Unearthing the Legacy of Hap Moran: A Journey Through Early Pro Football

One name that comes up constantly in researching early pro football is that of Hap Moran.

And his son Mike Moran visits the Pig Pen to share his dad's fantastic story.

Coming up in a moment.

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Hello my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com and welcome back to the Pig Pen.

We have our normal day show.

We're talking about early pro football teams, but we have got such a treat today.

We're going to talk about four different early pro football teams prior to World War II.

And it's all centering around one great player from that era.

And we have his son here today.

The player is Hap Moran and his son Mike is here today to give us a great biography on his father.

Let's bring him in right now.

Mike Moran, welcome to the Pig Penn.

Well, thanks, Darren.

Glad to be here.

Mike, you know you, before we came on the air, you're telling me some stories of how your early experiences of football and maybe you could just share some of that with us.

Tell us how you became a great football fan and historian.

And so as a kid, I grew up in Queens, New York, about 40 minutes on the train from the Polo Grounds.

So we would hop on the train and go to the Polo Grounds and my dad would show the pass, we'd walk through the turnstile and we'd go sit in the press box and we watched the gang.

He felt that he still knew some of the press guys, so.

But I have to admit, as a kid, I wasn't paying much attention.

I was looking for the next hot dog or the peanuts or something, but it was.

And it was a little intimidating because there's all these guys in their fedoras and their dark overcoats and their typewriters or whatever, and it's kind of a fond memory.

And then later, when the Giants went to Yankee Stadium, we could go in there and actually I met some of the players because on Election Day, which was a holiday in New York City, a couple times, my dad took me up to practices and we sat around and we watched them practice.

Now we went into the clubhouse.

And the thing I remember shaking hands with these guys and coming away, like, numb up to my elbow.

But I got to meet some of them, and I became like.

I mean, there was the era of Conner Lee, but my favorite was Ray Wojteka, the center, so always had a soft spot for him.

I didn't know much about the football history at that time, and that really didn't come into play until after my father died.

And I got.

Well, first thing that happened was I started getting letters from all these people saying, do you have any equipment?

Did your father have any equipment?

Can we buy anything from you?

But then I got one guy who wrote to me, and he was from the Professional Football Researchers association, and he asked me if I would write an article for their newsletter, which is called the Coffin Corner, about my father.

And I said I would.

And I started doing a little research, and I realized really how little I knew.

So it kind of.

This was also just when ebay was beginning.

So it was like grief counseling, ebay.

I got my father's NFL pension, and it metastasized into this obsession, really.

I guess one big question is, was going to any NFL game, was that transferable down to you, or was it just.

No, no, non transferable?

I don't know what happened to that pass.

You know, that's another thing I've searched.

One of the things I collect is NFL passes, probably because I lost that one.

And I haven't found a lifetime pass signed by Joe Carr.

And I have a lifetime pass for a guy who was a trainer, Andy Lotshaw, and it's signed by Elmer Layden, one of the four horsemen, but I've not found one signed by Joe Carr yet.

And that's probably the one that your father would have been a Joe Carr.

Yeah, he was.

Wow, that is amazing.

And by the way, to our listeners, Mike has a great tribute website to his father called Hap moran.org h a p m o r a n.org and you know, there's a.

It's a wealth of information on the man.

My hat's off to you.

How much work you put into this is really tremendous.

But in that Coffin Corner article, you start off by saying that you didn't really know that you're.

You knew your father.

You're aware your father played football, but you didn't realize what a big deal he was.

He was somewhat humble about that, didn't share a lot of that.

Is that.

Is that right?

There was one thing in our house that would make you think my father was a football coach, because after he retired from the Giants and moved out to this apartment house in Queens, there was a park right next door, Sunnyside Park.

The story I heard was as soon as my father moved in, two days later, some kids knocked on the door and said, we have a football team.

Would you come and coach us?

There was an article in a newspaper about him coaching this youth football squad.

And there was a drawing that somebody did to accompany the article, and that was what was on the wall.

