Celebrating the Legacy: The Pigskin Parade Revisited

You know, it wasn't too long ago and still happens sometimes in old time America where when something great happened, you know, Lindbergh crosses the ocean, a team wins the World Series, a Super bowl champion comes home, we hold a parade for it in celebration.

How about a celebration of the game we love?

How about a pigskin parade?

Yes, we're gonna go back almost 90 some years to talk about the Pigskin Parade that came in syndication in your local newspapers and the history of football that it told.

We're going to reinvigorate the Pigskin Parade coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history.

And before we get into today's episode, let's remember, let's hit that like and subscribe button right now.

You can enjoy all the latest of the Pigs Pen from Pigskin Dispatch and also check us out@pigskindispatch.com hit our subscribe there and you make sure you have all your latest articles that are coming out.

We have multiple articles and posting each and every day, both from our podcasts, our YouTube channels, and, and just some written ones that we're bringing back, you know, to put into some hall of Famers from the college and pro football hall of Fame spotlights on their birthdays and some other great fun like what we're going to talk about today.

And today we're going to put football on parade, as a matter of fact, the Pigskin Parade.

This is one that I found on Newspapers.com from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

They published 35 episodes of a little comic strip of football history called the Pigskin Parade.

You know, that's what we're doing here.

So we want to salute this and, you know, reinvigorate this great series because it had a really talented author and illustrator.

And we did tried to do a little research on her, trying to figure out because they really never gave a lot of credit to who, you know, illustrated and who wrote these things out.

The series author was a guy by the name of Jerry Brondfield and an unknown talented illustrator.

And Tim posted about that on Football Archaeology probably four or five years ago.

We have a link in the article on Pigskin Dispatch so you can follow that.

Also you can get a closer look at these cells that we're going to talk about from the Pigskin Parade number one that tells about the early beginnings of American football and which we'll be talking about tonight.

You know, these hand drawn sketches were published in multiple frames each day.

Introduce readers about significant gridiron people and events and teams.

And over the coming days and weeks we're going to try to reinvigorate this and bring football history to you through the light of these lenses of these great images of this illustrator and Mr. Bronfield that, you know, wrote some, some brilliant work and told some, some football history and we're going to try to add to it a little bit.

You know, maybe, maybe we'll disagree with them a little bit too.

We've learned a lot about football history in the last, you know, 80 some years.

Maybe Mr. Bromfield didn't have all the information.

Maybe he did, maybe he was spot on and we'll share that with you.

But what a great fun way to educate, just like people did many moons ago, just from their local fish wrap.

Now football originated in Europe as rugby and association game.

You know, We've talked to Dr. Tony Collins about this.

We talked to Dr. Spencer just a few weeks ago as they told us, you know, quite a bit about the rugby game and association soccer game and all the disciplines of football around the world.

And Garrett Smith Hiller organized a group of Yale students to play a game using the rules that were reasonably similar to those of soccer.

Still, the game was often more than of an excuse to beat up on the first year students and hazing event.

If anything else, you know, the freshmen would go out there and the seniors and upper restaurant, upper classroom would just come out and just abuse these, these poor saps that were coming into school.

And that was part of the rite of passage into school at that time.

Now the football game became popular in the Eastern Colleges.

And this game's a game day was very similar to rugby, but has had 20 players on a field on each team during the action.

And you know, it was kind of a really unique instance in there.

Sometimes we go and, you know, it's called the first football game is celebrated.

You know, we just recently had November 6th.

We had it in our most recent football history headlines for November 6th.

But we also, you know, recognize that it was probably more of a game of soccer as Timothy Brown has come come on and told us about that quite a bit, you know, about that fine instance coming up.

But you know, we have had some really great entertaining pieces, you know, about this exciting game.

And this is really a different way to look at it here on the Pigskin Parade.

And if you listening to this on the podcast, maybe if you get a chance, pull up pigskind dispatch.com, type in the search bar under Pigskin Parade and look up episode one here.

If you're on the YouTube channel, we're showing it up on screen right now.

Teams had 25 men to aside and English association rules were used, differing from rugby by forbidding running with or passing the ball.

Spectators sat on fences.

Only a semblance of uniforms were worn.

Red turbines worn by Rutgers, which won the spirited kicking game 6 to 4.

In a second contest a week later, Princeton won 8 to nothing.

So here we have some football history.

So, you know, we are airing this podcast on November 14th.

So almost a week ago and many moons many years earlier, you know, November 6th was that first game.

And of course yesterday, November 13th, we celebrated the second game where the first football uniforms were worn.

There's red turbines that they were talking about here in this first cell.

Just a great piece of artwork here by the illustrator and you know, just a great scene there.

The field was to be 500 by 300ft.

Goal posts were 25ft apart and teams were limited to 25 players.

Tripping and shoving were barred.

Holding was also banned, except when players had the ball in his possession.

Now doesn't that tell a tale right there?

We really don't have our, our modern football inklings into that yet.

And you know, we're going to take it into the next episode where we're going to talk a little bit more about rugby and you know, just like Dr. Tony Collins and Dr. Spencer had told us earlier, you know, Dr. Spencer cast me.

I'm sorry, had told us, you know, a few weeks ago that the rugby game came from soccer association, rugby came from the rugby school and you know, had some different rules, some different balls were used and a lot of fun.

But football came from both of these, as you can see here in early football in the 19th century, you know, shortly after the Civil War of America.

You think about that for a second.

That puts everything into perspective, how old these games truly are and sort of the evolution of our game of football that we love so much.

So hope you enjoyed this little bit of football history.

We're going to be coming back with multiple parts and we're going to cover all 35 of these here before we're done.

But you're sharing this great artwork and some great history in the newspaper that shares the history of a game we love, of American football history.

So stay tuned for some more of these pigskin parades as we come out with episode two coming up real soon.

And like we said, hit the like and subscribe.

Go on pigskindispatch.com and subscribe there and you'll know right when we're going to post that, that second one.

And we'll give you some also some postings and some heads up here on this Pigskin Dispatch podcast.

So till the next time, everybody have a great grid on your day.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

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Special thanks to the talents of Mike and Gene Munro, as well as Jason Neff for letting us use their music during our podcast.

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