Chicago Rockets

Author, expert historian on Chicago professional football, and Sports History Network Award winning podcast host of When Football Was Football, Joe Ziemba joins us in the Pigpen to talk about the Windy City edition of the All America Football Conference, the Chicago Rockets.

As we continue our trek through each team of the AAFC, we come to another of the little-known franchises, the Chicago Rockets. Joe Ziemba, author of multiple books on Chicago football history including When Football Was Football, Cadets, Canons and Legends, and his latest one coming out soon Bears vs. Cardinals: The NFL's Oldest Rivalry. The Rockets played in the All-America Football Conference from 1946 to 1949. Some know the franchise's version during the 1949 season as the Chicago Hornets. They were, let's say, not one of the better teams in the League. 

The Rockets franchise was owned by Chicago trucking executive John L. "Jack" Keeshin,  the President of the National Jockey Club that owned and operated Sportsman's Park race track in Cicero, Illinois. At one point, Keeshin famously wanted to purchase the Chicago White Sox from the Comiskey family but was kindly turned down. Jack Keeshin would not give up his dream of having a major pro ball club, so he bought into the AAFC. Joe Ziemba shares some great stories about Keeshin in our podcast above.

The Windy City was a competitive place to start a new ball club as the NFL already had two well-established franchises, the Chicago Cardinals and the Chicago Bears, both vying for fans' support. When Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward suggested starting a pro football team in the AAFC, he intended to have a club in his backyard. With the Bears and Cardinals playing simultaneously, Keeshin stood little chance of success. He did cause a stir by attempting to sign Chicago Bears stars Sid Luckman, George McAfee, and others without success. One thing the Rockets had going for them was that they played their home games at Soldier Field. Though the stadium was built years earlier, the Bears did not call it home until 1971.

As we discussed, the Chicago franchise played in the best division of the AAFC, the West. Their competition with the Cards and Bears was merely for newspaper space and fan draw; the onfield opponents, powerhouse AAFC squads of the LA Dons, San Francisco 49ers, and the Cleveland Browns, were indeed an uphill battle as they were the best teams in the AAFC, and each played the Rockets twice each season. Their dismal record of 11-40-3 placed them in or near the basement of the AAFC all four years.

According to Pro-Football-Reference, both the franchise's All-time Passing Leader and All-time Rushing Leader were the same person, Bob Hoernschemeyer, whose 833 total rushing yards with two TDs was matched with the yardage of his passing of  2,472 yds and 21 TDs.

The Chicago Rockets All-time Receiving Leader was Ray Ramsey, 52 rec, 1,134 yds, 12 TD.

The Rockets met their demise when the AAFC was merged into the NFL before the 1950 season. The NFL only accepted three All-America Football Conference teams into its ranks: the San Francisco 49ers, Baltimore Colts, and Cleveland Browns.

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we are in that same journey mode.
We are in early football in the 1940s, the late 1940s, talking about the All-American Football Conference. We're going team by team. And in this episode, we have Joe Ziemba, the great Chicago football historian, who is going to talk to us about the Chicago Rockets. Joe Ziemba, welcome back to the Pig Pen. 

Darin, it is always a pleasure to be here, and I'm kind of excited because I'm not an expert on the Chicago Rockets, but participating in, as always, one of your informative programs forced me to dig a little deeper into a team that really is unique as well as disappointing. I mean, here's a club with connections to a real-life Chicago mob assassination, a cross-country truck demonstration, a player's potential strike that cost a coach's job two games into a season, and a connection to one of the most famous locations in the world.

It's all with the Chicago Rockets, a miserable team that never won many games on the field or at the gate. But boy, did they try hard. Boy, Joe, you give better teases than the newscasters before they go on commercial breaks to keep the listeners going because you have me on the edge of my seat.

I'm sure the listeners, too. So you sound like some great stories from the Rockets team. So maybe if I start out, maybe if you could tell us a little bit about, you know, we we know a little bit about from some previous episodes how the AFC was formed with Arch Ward.