There was nothing about pro football or anywhere.

And I didn't realize.

I think I found out when I was in Cub Scouts and someone said something to me, and it was like, what.

I mean, I didn't.

And also, I wouldn't have.

I was like, what, seven at that time?

I didn't understand what it meant.

I had no clue.

But, no, I think, you know, part of my father's story is that he.

His father was killed when he was 7.

His father was a railroad man out in Iowa, and he got run over in a rail yard accident.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

So my father.

I mean, football at least, was less dangerous than railroading.

And.

And.

But after that, my father had a career as a professional, and I.

He was a buyer for Western Electric, which was the supplier for the entire Bell system.

So at one point, he was buying all of the telephone poles that the Bell system used in the whole United States, or all of the typewriters, all of the pencils, pens, canvas, safety bags.

And when I was growing up, every day, put on a suit and tie and got on the subway, went down to Broadway and the Financial District.

And, you know, I think his.

He saw football as a step up to a career, and what he had in mind for my brother and me was the career.

You know, no calluses, white shirts, that kind of thing.

So, yeah, he never talked about it as the good old days.

And in fact, he never really talked about it at all.

It was, I guess, you know, when he got into the late 80s and 90s, he started telling us more.

But.

I don't know, it wasn't the defining moment of his life.

It was a step on the way to something more prosperity and security and safety and the capacity to raise a family.

Well, that's part of the mystique that makes him so interesting.

I mean, his whole story is interesting.

That's just another layer of this story.

Just makes it real interesting.

Now, before we press record here, you were telling me, okay, you just talked on air about your dad was coaching a youth team in a neighborhood when you first moved to a place.

But you were telling me earlier about your experiences with playing youth football at a younger age.

If you could share something.

I was not cut out to be a football player.

I'll tell you.

I remember, Yeah, I was telling you I went to this little high school in Manhattan and we only had a six man football team, which I think was developed by the Navy or something so they could play football on ships.

I'm not sure the whole story.

About six man.

They had one or two about six man football.

And the director of athletics thought I must know everything about football.

He knew my dad, he'd been a Giants fan.

He drove me to football camp and, you know, we all got in a circle and somebody went in the middle and everybody hit him.

And I was in the middle.

I thought, no, I want nothing to do with this.

This is just not for me.

I love to swim.

And I thought, I think I'll pick a sport where the pain level is entirely in my control.

I swam in high school and I rode.

And my father actually encouraged me to row in college.

And I don't know if anybody's read that book, the Boys in the Boat.

The ones were Jesse Owens and the Nazis and that whole big story.

And Mel Heim was from Washington and was a crew fan.

And he used to tell the guys on the Giants that if they thought football was rough, they should try rowing.

I think my father got introduced to it because Mel Hein and he went up to watch that, those Olympic trials at Poughkeepsie, New York.

So my father never set foot in a boat.

But when I went to Rutgers.

He said to me, you should try rowing.

That's a tough sport.

I think you might like it.

So indirectly, from the University of Washington rowing team to Mel Hind to my father, to me, there was a connection there.

So I coached rowing also at Rutgers for a while and always enjoyed it.

Wow.

I'm from Erie, Pennsylvania, so rowing is quite a big sport around here.

Also.

We have quite a few competitions at Mercyhurst University here in town.

Does quite a bit on that.

So I'm familiar with that.

It is a tough sport.

I've never done it, my.

But it looks very strenuous, that's for sure.

Now I guess maybe let's go back maybe to where you think your father's football career started.

Is it at the high school level, college level?

Yeah.

Well, I think where it started was really was on the railroad because in the summers in high school he would, he worked as a railroad kind of track man and they would get on these railroad cars and they would go out and repair track and he would be swinging these 16 pound sledgehammers, you know, for four weeks in the summer.

And then when he went to high, he went, he lived in, went to high school in Boone, Iowa, which is a big railroading town.

And I have pictures of him playing football there.

But really basketball was his sport.

