The Bears’ Home Venue: A Historical Perspective

Are the Bears leaving for Indiana?

We're diving into a story that over the last 24 hours has taken the sports world by storm as the Chicago Bears are being lured by the Indiana Legislature to move their home venue across the state line into Indiana at Hammond.

Now, negotiations are still going on in Illinois to make things even more complicated, but we're going to examine some history to take a look at this scenario and some others that may come of it by looking at the past.

I'm Darren Hayes.

I'm your host of Pixkin Dispatch, where we love to go into the portal of football history.

And we're going to use that portal today to examine this situation and maybe come up with some answers for you as you worry about where your Bears are going to play next year.

So let's get right at it.

Oh, the history.

That's right.

Oh sure, and it is a great story.

The Decatur Staleys, who are now the Chicago Bears.

And many people think that when George Hallis was hired by the A.E.

And around that time, I think, is when the football team started.

That would have been October, September.

October, I think September 24th was the first practice and they had a coach from the University of Illinois, which was a construction superintendent at the plant named James Cook.

He had those guys out there practicing every night at 5 o' clock on the Staley field, as we mentioned.

And according to all indications, the Journal said they're going to turn out to be one of the finest bunch of semi pro football players in the world.

So the football team scheduled local competition.

They opened up with a loss over to the Peoria Tractors.

That gave him the one loss.

But then after a cancellation against those dastardly Rantoul Aviators, they won their final seven six games in a row to finish with a 6 and 1 record.

So they finished 6 and 1 and there was a lot of emphasis placed on the team.

They were getting good coverage from the local Decatur newspapers.

There were some rumors that the players were receiving 10 or $20 a game in addition to their salaries that they received working at the Staley plant.

But that was figured to be a little bit lower than what some of their opponents were getting.

So we're still seeing this nudge or this really strong hint that everybody else was professional except the Staley's.

And Decatur Daily Review said some of those games these players were receiving a lot of money, although they didn't pinpoint it exactly.

They played at Illinois colleges.

It might have been the University of Illinois, Millikan, places like that.

When George Hallis got the call that the Staleys were looking to start a football team and looking for someone to run it for them so he would have to decide what to do about the team, he pretty much cleaned house by the end of the season, Staley said.

Also another coach called Red Brannon.

We don't hear from him again.

And Taylorville has come up before in one of the big scandals that occurred a couple of years later when Taylorville and their opponents used players from Illinois and from Notre Dame and they got caught.

He said he played sensational baseball with Illinois and the Great Lakes Naval Training Station before he was signed and given a trial by the New York Yankees.

Whereas we know he couldn't hit the curveball.

And it said George was a wonderful football and basketball man, will be a big addition to the Staley team.

So though they didn't have a they did have a basketball team and apparently George Hallis did not play basketball for the Staleys.

He definitely played baseball that definitely ran the football team.

But they could also take off a little early in practice every day, which was a huge advantage.

But what he did that summer was unprecedented in terms of the professionals as we know him.

And there was really no professional league when he started this.

But Hallis moved around the country and at least on the Eastern and Midwest part, recruiting players looking for some of his old teammates.

He had Dutch Sterneman from Illinois, Jimmy Councilman from St. Louis was on the team.

And they had a pretty good season as part of the American Professional Football association, finishing in second place.

Alice brought together a bunch of players, had him practice, had them working there.

I believe he, as I mentioned, pretty much cleaned up the roster.

So they went kind of like the baseball team.

And here's that correlation to having a professional manage the team as the baseball did, as well as recruiting players who were players, not really starch workers.

Yeah.

So 21, as we mentioned, they Staley's did win what would become the NFL title that year with their 101 and 1 record.

They start out the season playing a couple home games at the Staley Field.

They beat The Waukegan Legion 350 and the Rock Island Independence 14 to 10 and then started.

They played every game at home, basically because the remaining schedule, the last 10 games were all at Cubs Park.

And in that time, in mid October or so late October, is when Halas was called into A.E.

staley's office.

And Staley wanted to know what was.

I'm trying to do this nicely.

I have an opinion in my book, but I'm not going to share it right now.

But what Halas said in his autobiography is that Mr. Staley came in and offered him seed money of $5,000, telling him that the football team, with its success and its notoriety and had brought a lot of good publicity to the company, which is one of the intents of having a baseball and football team.