How exactly did the Rockets come to be, and maybe who founded them, who owned them, and maybe the original name, if you know anything about that? Sure. I'm not quite sure about the name, but I do know the owner, a guy named John L. Jack Keishon, who was a contemporary of Arch Ward and was the brilliant sports editor of the Chicago Tribune. As you know, he started the Major League All-Star Game, the college football All-Star Game, with the colleges and the pros meeting every August in Chicago before over 100,000 people.

And he wanted more. And I said the guy was brilliant. So, he hatched this idea for the All-American Football Conference.

And in September of 1944 was the first mention that this league was going to be started. And one of the people who were interested was John Keishon of Chicago for the Chicago franchise. At that time, it did not have a name, but Keishon made his fortune as the president and owner of a Chicago trucking company that was huge at the time.

There's so many interesting things about this guy. He was, for example, talked about in Fortune magazine about how he made his fortune so easy. Fortune said, besides muscles and guts, Keishon has brains and persistence and ambition and prodigious energy.

For these reasons, he has money. And he flaunts the title of Keishon Transcontinental Freight Lines. So he made his money in trucking.

It grew from literally nothing. Basically, he started as a kid at the age of 13 with a horse-drawn truck in Chicago. And over the next three decades or so, he built Keishon Freight Lines into something that became the biggest privately owned trucking company in the United States.

He had over 3,000 employees, 2,000 trucks, and 17,000 miles of routes crossing mostly the Midwest and the East. He gained some national attention back in 1935 when he decided to establish a new record for a truck convoy in terms of shipping. How quickly could a truck get from Chicago to Los Angeles? So he sent, I think, four or five trucks with about 90,000 pounds of freight to leave Chicago in late 1935.

It took him only three days to cross country because the trucks kept running, and they had pre-planned the stops. And everyone thought, wow, this Keishon is really something. As a true executive with some marketing perspective, he started out leading the convoys that left Chicago, got out quickly, sat around for a couple of days, and then caught one of those early transcontinental flights over to Los Angeles so he could jump in the truck and be leading it into Los Angeles with the crowd cheering.

And it got him a lot of national attention because of the quickness and showed how rapidly that a trucking company could move freight if it had to. In this case, it would have broken all the modern rules of driver's rest, et cetera, because he had different drivers on the truck, as I mentioned, pre-planned the stops that they made along the way. But he wanted to do more.

One of the things he became involved with was becoming a part owner and president of the National Jockey Club in Chicago, which owned and operated Sportsman's Park. And that's a racetrack that had some connections to the Al Capone mob earlier. In fact, in 1939, one of the officers of the club was named Edward O'Hara, and he was assassinated, leaving work one day from Sportsman's Park.

And with his demise, Keishon was allowed to buy the stock of Edward O'Hara. But the story doesn't end there, Darren. O'Hara had been marked because by the mob, apparently he had returned some information against Al Capone several years earlier during Capone's accounting and tax trial.

And he was a marked man that just took the mob a few years to get to him. But more of the interesting story about him was that his son, Butch, that is the late Mr. Edward, son, Butch, was part of the Air Force Army Air Force in World War II and won the Medal of Honor in the Pacific. He served a tour and came back all in one piece.

But then, supposedly, he was embarrassed by his father's reputation. He went back and unfortunately lost his life in the Pacific. But Butch O'Hara is the name of O'Hara International Airport; that's who it's named after.
So, a connection, a little bit of a stretch to the Chicago Rockets because the death of his father allowed Jack Keishon to buy into Sportsman's Park. When he was unable to buy a part of the Chicago White Sox or any other sports team, he met with Arch Ward. And Arch said, hey, why don't you be part of our new football conference that we're going to be starting? And even though they're going up against the well-established Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals, Keishon had a team called the Chicago Rockets.

And one of the things about him which Arch Ward loved was Keishon had, I'm going to say this politely, a big mouth. He was not afraid. He was unfiltered, said what he wanted to do.

Always caused a stir and would do anything to promote his team in those early days. So, he was a very prominent member of the ownership club for the All-American Football Conference when it started. He had about two years to get ready to put a team on the field, which he did at that point.

He went about looking to see who he could get to represent it. He always wanted the best in the business to see what they could do on the football field. Knowing full well that he was going to be competing against two other pro teams in the city of Chicago.

Hmm. Wow. That's, I mean, it does take some brass tacks there to do that, especially the two really established football teams to, you know, to the older ones, the oldest one and what the second or third oldest team in the league.