He was an all American basketball player.

In those days it was considered, I don't know if it was illegal, but it was considered wrong for college coaches to go visit high schools and recruit.

So Amos Alonzo Stagg, who was the famous Yale player and coach, but he was hired by the University of Chicago to build up a football.

There's a great book about this called Staggs University, about the interaction between money, football alumni.

It goes way back.

This is not a new issue.

What he did was he set up these interscholastic tournaments at the University of Chicago so that the best athletes throughout the Midwest, I don't know how many eastern schools came, came to him and he could see them.

And I have some of the track and field and basketball programs from those tournaments and you see a lot of future great football players in there doing in those sports because there was no football tournaments.

So Stag picked my F as an all American basketball player and football was kind of secondary.

And then he went to Grinnell College for a year and I think he played on the freshman football and basketball teams.

But then he was recruited by Carnegie Tech and my brother went to Carnegie, which is now Carnegie Mellon, and we went to a football game there.

And the crowd was less than my daughter's field hockey team got in high school.

I mean, football was nothing at Carnegie in the 60s, but in the 20s, I mean, their schedule, they played Notre Dame regularly.

They were a real powerhouse of football.

And I think I.

You know, it's in the article that you.

I'm sure you read it, but they.

And that was.

And so my father was against.

Was the halfback for Carnegie against, you know, the Four Horsemen.

And.

But he got hurt, he got injured, and they went back to Grinnell and he played.

He had to take a year off, and then he played for two years at Grinnell before going into the NFL.

But Grinnell was, you know, it's a small school in Iowa.

Another friend of his, there was a guy named Frank Cooper who brought a horse onto the campus, took it up into a building, took it up a couple flights and couldn't get it to go down.

And he got thrown out of the school.

And he went out to do stunt work in Hollywood, and they said, there's already a Frank Cooper.

You got to change your name.

So he changed his name to Gary, and you got a bit, you know, that was like.

These three guys were there at Grinnell all at the same time.

My father, Morgan Taylor, and Gary Cooper.

Wow, that is tremendous.

That was a funny little story.

But.

And then, I guess.

I don't know, I have the letter that his football coach at Grinnell wrote to the coach of the Frankfurt Yellow Jackets recommending him as a player.

But I don't know the mechanism of that.

I mean, he had some big runs in college.

He got listed in the NCAA guide as like the.

And he's like, on the first, you know, Maybe he's number 12.

I don't know.

He had some big run backs that always got.

The stories got retold in every biography or, you know, a little blurb they'd write about him, right?

And so I got a chance with the Frankfurt Yellow Jackets, which was the Philadelphia franchise before the Eagles.

Yeah, that was the progress there.

That year, you know, and I think.

I'm not sure if it was 25 or 26 that they brought Guy Chamberlain as their coach.

It might have been the year before, but, I mean, a lot of people never heard of Guy Chamberlain, but Guy Chamberlain was like the, you know, the Bill belichick of the 20s.

He was.

He had been on the original Decatur Staleys with Halas before it was the Bears.

He was the coach of the Canton team.

He won in its first 10 years of the NFL.

I think he won five of the championships or was involved with five championship teams.

So Chamberlain, he pulled it all together in 26, and they won the NFL title that year.

But the NFL title back then was determined by your winning percentage.

They had no championship playoff game, so it was a little different.

And there was no money and you didn't get a big ring.

My father did get a watch, but, yeah, they had the best record in the NFL.

And the big game was they.

And the Bears were pretty closely.

Had pretty close percentage numbers.

When the Bears came to Philadelphia to play the.

Play them, and they won that game.

My father was injured.

He was in the game a little bit.

But one of the stars of the game was a guy from Gonzaga named Houston Stockton.

Who?

Stockton.

His grandson, John Stockton, you know, and so there's a little athleticism in that family.

But, yeah, they won the NFL championship that year.

Yeah.

Now, I guess if I remember correctly, didn't they.

