On this day in Labor History the year was 1921. That was the day that Green Bay Packers football team received a charter from American Professional Football Association.
A year later this would become the National Football League. The Green Bay club had started up two years earlier.
Its original sponsor was the Indian Packing Company, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They packaged canned meat. Meat packing was a major industry in the Midwest during this era.
Packing plants in Chicago, Kansas City, Iowa and Wisconsin processed the cattle and pigs raised in the west as meat to feed the nation.
Curly Lambeau was a shipping clerk for the company. He helped to organize a group of local players into a football team. Curly persuaded his boss to donate money for the uniforms. The name “Packers” was born.
Then when Indian Packing fell on hard times, they were bought out by Acme, another packing company based in Chicago. So for a brief moment, the Green Bay Packers, one of the staunchest rivals of the Chicago Bears, was actually owned by a Chicago company.
Although Acme only owned the team for a year, the team nickname stuck. Lambeau was able to buy back the team.
He went on to become the Packers coach, leading the team to six championships. The Packers are not the only American sports franchise that’s name harkens back to a particular kind of labor.
Another Wisconsin team, the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, is a reference to that city’s proud beer brewing tradition. In Big Ten Sports the Purdue Boilermakers and the Nebraska Cornhuskers take to the gridiron.
These names reflect the working traditions of the cities where the teams play ball.
April 29 - Allis-Chalmers and the Road to Taft-Hartley
April 28 - OSHA Goes Into Effect
April 27 - Disaster in West Virginia
April 26 - National Guard Ousts Montgomery Ward CEO
April 25 - UAW Mobilizes Against Taft-Hartley
April 24 - The California Spinach Riot
April 23 - Sitting Down for Dignity at Ford
April 22 - The Red Jacket Mine Explosion
April 21 - The Hated Taylor Law Takes Effect
April 20 - Deepwater Horizon Explosion Kills 11
April 19 -The Daughters of Mother Jones
April 18 - We Have Fed You All A thousand Years
April 17 - Fatal Explosion in West, Texas
April 16 - Jacob Coxey is Born
April 15 - Telephone Girls Cripple New England Bell
April 14 - A Job or Be Sterilized
April 13 - The Colfax Massacre
April 12 - The Wagner Act Stands
April 11 - Fed Up Transit Workers Walk Out
April 10 - Explosion at Eddystone
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