Retro Halloween

Courtesy of the folks at Uniwatch again, we are able to go back to Halloween 1994 when the Packers were in Chicago to play the Bears in the throes of a midwestern hurricane. Green Bay T Ken Ruettgers had some fun with the holiday and turned his throwback helmet into a pumpkin for the home viewers.

Here is the intro to ABC’s Monday Night Football from that long ago night.

And here are the game highlights.

Canadeo vs. The Texans

We saw a link to this photo today on the great site Uniwatch, and knew we had to pass it along to other Packers fans. It is a shot of halfback Tony Canadeo either gaining yardage, or scoring, or both vs. the Dallas Texans on November 23, 1952. Green Bay came out on top this day in a big way — 42-14 at old City Stadium. From Wikipedia: “The NFL was unable to find a buyer for the Texans, and folded the team after the season. A few months later, the NFL granted a new franchise to a Baltimore-based group headed by Carroll Rosenbloom, and awarded it the remains of the failed Texans operation. Rosenbloom named his new team the Baltimore Colts. However, the Colts (now based in Indianapolis) do not claim the history of the Texans as their own. Likewise, the NFL reckons the Colts as a 1953 expansion team.”

1967 Championship Coverage

Thanks for putting up with the breaks between our posts. We’re back to present the final installment of The Fabulous Green Bay Packers, the 1968 publication of the Milwaukee Journal’s coverage of the “Three in a Row” championships from 1965-1967. Starting off, we have the center spread photo of the 1967 team. The booklet continues with the Western Division Playoff with the Rams in Milwaukee, as well as Ice Bowl and Super Bowl II coverage.

1966 Championship Coverage

We’re moving on to 1966 with the original Milwaukee Journal coverage, with the NFL championship game in Dallas and Super Bowl I.

1965 Championship Coverage

Here’s another gem of the Packerville, U.S.A. archives — a compilation of the newspaper coverage of the Packers’ 1965, 1966, and 1967 NFL championships, as written at the time in the Milwaukee Journal. The Journal was the afternoon Milwaukee paper until its consolidation with the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1995. Today, it’s one of our two main sources for Packers’ news, although you need an online subscription to read it. This publication spotlights the three championships, as we mentioned. We’ll feature the 

1966-67 coverage in the next blog posts.

We love to read the contemporary coverage of sports and news events, because it is interesting to see how things appeared at the time, without 47 years of analysis and hindsight.

Don Hutson Tribute

Packer legend Don Hutson is the subject of today’s post from the October 1997 Packer Profiles. Most fans today are largely unaware of players during this era, but Hutson was the best of the best — and the Packers were fortunate to have him in Green Bay.

Who Can See the Game?

Sunday’s game at St. Louis will only be seen by a small section of the country (thankfully, we’re included), as is evidenced by the color green on the map above. Thought you might want to know so that you can make your viewing plans.

A Collector’s Collector

We apologize for the lengthy period of no updates here on the blog, but with travel and general over-busyness, time slipped away. We’re still featuring some articles from the October 1997 issue of Packer Profiles, and today we put the spotlight on collector Tom Pigeon of Green Bay. If you go to Lambeau Field these days and take a tour, you might have him as your tour guide. 

A Visit with Herb Adderley...

Another feature from our October 1997 issue of Packer Profiles is this one on Pro Football Hall of Fame and Packers Hall of Fame CB Herb Adderley.

Adderley has a new book out, and we have not yet added it to the Packerville, U.S.A. archives. But we will soon.

Packers Tickets — in 1997

If you were a Packers fan eagerly reading all you could get your hands on back in 1996-1997, you may have a few copies of Packer Profiles in your collection (if your wife hasn’t thrown all of that “junk” away). We liked the publication’s mix of then current-day and historic articles, and wish they had put out more issues. We’re going to feature some of the October 1997 issue, starting with this article on the state of the Packers’ season ticket waiting list and more at that time. Mark Wagner, seen above, is still the Packers’ Director of Ticket Operations in 2012.

A color-coded map of Lambeau Field shows the price breaks at that time. Our end zone seats have more than doubled in the last 15 years. 

Here we can see more on how much ticket prices increased over the years. Wagner also states that in 1997, only one Green Bay account turned over in that year, and it wasn’t voluntary. Yes folks, the Packers will take your tickets away for repeated behavioral issues. We enjoy reading the Green Bay police summary of arrests and ejections after home games, knowing that those idiots are helping us inch closer to the top of the list. We gained 101 spots between 2011 and 2012.

The easiest way to see a game at Lambeau then was buying from a broker — and it pretty much remains that way now. 

The Packers’ pretty basic ticket designs for 1997 are seen here. 

 

Here we see how advantageous it would’ve been to put your name on the waiting list when the Packers were a horrible team rather than waiting until they revived in the Holmgren-Wolf era. All the bandwagon-jumpers suddenly decided that they wanted to go to Packers games between 1992 and 1995, when the list more than doubled. Those of us who got on prior to 1985 are much closer to the dream now that the almost 7,000 seats are being added for 2013. Our number right now stands at 2,469. And the high end of the list is over 100,000.