The Frankfurt Yellow Jackets winning the NFL championship, and they had the rival league, the Red Grange original afl was going on, and the Philadelphia Quakers, which, you know, Frankfurt is just a suburb of Philadelphia, basically, and the Quakers were the champions of the afl and they, you know, I think it was in the press and the media they wanted to have these two teams play to see who was the best in the nation.

It didn't come to fruition, but they did end up having an exhibition game Frankfurt did.

Against the New York Giants.

Is that correct?

No, no, the Quakers did.

The Quakers did.

Okay, that's.

Quakers ended up having a game and they got whipped solidly.

And then the Yellow Jackets had whipped the Giants solidly.

So, you know, I.

The, you know, I mean, you never know game to game, but that makes you think they wouldn't have done very well.

Yeah, the old.

Any given Sunday theory applies, right?

Yeah.

But they got disqualified from winning the championship because they played an exhibition game against the Notre Dame All Stars in Philadelphia which violated the territorial rights of the Yellow Jackets and Joe Carr disqualified them.

That's a bitter pill, which is still being in Pottsville.

You don't want to mention that.

So maybe they were gun shy after that.

Or maybe they just want to give the AFL any legitimacy.

I mean it was, it was, it was, everything was on a shoestring at that point anyway.

You know, that's true.

I mean you're only, the league was only in existence for six, seven years at that point.

So it's understandable.

Wasn't some hard times there.

1927 he went to a different franchise.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.

Well, he started out 26, 27 with the yellow Jackets, but for an inexplicable reason.

I've never read a good explanation of it, although I think there was some.

The committee, the Yellow Jackets were a non profit team, but they had a committee that ran them.

Thought they were spending too much money and they let Guy Chamberlain go and they got a coach, guy named by the name of Charlie Moran.

No relationship as far as we know, but Charlie Moran made his day job was.

He was an umpire, major league umpire.

And he got called into umpire the World Series.

So he really didn't get to the Yellow Jackets until partway into the, into the season his son was doing it and they had a terrible, they were having a terrible season, a lot of turmoil and eventually, you know, they lost their coach and.

But anyway, the story I heard was that Guy Chamberlain had gone to the Chicago Cardinals and the Cardinals needed somebody who was a solid kicker and he got my father to come from Yellowjackets.

Like my father played all the games through the end of October in Philadelphia and then he went to Chicago and so he finished the season with the Yellow Jackets.

And I know in the first game the, I mean the finished season with Cardinals he had.

The Cardinals had another kicker named Bub Weller.

And I read one newspaper article that said Weller's attempt at the extra point came closer than usual, but still failed.

I don't know why they didn't let my father kick that extra point.

But anyway, yeah, so he finished that season with the Cardinals and that's all I know about it.

I've never, never been able to find a team picture of the Cardinals.

It's very hard to find their home programs.

They labored in the shadow of the Bears.

I mean, the one notable thing was that.

That was the.

I like to sort of research my father's teammates, and he was a teammate on the Cardinals with Duke Slater, who was just inducted into the Pro Football hall of Fame, another great Iowa player.

So, I mean, I feel like it wasn't totally unproductive for him, but.

Well, I know we've got one person that's very much going to be listening to this program, and that's Josiemba, who I'm sure you're aware of is a great Chicago Cardinals historian.

So maybe Joe can have some connections to find that photo that you.

You're looking for.

Yeah, I've read.

I know I've.

I've written to Joe.

Okay, okay.

Years ago.

Yeah, it's a great book he wrote about.

What's it called?

When the Grass Was Green or when something.

When Football Was Football.

I forget the name.

Yeah.

When Football Was Football, the Story of the Chicago Cardinals.

Yeah, that's a great book.

Yes.

I had gotten.

I had.

I bought a contract.

One of the things I bought on, maybe it wasn't on ebay, but the connection I made there was a contract for the last game played by the Duluth Eskimos, and it was against the Bears, and it was signed by Ole Hogsgood, who was the manager and eventually the owner of the Duluth Eskimos.