Yeah. Hmm. That's Keishon, besides having a mouth that ran a little bit.

He had a little bit of a temper in 1942. He was arrested for knocking out a rival trucking company executive and breaking his jaw. So he got off of that as they used to.

But he was a colorful individual. In fact, the league used him in April of 1945 to work with the great Paul Brown to talk with the established National Football League to see if there might be a way for the two leagues to cooperate. And that's when Commissioner Ellen Layton of the NFL said in April 1945 that he declined the kind offer and said, let them get a football and play a game first.

So it was kind of cool that Keishon, again, was very prominent and visible. He never stopped promoting. And one of the very first major things that he came up with in Chicago was in February of 1945.

He signed a lease to use Soldier Field on the lakefront in Chicago, which, of course, the Chicago Bears still use. But back then it wasn't used that much for football. There was annual games or high school games played there.

The prep bowl was it was called, which drew over 100,000 people. Notre Dame used it a few times. So he signed a lease on Soldier Field for 10 years.

And his plan was, as the league itself was trying to be unique, that he would play maybe his games on a Friday night so he wouldn't compete on other nights with the Bears and the Cardinals. And the Chicago Park District was going to get 10 percent of the gross-up to 100,000. And with the biggest discount that if the gate was over 250,000, which it never was, the Chicago Park District would get six percent of that.
So he had a bit of a varying requirement of what he would pay for Soldier Field. And when they finally took their first game, he drew over 51,000 people. But there was still a lot of work to come before that first game in 1946.

As we mentioned, they had a couple of years to get ready, and he had to prepare a team and find a coach. One of the first things he did after the lease was hiring a Marine lieutenant colonel named Dick Hanley to be his coach and general manager for the squad. So this is a year and a half before the team would actually take the field.

Now, Hanley, who was a former coach at Northwestern, was the coach of the El Toro, California football team, which was very powerful. But it also included one of the brightest stars who was in college a couple of years earlier, Elroy Crazy Legs Hirsch. One of the mistakes that Mr. Keishon made was varying his position as to whether he had signed Hirsch or not.

And in March of 1945, the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, where the university is located and where Hirsch had gone to school, said, we hope he, Hirsch, returns to the Badger School. But it looks as though Elroy has grabbed the pro gravy train and has decided to get his share of the lettuce floating around. But what a great quote.

But nothing was really confirmed then. But one time, and it occurred later that year in December, apparently Elroy Hirsch ran into Keishon in Denver, and someone heard him call him boss. That started some problems because Hirsch still had some eligibility left with the colleges.

But apparently, if he signed up with the Rockets, he would no longer be able to play in college. But in December of 1945, Jim Crowley, who's the head of the new league, said, yeah, Hirsch should sign with Chicago. That was the end of the story.

So Elroy Hirsch played with the Rockets when he got out of the service. He was called Crazy Legs for his wacky running style, which looked like his legs were gyrating in six different directions all at the same time, according to the Chicago Daily News. He eventually moved over to the Los Angeles Rams and was all pro three times and elected to the NFL Hall of Fame in 1968.

But back in 1945, the world was still waiting for the decision on Crazy Legs Hirsch. So the league was still a year or so from starting when Mr. Keishon, who we've been talking a lot about, resigned suddenly as president of his own company, and he got rid of all his connections with the firm because he was very, very upset with impossible labor demands, he called it. Less than three months later, the company filed for a reorganization and went bankrupt with assets a lot less than its liabilities.

So he got out at the right time, even though it was kind of unusual. And someone said, what are you doing this for? I mean, you can bring the company back, as you always did. And it also mentioned that perhaps his trucking company didn't have the value that it once had.

And Keishon said, yeah, it may not be worth anything now, but I don't want to be the richest man in the cemetery. I want to have some fun. So he still had his football team.
Later on, he got back into the trucking business. But I'm off a little bit talking too much about Jack Keishon back to the league itself. In September of 1945, Commissioner Crowley was talking about what would make the league different, especially in a town like Chicago, where there'd be plenty of competition.

