Packers

      More Letters From Paradise
              Packers
I never played football in school, because of a heart condition. But, I always was at   every game. Later, at the University of Michigan, there were some great football games. And now living here in Hawaii, due to the time difference,we can watch games at breakfast, and have the rest of the day to do other things. But, don't get me wrong,we watch only important games. I am not a fanatic, and neither is my wife. This brings me to some football fanatics, the Green Bay Packers.

If you are a football fanatic, you may want to skip all the following information about the Green Bay Packers. You probably know about all this anyway. But for people who are only mildly interested in football, you will find this information very interesting.

The Packers were founded in 1919. Curly Lambeau, an outstanding player for Notre Dame, and George W. Calhoun, the sports editor of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, decided to form a football team. Lambda worked as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company-hence the name of the new team. The Packers won ten games that first year. But it was difficult to find funds to keep the team solvent. In the end, aid came from stock sales, the first stock sale came in 1923. Shares were sold for $5.00 each, and required shareholders to buy six season tickets in order to see the bleachers filled.

Today the Packers are the only professional sports team in the United States that is owned by shareholders-363,948 of them representing 5,020,523 shares. I met a woman who was able to buy a single share for her husband's Christmas gift. It cost $250.  There are no dividends for shares, only bragging rights and a framed certificate proving that he is one of the team's 363,948 owners.

The only way to get tickets to a game at Lambeau Field is to inherit them. Tickets could not be transferred to anybody outside the ticket holder's immediate family. Nowadays, however, you can put your name on a waiting list-which currently numbers more than 81,000. The wait to get tickets is estimated to be around thirty years. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote that the wait would be more like 955 years. Some couples, on having a baby, put the child's name on the list.

A couple of other facts about the Packers. When  a Packer scores a touchdown, it is expected that he will jump into the stands.  In this way, the leap is a symbolic embrace of the team with the crowd. Also, the Packer fans travel, and are to be found everywhere. We have them here in Honolulu at Snapper's bar, which is always filled to over-flowing for a Packer game.

All of the information for this brief story of the Packers came from a most wonderful essay by Austin Smith, in Harper's magazine.

     Aloha
     Grant