And it was all about.

There was an all American named Howard Maple, and it was about, you know, you got to show up at the bus station on this day and you got to have.

We'll supply you with a football, but bring your own equipment.

And for the.

One of the first training camps.

So I went to Joe's book and I was trying to figure out.

He helped me figure out who Hogs Grid was.

If I'm saying it right, I am not good with Swedish names or Norwegian.

And it was just a wealth of information in there.

Yeah.

And I better correct my wrong here because I've been digging, as you've been talking for Joe's book, I butchered the name of it.

So let me get it right here.

When Football Was Football, the Chicago Cardinals and the Birth of the NFL by Josie Emba.

So sorry about that, Joe, but what's your name at first there, you know.

The Hogs grid is interesting story because he sold that franchise back to the NFL with a provision that if there was Ever another Minnesota franchise, he could buy a part of it for a set amount of money.

So he became an original owner of the Vikings.

Interesting.

He lived long enough to cash that in.

Yeah.

Wow, that's amazing.

And they also a lot of guys, if you read the guys like Ernie Nevers and they said he really should be in the hall of Fame because when Red Grange, as you mentioned, went to the.

Formed a separate league, the NFL was really lacking a marquee star from the college years.

And Haasgood and Ernie Nevers went to high school together.

And Hodsgood convinced Nevers to come and get into pro football, even though they didn't play any home games.

It was a traveling team.

The adding Never's name to the NFL roster was probably might have been.

You know, some people think that's what tipped the balance in favor of the NFL as opposed to the afl.

The original.

The Grange Pyle league.

Yeah.

Now, were they.

Was Nevers and Ollie with the Cardinals when your dad played or was that after your dad?

I think they were with the Eskimos.

Okay.

Yeah.

There must have been like a year or two later, I think.

And then they went over a year.

Yeah.

Later, afterwards.

But.

But your.

Your father had.

Trans.

Did.

Had another team transfer that, that next season or shortly thereafter.

And you know, I don't know.

I never.

I've never seen.

I have his contract, that's one thing.

I do have his contract from that.

Year.

But I don't have any correspondence.

I don't know how it came to be that he ended up in Pottsville.

It was the only my father told me about Pottsville was that the field was like the.

The basis of the field was all this slag coal.

Because Pottsville was the anthracite district.

It was the anthracite league.

It was a tough league.

It got out of the anthracite league and got into the NFL.

And he said if you cut yourself on that field, you had to pour iodine over.

It was bacterially infected.

The other story he told, and I'm not sure if it was from that year or later, but just about those coal mining towns and the intense rivalries that existed was he got hired to play for some local coal mining town, maybe Shenandoah Gilbert.

I don't know the name.

He was a ringer.

He was brought in as a ringer and he got there and like half the players on both teams were NFL Players, they all knew each other.

They'd all been brought in because there was such heavy betting on these games.

And he said they played to a tie and, like, they'd never even got their clothes back.

They had to like, get on directly from the field onto the train.

People were going to, you know, strangle them because nobody made any money.

They didn't lose any money, but nobody made any money.

So that was a pretty tough team and a tough league.

Yeah, pretty tough crowd.

You know, when they say tough crowd, that's a tough crowd.

Yeah, Hard rock football players off the field and I don't know, you know, they had a terrible year.

They didn't do well.

And they had four future hall of Famers on that team.

They had.

Let's see if I remember.

Well, Johnny blood, John Blood, McNally was on it.

Right.

Walter Kiesling was on it.

Peter Fats Henry, Pete Henry was on it.

Maybe that was.

Maybe those were the only three.

I don't remember now if there was a fourth or not.

It seemed to me there was, but they did not have a good year.

Again, I think it was management and coaching because after that season the franchise moved to Boston for one year and then folded.

They became the Boston Bulldogs and then they didn't do very well.

They folded.

But, you know, it was.

The thing that happened for my father in Pottsville was the story.

And I don't have documentation of it.

