Lambeau. I met Curly in Fish Creek in 1961. After his Fish Creek house burned down that summer, he moved into one of the Thorp Hotel cottages. I was the night clerk at the hotel that summer. Curly came to me with his wake-up call requests. Herb told me he had never heard of Curly and the hotel, and autographed my book. Fun stuff.
I didn't know about the Thorp, either. Thanks for sharing. As I've written, Gould is an engaging writer and a real decent guy based on my contact with him. I have not read his book but fact-checked his first seven chapters or so, and I just wish he had used reliable sources, not many of the same ones found in the WHS book.
Rich from Prospect, KY
Every time I walk in a bookstore I observe more published works about the Packers than any other NFL team. Seems there's almost as much about Green Bay as is the Yankees. Are they the most written about team?
My guess would be yes, among NFL teams. And there are some masterpieces among the many books.
David Maraniss' book on Vince Lombardi is what you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Maraniss is in a class by himself as a storyteller. The late Michael O'Brien's 1987 book, "Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi," was another good read.
Lombardi's own book, "Run to Daylight," done with W. C. Heinz, was as insightful about his coaching as anything I've read. And "Lombardi," a 1971 oral history edited by John Wiebusch, offers more rich detail about Lombardi's life and coaching. I just reread that book.
The two-volume set, "Vince Lombardi on Football," offers the most insight on Lombardi's playbook. But it wasn't published until 1973, three years after Lombardi's death, and I'm all but certain the editor or someone took liberties with the book and inserted passages that didn't come from Lombardi.
Of the Wisconsin beat reporters during the Lombardi years, none was better than the Milwaukee Sentinel's Bud Lea. There would be no more credible author than him to write the 2002 book, "Magnificent Seven: The Championship Games That Built the Lombardi Dynasty."
There are always nuggets to be found, as well, in the many books written by former Packers players. They might not always get basic facts right, but they can take a reader behind the scenes like nobody else.
You're right. There's plenty to read about the Packers. But be selective.
