Exploring the Legacy of the Frankford Yellow Jackets: Philadelphia’s First NFL Champions

Author Brian Michael joins us to tell us all about it.

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.

Welcome to the deep archives of football history.

We love to go back in time, talk about some of the great National Football League teams and pro teams and college teams.

And today we're going to talk about one that we've really wrote a lot about in our book, Maroon, that we wrote with Jeffrey Payne just not too long ago.

And that's the arch rival of the Pottsville Maroons, the Frankfurt Yellow Jackets.

What an interesting team in the Eastern Pennsylvania area.

Basically a berg of Philadelphia that really had a great impact on National Football League history with some excellent players and a championship.

And before we get into the story with our guest Brian Michael, who wrote a book about it, I'd like you to make sure you can hit that subscribe button and if you like it, give us a thumbs up too.

That really helps us out with our YouTube so we can bring in more great stories and videos here from Pigskin Dispatch.

So without any further ado, let's go on to our interview.

Hello, my football friends.

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

And welcome to another edition where we get to talk to an author that's wrote a recent book on some great football history.

And this is really a fantastic time to have this author on.

He has written about the Frankfurt Yellow Jackets.

He has a returning guest, Brian Michael.

Welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hello.

Thanks for having me, Darren.

Yeah.

Brian, yeah.

How exciting.

Your, your book is out.

The long awaited and long worked on piece of, of art, you know.

Yeah, very awesome.

So why don't you go ahead, read the title.

Let's read the title.

Let's let people know that are.

Because some people are listening on the podcast.

Sure.

So yeah, Frankfurt Yellow Jackets, Philadelphia's first NFL team.

So if people didn't know that, it's a great first kind of entry into hopefully judging the book by its cover.

And of course myself and co author Andrew Weicker.

Yeah, very Good book.

I appreciate you sending me a copy of it.

I really enjoyed it.

A lot of great history and a lot of great.

Not only the football history, but just the history of the town, which, you know, many of us that don't live in the area.

It was really enjoyable to help you learn about what's why Frankfurt is so special and why they love their football team.

Yeah, absolutely.

That was a really big part of the team.

You know, just like the Green Bay packers, they were a community owned team, not owned by just one person or company.

So that was a really big part of the Yellowjacket success and their history throughout their entire existence.

Yeah.

So I guess if you don't mind, why don't you start, you know, where, where did the Frankfurt team come from?

Sure, yeah.

When they first started up in Frankfurt, they played at Worcester park, which was a big grounds that was owned by an eccentric millionaire who had these animals like camels and llamas and zebras running around.

Eventually they turned it into, it was a driving school, but then also the Yellow Jacket Stadium.

Back when they first started the Frankfurt Athletic association, baseball was by far the biggest sport that they had.

It brought in the most money, it had the most games, of course, for baseball.

So that was really a big part of the organization probably for the first 10 years or so.

It wasn't until the FAA actually dissolved, reformed a couple years later.

So again, it's a neighborhood team, just like your neighborhood boys and girls club or rec center.

Right.

It was a local bunch of local guys that were playing football and they were really good.

Right.

So they were beating teams.

Yeah, it's a really, really cool, cool story.

So that's, that's really special.

That's, you know, 20 some years before the packers and the Bears and teams like that were even organized.

So pretty cool.

Yeah, no, it was.

But there's a lot of great stories in between.

Yeah, absolutely, there certainly is.

Now, I guess maybe just to clarify, because you have Frankfurt Yellow Jackets, then you have Philadelphia's first team.

When should tell us sort of the geographic location of Frankfurt in comparison to where the city of Philadelphia store.

Yep.

So Frankfurt is a neighborhood within Philadelphia.

Before the entire city and county were incorporated together, it was its own city with its, you know, own mayor and city council and police force.

But it's centrally located, so great for transportation routes, great for industry.

There is a Frankfurt arsenal, which was really a big place for jobs.

So people live there.

A great working class neighborhood and a main street too.

There was a main street called of course, Frankfurt Avenue.

So that's where all the commerce took place.

That's where all the neighbors met, certainly on the weekends.

And eventually that's where the Yellow Jackets built their stadium.

So you have, you know, a city within the city.

Frankfurt neighborhood, it was just on the lower end of northeast Philadelphia, so just north of the center part of the city.