I just kind of remember it was that in a game against the Giants, he and Steve Owen had a collision and Steve Owen was knocked unconscious.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

And the Giants had this Yale All American on their team named Bruce Caldwell.

And Bruce Caldwell was a great runner, you know, really good player, but he wouldn't block for anybody.

And at one point the other Giants just stopped blocking for him and he was just getting clobbered.

And, you know, he'd been a marquee player at an Ivy League school and the Giants released him right before the end of the season and they brought my father in to take his place.

And my father was a good blocker.

I know he didn't.

He was not a prima donna.

So I got some.

I got a great picture of him blocking for Friedman.

It's just classic.

So they brought my father in for the last game and it was against Red Granger's New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium.

And my father scored the touchdown for the Giants that day.

And.

And that's how we got to New York.

So being in Pottsville, have you ever had a job that was a terrible job, but it got you your next job?

You know, that's.

Yeah, one of those stepping stone jobs.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But I mean, let's pause for a second because you're saying, you know how your father had a collision with Steve Owen, was, you know, well known Giants coach, but he was, he was a pretty good sized man in his playing days.

And your father, when you look at your website and you're seeing all these things, you know, the longest run from scrimmage in this game, the most receiving yards.

And when I first was reading that, I'm sitting there picturing in my mind, you know, somebody like, you know, Christian McCaffrey or something, some small fast guy that's playing here.

Then I'm looking at some of the film you have on there in his Giants games, which we'll talk about here in a minute, and looked at the size that the pro football reference has them down as.

6 foot 1, 190 pounds, which is playing size.

So your dad was a large man and he had some great athleticism to boot and you know, and a two way player, actually a three way player because he was punting and kicking as well and playing offense and defense.

Just a tremendous athlete.

He had, yeah, really had no choice then, you know, if you, if you were taken out in a, in a, in the, in the first quarter, you couldn't go back in again until the second quarter.

There was no running people in and out.

So you had no choice.

I mean, everybody played, you know, both ways till I think till like the late 30s or you know, I'm not sure exactly when colleges did it first, but you had no choice but to play both ways back then.

And you know, you couldn't run in if you ran in somebody who just knew how to punt.

I don't think people, I read all these, who's the greatest of all times?

Like who's the greatest quarterback of all times?

If you threw a pass into the end zone and it was incomplete, the ball turned over to the other team.

Like that's a basic rule change that makes.

And plus you had to play defense, you Know, I am.

I find these great.

You know, what I like about sports is you go and you do something, it's at a set time.

If it's a football game, it's an hour.

If it's a crew race, it's like eight minutes or whatever.

And when it's over, it's done.

But sports talk, you know, it's never over.

It's never done.

So I don't.

And I'm trying to compare people from the different eras.

Eras is, you know, really can't.

I think.

Yeah, you really can't.

Especially the game of football.

It's.

I mean, some.

Maybe something like baseball you can do because it's.

There's subtle changes, but football has had so many morphic changes, you know, that have really changed the landscape, you know, probably four or five times during the course of the history of the game.

It's just amazing.

But you can't compare.

It's a different game altogether.

So Mr. Mara, Tim Mara, the owner, went and bought an entire franchise, the Detroit Wolverines, so he could get the number one quarterback in the NFL in New York City, Benny Friedman.

And most.

My father was one of the few.

But although some of them did pretty well other places.

Went back.

Went to Green Bay.

Right.

Pretty good.

Yeah, I'd say so.

Hall of Famer.

But the only man in the football hall of Fame and the Baseball hall of Fame.

That's right.

Yeah.

Right.

I know his granddaughter was trying to.

Was working on getting him a stamp, you know, a U.S. postal stamp.

And that was a good year for them.

Yeah.

Now he.

You have some great footage on your website.

32.

Yeah, 32.

32.

I'm sorry, 32.

And I believe it was the Portsmouth game and where, you know, he shows off his great defensive play and your father comes in, I believe, just like crushes Dutch Clark, I believe.

