On Aug. 27, 1921, the year-old American Professional Football Association awarded a franchise to the Acme Packers of Green Bay during a league meeting in Chicago. The Acme Packing Co., based in Chicago, had purchased Indian Packing eight months earlier. Less than a year later, the APFA would change its name to National Football League.
Green Bay was now in the big leagues – sort of. Most of the APFA’s 21 members that second year were located in small hotbeds of football rather than big cities – places like Canton, Ohio, Hammond, Ind., and Rock Island, Ill. Then again, compared to Green Bay maybe those were big cities.
Green Bay hasn’t just been the smallest city in the league for as long as anyone can remember – that has been true since Day One if you discount a minor technicality. The only smaller city in 1921 was Tonawanda, N.Y., but the Tonawanda Kardex were designated a traveling team and lasted only one game.
Green Bay’s population was 31,017 based on the 1920 U.S. Census. Not only was it the smallest city in the league, it was smaller than six other cities in Wisconsin, including Superior and Oshkosh, and none of them had teams. Even through the lens of history, it’s almost incomprehensible that the Packers survived. They’re closing in on their 100th anniversary, but until they were nudging toward 50 they were perpetually on their deathbed.
Take their first season, for example. The Packers pulled off a major coup when they signed lineman Howard “Cub” Buck, a veteran of the famous Canton Bulldogs. They won their inaugural league game against the Minneapolis Marines on Oct. 23, 1921. They were able to book games with the formidable Chicago Staleys (Bears) and Chicago Cardinals. And they finished with a winning record, 3-2-1.
But then everything unraveled. On Dec. 4, 1921, in a non-league game against Racine billed as a battle for the state championship, the Packers used three Notre Dame players with college eligibility remaining under assumed names and got caught. Less than two months later, Green Bay was booted from the league – albeit, not for long. Thanks to Lambeau’s persistence and the impression Green Bay had made on other club owners during its first season, the Packers were reinstated at the next meeting in June.
The Acme Packing Co. bowed out of the picture at that point, after just one season, and a small group headed by Lambeau and Calhoun took control of the franchise. Plagued by limited resources and terrible weather, the new owners barely made it through their first season.
A game against Columbus in early November was played in a driving rain and resulted in a loss of $1,500 when the total rainfall for the day fell three one-hundredths of an inch short of the amount needed for the Packers to collect on its rain insurance. On Thanksgiving, a 12-hour rainfall ruined what was supposed to be Booster Day contributing to a sparse crowd for a non-league game against Duluth and another financial disaster. Club officials nearly cancelled the game, but were persuaded not to by Andrew Turnbull, one of the owners of the Press-Gazette.
Nearly 25 years later in a three-part series, Calhoun wrote that Nov. 30, 1922, “marked a turning point in the history of the Packers.” He said Turnbull promised that if club officials went ahead and played their game that day, he would get Green Bay’s business community to rally behind the team once the season ended. True to his word, Turnbull led the effort to create the non-profit Green Bay Football Corporation before the start of the next season. The Packers were now a community-owned team. Their investors were their fans.