And you know, like I said, working class, industrial, not far from the distant sawmills, which was huge during the industrial revolution as well.

So a lot of jobs there, a lot of business and schools.

And just what started as neighborhood rivalries, there were different local teams that would play each other.

And they did.

And they drew on players from those Oxford and Pennant clubs that came before the Yellow Jackets to find their early players both for bas and for football.

And so, you know, that was really a part of the genesis of the team and the organization, you know, and the community.

It was always a fabric of the community.

And that was a big part of the Yellow Jackets.

Now it's interesting that, you know, Frankfurt being a neighborhood in Philadelphia and at that time in, you know, the early 20th century, one of the powerhouses of college football was University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Quakers.

Now was there a lot of Penn Quaker former players that had joined on Frankfurt.

So it was fewer players from the neighborhood, more from these big time college programs like Nebraska and Michigan and Pen and Yale and Harvard.

There were several players, including Heinie Miller, who later became the coach of the Yellow Jackets and of Temple football as well.

And, you know, is very well known around early football circles.

So that was a big part of it.

But even in the early days in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, but Philadelphia specifically, you had the blue laws.

So that meant the Yellow Jackets were not able to play their games on Sunday.

Right.

You know, businesses were closed, you couldn't buy alcohol on Sundays.

Right.

So the Yellow Jackets, whereas most NFL teams even at the early time were playing on Sundays, they had to play on Saturdays.

But of course, all these big time college football teams were also playing on Saturdays.

Penn State, Rutgers not too far away, Villanova, Lafayette were all really popular teams.

So they had to compete with college football teams on Saturday, play their games on Saturday, and then often they would go play a road game on Sunday.

So sometimes they would even follow the team that played them at home on Saturday, back home on the train, you know, sometimes as far as Chicago, but often New York, Providence, places like that, and play two games in one weekend.

And that was unique to the Yellow Jackets.

Most early pro football teams played their game on Sunday and that was it.

The Yellow Jackets regularly played two games a week, sometimes even three, especially with Thanksgiving games, which they took on because that was a popular tradition in Philadelphia high school Thanksgiving games.

And they wanted to get in on that.

And they play Thanksgiving games and in the last five or six years played the packers every year on Thanksgiving.

So the tradition of the packers playing, you're so used to seeing them play Detroit and things nowadays, but the really, you know, 100 years earlier, back the Frankfurt days.

Yeah.

So so many of these are going to sound familiar to, to our listeners here because it's kind of a unique situation that, you know, we, we've talked to Greg Tranter, who recently wrote the Providence Steamroller book.

Of course, you know, we have our Pottsville book out.

We've talked extensively with that, with Jeff Payne, our co writer, being on, and some other authors that wrote books on there and the Yellow Jackets.

You have all these brand new teams sprouting up in the NFL and really dominating it.

And definitely the Yellow Jackets are a big part of that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, you may be able to include Buffalo if you want to east coast, but that's probably more Midwest, but absolutely.

The early NFL was of course, a midwestern league, so they were always looking to get a foothold in the east coast where there's more people and more money and more viewers and they would try to start their own franchises or, or have again, a, you know, wealthy owner, as we saw with the Mares or with Marshall, eventually in D.C. but the yellow Jackets were unique again, in that they were a community based group and they had so much success against NFL teams before they were in the NFL.

Again.

So, you know, that was probably a smart move for the league.

You know, picking them up, picking up kind of a known quantity, and it's certainly a successful one at that.

Yeah, no, no, many people, you know, just like Pottsville was sort of accused of it in Frankfurt, just like you said, you're playing these, these double headers on the weekends and you know, being sort of, you know, two games at home and you have an opponent that's been traveling, you know, to long.

Mind if you have the Chicago Bears or the Green Bay packers coming down and playing two games on east coast, that's kind of a rough weekend.

And you know, but you can also look at it the other way with these teams that are playing, you know, back to back games at home.

I mean, they're playing two games too many of the times.

Like you said, Frankfurt, you know, might be playing at Providence and incoming or playing at home and against somebody, then going to Providence or somebody to pick up a game on Sunday.

And yeah, so they have to travel and, you know, they're licking their wounds and you know, having some players or maybe you're missing a game or not up to 100 too, on.

Yeah.

