THE PACKERS AND FAMILY HISTORY.
THE PACKERS AND FAMILY HISTORY. Some of the stories at our dinner table involved some exaggeration. The Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers have an important playoff game this Sunday. The New York Times had an article about the long rivalry between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. My cousin Walt e mailed me that the article “completely overlooked the fact that the first game between the two teams was played using our fathers’ football.” Walt is referring to an old family joke. As I posted here, my father’s high school football coach in Green Bay was Curly Lambeau (the founder of the Packers), and my father used to reminisce happily about how Lambeau would yell at him in practice. The story my father used to tell at the dinner table about the founding of the Packers was that he had been in a pick up football game one day in which Lambeau participated. As the players were talking after the game, Lambeau made an announcement to everybody that he was thinking of starting a football team, and very soon thereafter he started the Packers. My father would finish by saying that since it was the Schaefer family football that had been used in that game, he liked to think that the Packers were started with his football. It’s nice to think that the story might grow some more in coming years.
I recall that Dad quoted Lambeau as saying, while the players were sitting under a tree after the game, “Let’s get together and play DePere. I know where we can get uniforms.” What I like about the story is that this must be how the Packers started: some young men sitting under a tree after a sandlot game … .