And he figured, and the league figured, that if they could start earlier, they might get done before the bad winter set in and really hindered attendance. So Crowley mentioned we can get off to an earlier start than the National Football League because we won't have to depend on baseball parks for our fields. We can start around Labor Day, and our northern teams can finish their home seasons before the real bad weather sets in. Then, we can play off the rest of their schedules in our southern cities.

So that was an interesting aspect of football. Of course, now we have dome stadiums, et cetera. But another major announcement for Chicago was Ernie Nevers, the great Chicago Cardinal, who had been now in the Hall of Fame, still holds the NFL record for 40 points and scored one game back in 1929 against the Bears.

He was hired by the Rockets to help out with Coach Dick Hanley. Initially, Nevers would scout the Rockies on the West Coast. And he had already signed up 24 folks for playing in 1946.

So it was all working towards getting that that team on the field and having a big name like Ernie Nevers certainly helped the visibility of the new team in the new league. Keishon also offered something a little different than other teams couldn't. And I'm thinking back to when George Ellis was with the Decatur Staley's back in 1920.

He offered the players a job. And back then, everybody, just about everybody, had to work a part-time job. But Keishon, when he started the company before, backed away and mentioned that he would get his players jobs within his company.

He was asked what he looks for most in a player and an employee. And he said loyalty, he said. That comes first. I'll follow them for some time to see if they have talents that we can use.

Then, if they're reliable and trustworthy, I send for them and put them in their position. But he also made a prediction for his football team. He was really happy with Lieutenant Colonel Dick Hanley and Ernie Nevers as his coaches saying they're mighty solid football men.

And two years from now, Jack Keishon said, I want my men in the all-star game. I've always had champions. I'll have them again.

These are big words from a guy, Jack Keishon, at the time. He also created a couple more headlines in 1945 when he said that he wanted to play the very first game of the league in 1946, which would turn out to be an exhibition game by an unknown, unknown opponent, probably in Denver in 1946, and put down a thousand dollars guarantee, which is kind of big money at the time. And then he made an even bigger splash.

And we mentioned Dick Hanley, the coach, was also coaching the El Toro Marine team. Keishon swept in and claimed that he had signed a large percentage of that team to play for the Chicago Rockets. So, again, he was asked about Elroy Hirsch and if he was really joining the Rockets.

And Keishon commented, when I say a player is signed, he's signed. And I say that Hirsch will be with us next year in Chicago. So he now had the basis of a pretty strong team, just based on all the service guys who had been with Hanley at El Toro.

And as the season progressed, 1946 would be the kickoff in September of 46 for the league. Keishon made a couple of major signings. It was assumed that he had Hirsch already signed up.

And then, in July of 46, he signed tailback Bob Hunchey Hornschmeyer from Indiana, who led the nation in total offense and passing in 1943. He then went to the U.S. Naval Academy. And so this is a major signing by the league.

And it paid off immediately as a rookie. He rated among the top players in the conference and the pro conference with 1,266 passing yards, 14 passing touchdowns, and 375 rushing yards. He also was among the leaders in punt and kickoff return yards.

So a great player to add to the very, very young Chicago Rockets. He ended up playing through 46, but only a couple of games in 47 before he was traded to another team in the league. Later in 46, hopefully not important or bad things would come for the team, but a very highly regarded halfback named Bill MacArthur suffered a severe leg injury in August of 1946 during workouts.

And the damage was so severe that he actually had his leg removed. So, it's a bad way to start the season for the Chicago Rockets. But now everybody was turning to the big day.

September 13th, 1946, when the Rockets would host the Cleveland Browns. As I mentioned earlier, a very nice crowd showed up of 51,962 to Soldier Field to see the Rockets lose that opener 20 to 6 to the Cleveland Browns. The season went OK for the team.

They finished five, six and three. But the bigger news, and again, this is a team of wacky stories. After two games, Hanley, the coach, and Keishon, the owner, had been butting heads for a while.

They turned a lot of public quotes against each other. And after two games, Hanley decided to resign. Of course, it looks like he was forced out.
But ironically, he and Nevers sat in the stands for the third game. Later, Keishon started a pick of three players to run the team as coaches rotated, which was highly unusual. The three players were Ned Matthews, Bob Dove, and Willie Wilkin.