And interestingly enough, something we came across in our stats as we compiled the game records, you know, most of the Yellow Jackets losses would come on those Sundays after they had played a game already.

I think they, they lost almost half of those games where they played back to back.

They still won many more games than they lost.

But as we were going through our research, you know, we were looking through newspaper articles, both at the Historical Society of Frankfurt.

You know, actually 100-year-old newspaper articles as well as microfilm at the Pennsylvania Historical Society.

And we were realizing that all of these game stats weren't published anywhere else before, so we put them all together as part of the book.

Actually, the publisher said that's too much.

Your book's getting too big.

So we created a website, frankfortyellowjacketsbook.com where you can look through all of these game stats, rosters, old photos, history, things like that that aren't included in the book that we still wanted to get out there to the public because we did all the research.

We haven't seen it anywhere else.

We are working with ProFootball Reference.com to put some of the pre NFL stats together.

But it's great to find all this stuff and be able to bring it out to the public.

Yeah, it's really cool.

One of the unique things about your book is not only is there the great history in there, but there's the, the images you have.

I don't know how many photos you have in there, but it's.

You gotta probably have over 100 photos, I'm guessing, in there.

And they're just spectacular to look at.

So as you're telling the story of the Frankfurt, the town.

Yeah, it's just, it's incredible.

So, yeah, there's over 150 photos and actually it's primarily a photo book.

You know, it's the photo history.

So there's seven chapters, starting with the neighborhood of Frankfurt, then through the Yellow Jackets, as well as chapters on just players and fans.

But each one's full of photos with history captions and it's a fun way to put it together.

You can pick up the book at any page, really, and learn a couple things and get some fun stories.

That's the thing, there are tons of stories, let alone just the stats, but about the players and how these players would play for multiple teams on the same weekend and things like that.

Teams coming and going, players jumping teams.

It was really the wild west of football and, and learning about the, the personalities of all these guys was really fascinating.

Yeah, it's.

They're also playing for the Pottsville Maroons, you know, from the other side of the state.

And it's really, really pretty cool.

But I think one of the more intriguing characters that, that you mentioned and we talked about too is it was a non player and now Shep Royal.

What can you tell us a little bit about Shep Royal?

Sure.

So Shep was part of the Yellow Jackets probably for over two decades, the last which as the president of the team.

So he was behind a lot of the success of the Yellow Jackets, mostly on the business side and organizing the expansion of the stadium, the sponsorships, again, the community was a big part of the team, not just with the fans, but with the sponsorships as well as the construction of the stadium.

The lumber, things like that all came from the neighborhood.

So managing the business interest was a big part of having this community organization survive because it didn't turn a profit, any profit that it made, it donated back to the neighborhood.

So it would donate, for instance, say a coal heater to the Frankfurt day nursery and things like that.

So organizing the finances is a pretty heroic endeavor.

Him as well as all the board of directors were unpaid positions, right?

So they, they did that.

And one of his best moves, and maybe worse, was signing Guy Chamberlain to be the coach.

Then mysteriously he had to.

To leave right around the same time that Shep left and.

And Theo Holden became president.

So there was some politicking behind the scenes even back then, but he held it together for, you know, all of the teens and twenties and really turn the Yellowjackets into this NFL successful NFL franchise that we're learning about today.

Now didn't even Shep believe, I mean, he dropped.

He was 19, 25, I think he was at the post.

But the 26 season when Frankfurt ended up winning the NFL championship, Shep Royal wasn't in charge of the Yellow Jackets that point.

It was not where he sort of stepped down.

Yeah, that's where, that's where Thea Holden came on board.

But yeah, he was always there behind the scenes too.

He was still a board member and part of the organization, which is great because we were able to find all of this information at the Historical Society of Frankfurt.

We have, you know, roll call from meetings, we have accounting ledgers, we have the notes from, from the games, baseball and football and programs too, which even then would look back on previous years and tell stories of previous years and tell stories about players.

So having all them preserved at the Historical Society was, was amazing.

And putting the pieces, it really helped with putting the pieces together.

But even still, as you know, they don't always fit perfectly.

Right.

You have players, like we said, playing on the same, different teams the same weekend sometimes with different names too, or partial names that you come up with.

And that was a really hard part about putting the book together as opposed to with our Eagles book that we did before.

