Acme Packers existed for two months max

[Cheesehead]

Can you outline the ownership of the Packers prior to their charter as a public team? Nate Abrams giving $3,000 to Lambeau for ownership of the team in 1922, but allowing Lambeau to run it. Abrams was repaid by the first stock sale, supposedly. This is from the "History of the Green Bay Packers: The Lambeau Years" by Larry Names, 1987. Any insight or confirmation?


The Packers were sponsored by the Indian Packing Co. in 1919 and 1920, when they played an independent schedule against mostly teams in eastern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In late December 1920, Acme Packing of Chicago purchased Indian and the consolidation of the two companies under the Acme name was finalized on Jan. 10, 1921. In August, Acme Packing of Green Bay was granted an American Professional Football Association franchise. The Packers played four non-league games and then their first league game on Oct. 23 vs. the Minneapolis Marines. On the following Sunday in "The Dope Sheet," the official publication of the Packers and the edition for that day's game against Rock Island, the team announced it had cut all ties with Acme Packing. "The Acme Packing Company does not own nor financially back the Packer team," was the first sentence in the announcement. The story noted Acme had supplied uniforms bearing its name and equipped the team, but didn't give a precise date as to when the relationship ended. Do the math: Aug. 27 was when Green Bay was granted a franchise, and Oct. 30 was the day of "The Dope Sheet's" announcement. Thus, at maximum, the Packers were affiliated with Acme Packing for two months and one APFA (now the NFL) game. However, the announcement suggested the sponsorship had ended "at the offset of the season," which would have been as early as Sept. 25 or less than a month after the APFA minutes noted the Acme Packers of Green Bay had been admitted to its membership. What happened? Acme was $3.5 million (or more than $52 million in today's money) in debt and its stock had plummeted to 95 cents as of the day before the Minneapolis game. That was a steep drop from the $44 Indian Packing closed at on July 30, 1919, the day it was first offered on the market and 13 days before the Packers were founded. The story of Green Bay's packing plant and its ties to the Packers is fascinating and will be covered in detail in our definitive history. My book, "Packers Heritage Trail: The Town, The Team, The Fans From Lambeau to Lombardi" also includes a 13-page chapter about it. Anyway, J. Emmett Clair, who was the only Green Bay representative at the league meeting when Acme was granted the franchise, ran the team for the remainder of the 1921 season with the financial assistance of his older brother, John M. Clair, who had been promoted to vice president of Acme when it merged with Indian. The Clairs lost $3,800 (more than $57,000 in today's money) over the remainder of the season and gave up the franchise when they got caught violating league rules over player eligibility. That's when Curly Lambeau stepped in and saved the franchise. Shortly before the start of the 1922 season, he, George Whitney Calhoun, Nate Abrams and Joe Ordens formed the Green Bay Football Club, a private corporation. Based on my research, none of the four men were particularly wealthy at the time and their corporation was $4,000 in debt going into the final game, which turned out to be another financial disaster. At about the same time, Andrew Turnbull, one of the owners of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, and John Kittell, a local attorney, launched the effort to create the Green Bay Football Corporation (different from the Green Bay Football Club) and make the Packers a community property. It would be another eight months before the corporation was actually registered with the state of Wisconsin, but the NFL didn't wait to pull the plug on Lambeau, Calhoun, Abrams and Ordens. On Jan, 20, 1923, the NFL turned the team over to the organizers of the public corporation even though it didn't exist yet. Among the 204 original shareholders of the Green Bay Football Corporation when it was organized in 1923 were many of the wealthiest men in town and not one invested more than $100. I've previously written about this in detail, but you'd have to drink a lot of Larry Names' Kool-Aid to believe Abrams, who was 24 years old in 1922 and left an estate of only $15,000, with debts of $8,000, when he died in 1941, had $3,000 to blow on a private corporation that lasted four months. I'd also point out, the 1923 public stock sale raised only $5,545, so if Abrams was repaid $3,000 there wouldn't have been much left for the Packers to exist on that season. Here's something else to consider. Names wrote that Indian Packing was sold following the 1919 season and Acme was the sponsor in 1920, something countless other authors have repeated, even though it would take little time and effort to determine the proposed sale wasn't agreed to until Dec. 23, 1920, almost a month after the Packers' season ended. There's also other supporting evidence that Indian was the sponsor in 1920, including a company letterhead with the names of the people in its football department. Another point: Names also devoted pages to a conspiracy theory he concocted without offering a shred of evidence about how the Packers were kicked out of the league for roughly five months in early 1922 for using ineligible players from Notre Dame under assumed names against George Halas' Staleys; and how Halas was behind the Packers' ouster because of it. The official minutes from the Notre Dame athletic board spell out that the players played in a non-league game played in Milwaukee against Racine a week after the Packers-Staleys game and Knute Rockne was quoted to that effect. What's more the Racine Journal-News identified the Notre Dame players the day after the game and newspapers from Milwaukee to South Bend reported the game was played in Milwaukee between Green Bay and Racine. Bottom line: Names didn't get much right about the Packers history over their first four seasons.