But Mr. Staley indicated to Hellas that this needs a bigger city and he suggested that they move the team to Chicago then for the remainder of the season.

And Halas talks about how he had to go right away up to Cubs park and try and reserve it for the end of the season.

But there's an Incredible twist, because even before the Chicago Bears or the Decatur Staleys, that is, set foot in the city of Chicago, there was already a team playing NFL football in Hammond.

The Hammond team is a unique one, started by a boxer, taken over by a doctor.

One of the owners had his players, had him arrested, and they even tried to get a Hollywood star to help them out on the front line.

So this is an intriguing team and one that sadly, wasn't very successful in the National Football League.

It's a team that's got a little bit of history.

But teams in that area, Hammond is really closer to Chicago than a lot of the Chicago suburbs.

In fact, you may not know that Hammond was renamed Homan for a little movie called A Christmas Story.

And so when you hear Downtown Homan, even though it wasn't filmed there, that was Hammond, Indiana.

That was the movie took place in the original book.

So enough of my theatrical trivia.

But the team goes back founded by a boxer named Jimmy Clabby, and he started the Clabby Athletic Club.

And then Jimmy decided to get out of football, and the team was turned over to a couple local entrepreneurs.

Paul Pardonen, his partner, owned a fuel company in Hammond, Indiana.

He played at Northwestern and also played with the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

And because of his time with the Cubs, Northwestern found out about it.

Very difficult for them not to find out about it since it was right in the same neighborhood.

And Patty wasn't allowed to play football his final year.

So we went over to Hammond to play, and they had a real good team which won the title, the Midwest title, I believe was called.

And the team in Hammond was so popular that there would be 10 and 12 coach, special trains that would follow the Hammond.

They called them the professionals back then to their battles in Fort Wayne or Lafayette or Pine Village, which were all in Indiana at the time.

And there was a real rivalry between Pine Village and Hammond, where a Lot of betting went on.

Hard to believe that would even happen.

But Hammond Times once said that regarding that rivalry, that thousands of dollars changed hands on the outcome of a football game.

But Pardone had even bigger ideas.

He didn't play many home games because the fields weren't very big there.

But he was the first to lease what we now know as Wrigley Field in Chicago so that Hammond could play its games there.

And they were a team that even when they entered the NFL, pretty much did not play any games in Hammond.

So they were called the Hammond Pros when they entered the league, but didn't spend much time in Hammond.

Yeah, the pros were absolute trailblazers.

So the.

The Hammond Pros were actually part of the downfall of the Pottsville Maroons and let the Cardinals overtake by really scheduling a game that really shouldn't have been played.

1926 ended up being their last season in the NFL and as the Hammond Pros.

But the town still remembers them quite well.

But it's interesting because Hammond, when we.

Joe just said they didn't play many of their games in Hammond, they played most of them in Chicago.

They traveled across the state lines.

So in a way, it's almost a reverse order of the Hammond Pros.

The Chicago Bears, if they move to plan Hammond of that what happened over 125, 126 years ago.

But that's not the first time in modern NFL history that a team would leave a city to go across the state lines.

We're going to talk about that in our next segment.

So a team moving across state lines isn't completely unheard of.

In fact, the Bears moved to Indiana.

They'll join a unique club of NFL franchises located just out of their namesake cities or states.

One in particular that comes to mind is the New York Giants.

And then they had some fallout and ended up going and playing in a different state, the state of Connecticut, which is not too far away, a little over an hour by rail up in Yale Stadium at the Yale Bowl.

The jets played at Giant Stadium.

Yeah, if you're old enough to remember, that sounds crazy and it kind of was.

But yeah, both teams played there and both teams still play now in the new MetLife Stadium, that which is in the Meadowlands real close to where the original Giant Stadium was in that venue.

So that happens all the time.

Just as recently in as the last year or so, the Kansas City Chiefs announced that they were building a new stadium and they are leaving Arrowhead.

In fact, they're leaving Kansas City, Missouri and crossing over into the state of Kansas City.

So I think they'll still be called the Kansas City Chiefs and won't just drop the city and be the Kansas Chiefs.

The New York Giants and the New York jets never drop their New York even though they play in New Jersey.

And isn't that kind of a crazy thing when you think about it?