A lot of that history is out there and can be checked from multiple sources.

This yellow jacket stuff, you know, was pretty much primary sources only and whatever we could get our hands on, we were looking for and we, we looked at.

So it was, it was.

That part was really interesting.

Yeah.

It sounds like you had some great people on your side with not only the Historical Society, but you also have a relative of one of the famous players of Frankfurt who did the forward.

And you know, one of my favorite people and such a great preservationalist of early pro football, and that's Mike Moran.

And you know, of course his father being Hat Marien, who, Who played one of the teams he played on was the Yellow Jacket.

So very interesting.

So why don't you tell us?

I mean, if you.

Right there.

Oh, yeah.

Very distinct looking guy.

Yeah.

And Mike, you know, has a really great collection of things, you know, not only associated with his father, but a lot from, you know, the Giants when he played there and things like that.

So I'm sure he was a great website too.

Yeah, check out his website.

Yes, yeah.

Org correctly.

Right.

Yeah.

Very, very cool.

So why don't you tell us, you mentioned a couple of the famous players not named Hat Marienne for playing for that.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the players that played for Frankfurt.

Sure.

We had link.

Lyman was one.

He was, uh, hall of Famer from Nebraska.

He was probably a little more famous with the Bears.

And that's something you find with a lot of these yellow jacket players.

An integral player was Houston Stockton, grandfather of NBA hall of Famer John Stockton, both Gonzaga graduates.

So he was a big part of that team too.

We have Two Bits Hohman.

Two Bits was one of the smallest players ever to play football.

He was 5.

5 and also credited for inventing the touchdown dance.

He, after scoring a touchdown, he held the ball, went over to a teammate, shook his hand and shook the official's hand and handed the official the ball all before returning back to his team.

Whereas.

Or you would just drop to the ground like a, like a rugby try.

He gets credit for inventing the, the touchdown dance.

I mentioned Guy Chamberlain.

He came over as a previous coach from the Cleveland Bulldogs, Canton Bulldogs, and He had won three championships already.

And.

And he would probably get a lot of credit for that, his veteran leadership on the field and just organization in general.

So Guy Chamberlain, pretty famous as well.

Hall of Famer, pretty much.

Pretty incredible run he had.

I think it was something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's like the Yogi Bear of early football.

So, yeah, he was big.

Ludrae.

Ludrae.

He was later the Eagles coach, birthday coach, but he was on the Yellow Jackets as well.

And it's great.

We have a lot of these player profiles on the website.

We have a list of all the players that have played, but we also have some select biographies listed.

But since we've had the site up, we've been getting some emails from people who say their grandfather or their uncle has played.

And we're starting to collect more and more stories on all these players.

So there are plenty that aren't just in the hall of Fame, Right.

But they all have interesting stories.

There was one doctor, Joe Alexander, who was a doctor up in New York City and would come down on the weekends and play for the Yellow Jackets and probably play for the Maroons and a couple other teams.

And he would go back and forth between being a doctor and that.

Ray Crowther, who was the captain of the team, he was a boxer, I think, in the Olympics, too, but he invented the tackling sled that we all see throughout OTAs and summer camps and stuff.

So he made of the tackling sled again, early football days, this was, you know, three yards and a cloud of dust, dust type football.

Before we really got things going, you know, like we do today, these guys were playing just for fun, usually for 10, maybe $50 a game.

By the 20s, some of the better players were making maybe 100 or 200 a game.

But interestingly enough, for road games, all the players only would make 60% of their home wages.

So you actually got paid less for the road games, too.

So that's what you were working with.

Most of the players had jobs in the city or in other cities.

And this was for the love of the game, basically.

Yeah, it's always.

I always find it interesting, the.

The pay of professional football.

You know, of course, it starts with Pudge, Hufflefinger, he's made, I think he made $250 his first game.

And it sort of went down downhill, you know, down to like the $10 mark at some points, you know, 20, 30 years after that.

And now, you know, God, the guys are on the verge of being billionaires, you know, by the time, of course, they're done.

Yeah, yeah, no, it was, it was a lot different game back then.

You have some of the same teams as we've mentioned, same franchise is still around, so it's amazing that they've stuck around for so long, but it was certainly different, a different game back.

Back in those days.

Yeah.