You know, the 29 game was again, they went by percentages.

That was effectively the championship playoff game in 29.

And the packers won.

And they won the championship by like 4%, 2%, maybe 2/10 of 1 percentage point.

I don't know what it was.

And yeah, that was a great game for the Packers.

Yeah, right, right.

You know, before I forget, I've got to ask this question.

This is like the hundred dollar question here.

Where did your father get the nickname Hap from?

There was a cartoon character named Happy Hooligan, and that is my understanding of where he got the nickname.

And I think it might have had to do something with being sent to get a bucket of beer.

I'm not sure about that part.

But yeah, there was a Happy Hooligan.

And so my grandmother would really.

His middle name was Dale, which.

I don't even know how he spelled it.

I mean, I spelled it more than one way.

D, A Y, L, E or D A L, E. She called him Dale or Happy.

And occasionally in the programs, he's listed as Happy, not Hap.

But Hap was what he used as an adult anyway, that I know of.

I never heard anybody call him Frank.

Very interesting.

His first name was Francis.

Yeah, I had to make sure I asked that question because that's one that popped up to me right away.

So when you look up Happy Hooligan, you'll see he was a very funny little guy.

Oh, I have to.

I'll make sure.

I have to.

Okay, so tell me a little bit about him with the Giants, because that's where he spent most of his NFL career.

Six seasons, I believe.

With the New York Giants.

Yes.

The Giants had a. I'm in touch with the great grandson of Dr. Harry March.

And Dr. Harry March was from Canton, Ohio, and had been.

The team, always loved football.

Might have played football in college a little bit, and was kind of the team doctor for the Canton Bulldogs when Thorpe was playing.

He ended up.

He was also a theatrical man and a medical doctor.

He ended up in New York City.

And Joe Carr wanted to find a buyer, wanted to find a New Yorker who could finance and manage an NFL franchise in New York City.

There had been Giants in New York city in like 19, 22, 23, called Brickley's Giants, which Charles Brickley was a famous Harvard All American that had failed.

So they hadn't been able to get a good franchise in New York City.

And I was reading an interesting thing by Dutch Clark, speaking at Dutch Clark the other day.

He said the same thing was true in Detroit.

There were so many great college teams in Detroit that it was hard for the NFL to get a foothold there.

And there were a lot of great college football teams in New York City, so it was hard for the NFL to get a football team there.

And Tim Mara was a bookmaker and was trying to get a piece of, I think, Gene Tunney or a boxer, and he was having no luck with it.

And Harry March knew him, and he took Joe Carr to his office and said, look, you can't.

I'm sorry you can't get this boxer you want, but here's an opportunity for, what, $500, you can have a NFL franchise.

And the story is that Tim Merritt never even seen a football game.

He was, like, into the horses and then in boxing, but he said, look, an empty storefront in New York city is worth 500 bucks.

I'll take it.

But to Mr. March, Dr. March, he said, you got to run it.

I'm not running it.

So March was the man, and I think he was a part owner originally.

He was the man who did all the recruiting for the Giants for, like, the first maybe seven years of their existence until Tim Mara's son, Jack Mara, got out of school and came on board as, like, the vice president of the club.

And so Dr. March was the one who got my father in, and my father even lived with Dr. March and a couple other Giants in this.

In his, like, rooming house somewhere.

And we're largely the result of this, Dr. March's initiative.

And I'm so glad I'm in touch with the grandson, because you ever heard of Doc March?

No, probably not.

No.

90%.

He's very important in the history of the NFL, and nobody's heard of him.

And the grandson is writing a book about it, so hopefully his name will become better known.

Yeah, I think you'll have to give me his contact information, if you can.

When he gets his book, I'd love to get him on.

And that sounds like a very interesting story, but you brought up quite another question I had, and you sort of somewhat answered it here.

Now, your father went to four different teams, and matter of fact, in the first, you know, 15 years of the NFL and APFA, these are four of the biggest franchises going.

