Quote of the Day | August 7, 2008: The Last of the Small Industry Towns

Michael MacCambridge's 2004 America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation:

In 1960, pro football nearly doubled itself, the twelve teams of 1959 multiplying to twenty-one a year later. The financial boom and the growth of the American middle-class made the explosion possible, and the sense of a new era dawning was heightened by a new commissioner, a new rival league, and, in the country at large, a presidential campaign that would bring a new president to the White House.

The tension between the sport's past and future was felt most acutely in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where a pervasive gloom surrounded the team throughout much of the '50s. While the jet-powered cosmopolitan world of postwar America was taking shape, the small central Wisconsin burg of 62,000 people seemed willfully rooted in a Rockwellian portrait of an earlier era, isolated from the bustle of modern urban life, still remarkably homogenous (only 128 blacks lived in the county in 1959) and stubbornly proud of it.

The city's claim to fame -- that it was the last of the small industry towns to still have a major professional sports team -- seemed increasingly tenuous by the late '50s. The NFL's only publicly held franchise was a living testament to the league's heritage, and yet there was a feeling among many in the league that the team wouldn't be able to compete for much longer. Though their personnel department, run by the sharp Jack Vainisi, had enjoyed a series of productive drafts, Green Bay had the smallest payroll in the league, and made far less television money than most other clubs.

. . .

After the 1-10-1 1958 campaign, feeling that they needed to break from the past, the Packers pursued and hired Lombardi, the top offensive assistant on the Giants' staff. He came highly recommended from around the league, even from a reluctant George Halas. "I shouldn't tell you this, Ole," Halas confided to Packers president Dominic Olejniczak, "but he'll be a good one. I shouldn't tell you because you're liable to kick the crap out of us!" In that Halas would prove prophetic.

Tags: Michael MacCambridge, America's Game