Fascinating book, folks.

I mean, I highly recommend it, you know, especially, you know, you listen to this show, you're.

It was long awaited.

I've been, was hearing rumors of it for a long time and we, I know we touched base on it a couple of times actually.

We had Brian on probably what, four or five years ago talking about Frankfurt Yellow Jackson.

We were doing a series on early football.

So it got some of the rudimentary parts of your research, I'm sure on there.

Yes, yes, it has been a process.

It started with our Eagles book when we were looking for pre Eagles history and photos and we went over to the Historical Society of Frankfurt.

We were only looking for maybe four or five photos and we found hundreds as well as all these other things that I mentioned.

So we filed it away.

We knew that it was there and that once we were done with our Eagles book, we would come back to it.

And like you said, here we are.

So we're very excited.

So we're even more excited for next year having the book out and getting to do some events and maybe some, some cool things for the yellow Jackets then.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now I think I would be remiss if I didn't let you give this feel, you know, you're wearing, wearing the shirt, of course, that I'm sure people are sitting there going, hey, where can I get one of those shirts?

And I think you have some information on maybe where folks can, can get a copy of this shirt.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

So shibsports.com as in shib Park Shy Vintage Sports is a local apparel store that I own in Center City Philadelphia.

In old school, you know, Philly sports teams, area Philly history.

And the Yellow Jackets are certainly one of them.

You know, we don't sell a ton of Yellow Jackets, certainly compared to our Kelly Green Eagles here, but it's the.

It's these kind of stories that we like to make sure that are out there in the public, because otherwise they might get forgotten.

And it's really a part of, you know, the city and the city history.

And, you know, I mentioned the.

The game of football was different back then, but the fans in Philly were very much the same, very passionate.

Went to all the home games.

They tailgated Yellow Jacket Stadium, had a big parking lot with a lot of outhouses in there.

And they traveled well.

They would charter their own trains to Atlantic City, to New York and bring thousands of people.

So much so that almost all the newspapers in those cities would mention that in the game recap just how many Yellowjackets fans were there.

They would parade from their hotel to the stadium.

It was always a big deal.

So some things like that.

The Philly fandom never changes.

Yeah, it's amazing when you read some of those old excerpts from newspapers, like, especially like Atlantic City with the.

The roses, when they would entertain and.

And play Frankfurt or play Pottsville.

And it seems like there was a parade before the game, like you said, and fanfare and the mayor, you know, speaking before the crowd is really, really quite a spectacle, something that we don't even see today.

You know, it's kind of neat, right?

It really was.

And.

And the Yellow Jackets, Rosies.

Atlantic City Rosies.

Rivalry was always a big one.

They would usually play in the beginning of the year, every year probably while it was still nice and warm down in Atlantic City.

So they regularly played locally.

Holmesburg was a big rival.

Again, you would have the mayor coming out for that one, which was, you know, basically the next neighborhood up, maybe two up in Northeast Philly.

And then later, the packers, the packers and the Bears.

The Bears were the real tough team that the Yellow Jackets could just never be right, that they were always standing in their way.

So that was, you know, a big step on the way to their championship.

Yeah, Very, very cool.

Well, Brian, we really appreciate you preserving this history of.

Of the, you know, the team of the NFL history of, you know, early professional history with everything that you've done and collected in this book.

And maybe let's mention the name of the book again where folks can get it.

And we'll also, folks, don't worry if you're driving or something.

We'll put links that Brian is mentioning here so you can check in the show notes of YouTube or of the podcast.

So go ahead, Brian.

I'm sorry.

Yep, it's Frankfurt Yellow jackets, Philadelphia's first NFL team.

And you could get it at frankford yellow jackets book.com you could Google that.

But check out the website too.

We love to get people's feedback.

Certainly if you have any stories that you remember, we're just really just trying to collect history here both with the book and the website.

Very cool.

We appreciate you coming on and for sharing a book with us and sending, you know, some shirts up our way earlier this year too with the the pot because he also has Pottsville shirts at his store too, which is really cool too, along with some other really neat teams I noticed you had.

Was it the World Football League team with Philadelphia Stars, I think I saw on there and some other defunct teams of other sports too, which are really pretty neat to see.

So great job.

Yeah.

Thank you, Darren.

Thank you.

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

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