A Newspaper Office, A Meat Company, And $500
There was no stadium. There was no league. There was a room.
On August 11, 1919, a group of local athletes crowded into the editorial room of the Green Bay Press-Gazette - the paper's editor, George Calhoun, had been running ads telling anybody who wanted to play football to show up - and started a team.
Curly Lambeau was 21. He'd been at Notre Dame under Knute Rockne, got knocked out of school by tonsillitis, come home, and taken a job at the Indian Packing Company. So he asked his employer for money. The company gave him $500 for jerseys and equipment and let the team practice on an open lot on company property three days a week.
The condition: name the team after the sponsor. They were the Indians first. By the end of the year everybody was just calling them the Packers.
That first season they went 10-1 and opened with a 53-0 win over the Menominee North End A.C. at Hagemeister Park, passing a hat through the crowd for gate money.
The meatpacking company that paid for the jerseys was gone within a few years. The name it bought is still on the field in Green Bay, 107 years later, owned by the town.