If the Bears ended up playing in Indiana, the state of Indiana will have two professional football teams just like the state of New Jersey.

Two professional football teams when Illinois would have zero housed at their thing with the second or third largest city in the country and the city of New York is the largest city, has none of their teams playing in none of their NFL teams playing in the confines of the city or the five boroughs.

So they're actually in New Jersey in a different state.

So kind of interesting there as well a couple things of twists and turns and we've got some more twists and turns as this story goes along.

So this all brings us back to the modern day Bear saga of how did the Chicago Bears get the point of heading to Hammond, Indiana?

They've been tenants at Wrigley Field and Soldier Field.

And recently Kevin Warren explored remodeling Soldier Field to the Chicago lakefront.

But then they talked about moving up to the suburbs, up to Arlington.

They purchased a demolished Arlington Heights racetrack, a massive $5 billion project featuring a dome stadium capable of hosting super bowls and Final Fours.

However, the Bears and their property tax certainty, $855 million that the taxpayers would pay that ended up getting sort of crushed.

And that idea went out the window.

So they went back into the drawing board to maybe remodel Soldier Field again.

They also looked around at some other places in the Chicagoland area in Illinois.

But then that Indiana legislature, they were scheming and secretive, having meetings in the whispers in the halls of the legislators in Indiana and said, hey, we just won a national championship in football and we have the Indianapolis Colts who have won Super Bowls.

How about we get the Chicago Bears?

Yeah, the Chicago Bears, that have that exciting team with, you know, Caleb throwing these, you know, impossible passes at the end of games to win and keep them in it and take them to overtime and go deep into the playoffs.

Yeah, those guys, you know, they, the defense is just smothering people.

They, they're an exciting young team, probably most exciting in the National Football League right now, next to the world champion Seattle Seahawks and maybe a couple others.

But they are one of the more exciting teams to watch, a must watch on tv.

So this would really be a feather in a cap for Hammond in the state of Indiana.

So they plotted and schemed and they brought a proposal and said they'll come up with the money and get a dome stadium for the Bears.

That's what they ultimately want.

Now, the Hammond is actually 30 miles from where Soldier Field is, give or take a little bit.

But if you've ever traveled through Chicago into Indiana, you can realize that 30 miles could take up to 2, 3, 4 hours sometimes, depending on the traffic.

Because we told you Chicago has a lot of people and a lot of cars traveling the roads there.

And Decatur is.

Was about 90 miles away.

It was not a horrible trip to go out there and go to Decatur, but Chicago is where it's at.

And it'd be really stink for somebody that Chicago Bears season ticket holder, especially as they live on the west side of Chicago, like up in the Arlington area or up near Wisconsin.

And now it may have a 45 minute to an hour commute to get down to Soldier Field.

But imagine if it's in Hammond.

That could turn into a Nice three hour one way trip to do that, to make that game, which is really starting to take your toll on your, your day and probably your tailgating as well as.

Well, you'd have to get up pretty early in the morning to get there or camp out in an RV or hotel or whatever.

But you know, who knows what's going to happen on that now in my opinion, I think that Hammond in the state of Indiana are really trying to make this push, make this ploy to get their team, you know, get Chicago to play in their, their city and in their state and they're really going to make a big push.

But I think maybe, just maybe, since the negotiations are still going on, I think the Bears are sitting there holding all the cards and it's really going to make the taxpayers of Chicago and the legislatures of Illinois think about things a little bit more and say, you know, are we really going to lose our only National Football League team from playing on?

You know, even though they'll still be called the Chicago Bears?

Let's, let's get over that.

You know, they will not be called the Hammond Bears or the Hammond Pros Revisited or anything else.

They, they will be the Chicago Bears if they play in Hammond.

But does the people of Chicago really want their team playing somewhere else?

I think something gets done.

I think Chicago's going to get its dome stadium.

I don't know that it'll be downtown like where Soldier Field is, but I think it'll be in Illinois and they'll get that done.

That's just my opinion.

We'll have to wait and see on that.

But sure is fun to talk about, especially when you get to go back and talk about the Hammond pros, Decatur Staley's and your Chicago Bears.

So this has been a great little revisit down to history of the NFL by using some modern news that's come out and we sure love to do that.

We sure love to talk about football history as we told you.

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So till next time, everybody have a great gridiron day.

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