You know, they all competed for championships in that era, but how was it for a player in that era to transfer to a different city?

Especially, you know, he's going from Chicago to, you know, Frankfurt, you know, you know, Philadelphia area to New York.

One of the things I don't.

I.

The Yellow Jackets were like.

It was really an athletic club, athletic association.

And they had a golf course.

And so they were.

Bowling alley, I believe, or all I know is that my father worked.

They also provided work for him at the golf course and at the bowling alley.

And I would assume.

I don't know about where they lived in Frankfurt and Philly, but when he went to Pottsville, they all stayed in a hotel.

There was the Necho Allen Hotel in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and that was where the team, the players lived.

And I know when he went to New York City, well, he lived with this doctor March for a while, and then they also lived in a hotel, the Hotel Paris.

And my father basically lived out of a suitcase for a lot of his life.

He used to stay.

Well, when he was on the railroads, they'd stay in YMCAs or things like this.

He never owned a home his entire life.

He was like.

He lived in hotels and it was an apartment guy.

So I think a lot of the guys from the Giants did live in this Hotel Paris in Manhattan.

And I think anybody who didn't live in New York City or a lot of those Giants all still lived in a hotel, because he talks about after games, they would, you know, they'd go to different floors, and then they'd all get on the subway and go into Manhattan out to, you know, like Toots Shores or something.

You know, it was.

I.

It was.

I mean, Andy Robustelli, take the train home to Stanford, Connecticut.

But I don't think it was.

A.

Nomadic life, let's put it that way.

At that time, I'm sure it probably was.

Well, Mike, I appreciate you coming on and spending some time and sharing this great story of your father.

And I want to share with the listeners once again, if you want to learn more about Hap Moran, Mike's website, HAP moran.org we'll have a link for it in our show Notes for this podcast.

We'll also have it on pigskindispatch.com, so you can go and enjoy this great website and enjoy the videos and all the other articles are on there.

It's really tremendous time for one more story.

Oh, absolutely.

So this guy, Harry March, he bought a refitted submarine chaser from World War I, and I have no idea why.

And then there was articles in the newspaper that the Giants are going a la Huck Finn down the Mississippi river with this boat with a Harry March own.

And they took it down the Mississippi and into Miami.

And they put it into the hands of a captain, a real guy, and they left and the captain stole the boat.

And then my father.

The owners asked my father to go down to Miami and investigate, where's our boat?

So my father went down there and he found out that it was called the Kingfisher, that the captain was part of this international scheme to smuggle Chinese out of Mexico into the United States.

And the whole thing unraveled because this woman aviator crashed her plane, which was loaded with gold.

And anyway, my father's remembrance of this was how seasick he got trying to get to Cuba, where the boat was.

And a guy ended up in jail.

And that was my father's last seamanship thing.

And then, like 20 years later, this guy shows up on the TV show, like, what's my line?

Or the 61 of these quiz shows as an expert on navy.

On, you know, merchant marine stuff.

And then my father runs into him on the street near where we lived.

And we lived in Sunnyside.

Jackson Heights is where you went and did your shopping.

And my father said.

I just looked at him.

I said, hello, captain.

And he said, the guy just turned and ran the other way.

But that's a story that this kid or this.

He's not a kid.

He's the great grandson of Harry March.

He's been doing a lot of research into this crazy story that involved the giant New York giants and gold and illegal immigrants.

Oh, my God, my head's spinning.

My jaws on the ground.

That story had a lot of pieces moving there.

Yeah.

Airplanes filled with gold crashing and Chinese immigrants from Mexico and the New York Giants.

Wow.

Yeah, there you go.

Six degrees of separation.

Yeah.

My goodness.

Goodness gracious.

Well, sir, I really appreciate your time and sharing your family story.

This is.

He is truly an integral part of football history, and we were sure glad that we were able to have you on and share this great story with him.

And please continue your great work with your website and spreading the great story of hap Moran to the world, because it is truly remarkable and we appreciate your time.

All right, Darren, thank you.

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