Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Earl Louis "Curly" Lambeau
Green Bay Packers founder and longtime coach (stadium namesake); not later Packers coaches or Lambeau Field alone
$500
Earl Louis “Curly” Lambeau founded the Green Bay Packers in 1919, coached them for twenty-nine seasons, and won six NFL championships in a town that had no business keeping a big-league franchise. Green Bay did not inherit a football team; a shipping clerk invented one. He was born in Green Bay on April 9, 1898, and starred for four years at Green Bay East High before playing halfback on Knute Rockne’s first Notre Dame team in 1918. Tonsillitis sent him home for good. At twenty-one, as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company, he talked president Frank Peck into five hundred dollars for uniforms, borrowed a practice lot next to the plant, and—with Press-Gazette city editor George Whitney Calhoun—launched the Packers. His father, Marcel, a contractor of Belgian descent, later helped supervise the volunteer fence around Hagemeister Park so the club could charge admission. Lambeau was the team’s first star passer, then its coach through 1949, winning titles in 1929–31, 1936, 1939, and 1944. He pioneered the forward pass in the professional game when most teams still treated it as a trick. A board fight pushed him out after 1949; he later coached the Chicago Cardinals and Washington. He entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1963 and died in Sturgeon Bay on June 1, 1965. Later that year the city renamed its stadium Lambeau Field.