So they were player coaches. But that experiment ended later in October when Pat Bullen was hired as the head coach. So Elroy Hirsch picked up 347 receiving yards.

They used a good passing game. The only all-pro guy was Hormshmeyer from Indiana, who received second-team honors from the United Press on the official team that year. And then another surprise right after all the stuff that was going on with the team.

Keishon separated himself from another business by selling his interest in Sportsman's Park to Charles Bidwell, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals. So, our links between the teams continue. Keishon wasn't done with surprises.

So, to end the year, on December 30th, 1946, he sold the team to Commissioner Jim Crowley and two of Crowley's boyhood friends from Green Bay. Keishon said at the time, I have said repeatedly that I intend to bring the country's outstanding football leader to Chicago, and the 1947 coach of the Rockets, Jim Crowley, is that man, but he accepted the job only if he gained control of the club. So Keishon, the most visible owner in the league, stepped away at the end of 1946.

Wow. I mean, he had a lot to do in just a short amount of time with that team. That's for sure.

That's just a span of a year and a half to 44 to 46. Wow. That is a, I don't know if I'd do that in myself in a year.

He did all that with just one football team. Plenty of activity. Well, with, um, the coach and the owner out of the way, Jim Crowley took over in 1947 and the team had a tough time.
They finished 0-10, uh, and Crowley didn't last a season. This coach, Hampton Pool, took over for the last four games. Overall, the team was one in 13.
So a last-place finish, uh, for the squad. More changes will occur next year. Ed McKeever took over in 1948, and the team was starting to get a little bit of support on the South side of Chicago.
And it's a very small newspaper called the Daily Kelly Met that was encouraging fans to have a full house for the training camp, uh, at Yates stadium in Chicago for the new Chicago Rockets football team. And if you attended, that would assure the needy local inhabitants of a more cheerful and comfortable winter for some reason that if you showed up for a game in the summer of 1948, but, uh, the team is really supported by that paper, uh, which said the new Chicago Rockets had stored their preeminence in the football world. This is a team that was one in 13 the year before. It has been almost completely reorganized, and every phase has been rehabilitated, with personnel ownership, sponsorship, and directorship into a glorious, glamorous, star-studded squad of all-Americans in an all-American league.
Now, how can anyone, excuse me, turn down an offer to see a team like that? So, how did the 1948 Chicago Rockets react? Yeah, not too good. They finished one in 13 again. So under new coach, Ed McKeever, things did not go well, but the only success the team was having in those days was, uh, being able to, uh, play against some teams and not really get blown out that bad, but they were not, certainly not competitive.
So that brought us then to the 1949 season, 1949 turned out to be the fourth and final season for the, uh, Rockets in the conference. They did improve a bit on their record in 1949 and they changed their name to the Chicago Hornets. Finishing four and eight under, um, pretty much a legendary NFL coach named Ray, Ray Flaherty.

That helped them move up a notch in the standings. They trained at Ripon College in Wisconsin and had a couple of ex-pros from the area, like Johnny Clement from the Cardinals playing Ray Ramsey. But again, not a whole lot of success on the field.

So with the new name, uh, new ownership came in again, but not a very good result in the standing. So they failed to qualify for the playoffs and the team then folded with the league. Some of the teams, as we know, did go to the NFL, but not the Chicago Rockets.

Footnote to football history, uh, in the Chicago area. One of the neat things about the league is, uh, we have an Arch Ward and the Chicago Tribune behind the league that, even though the teams were not quite as talented talking about the Chicago Rockets, they did generate a great deal of publicity in Chicago. And sometimes at the expense of the Bears and the Cardinals, cause Arch Ward really, truly, uh, wanted his lead to succeed.
In fact, he was trying; he was the founder of the college football all-star game, and he tried to have the all-American football conference champion replace the NFL champion in the annual all-star game, which did not go over well with the NFL owners. So that, uh, that did not go, go forward at all. So that Darren is a brief history of the energetic, uh, the not enormously talented, but the fun Chicago Rockets who, while they lasted, we can at least say they fielded a football team in a professional league.

Well, they definitely had an interesting short history, but some great stories from there. So, I appreciate you sharing that with us. Now, you know, one thing that may come to mind is, you know, the poor foot, uh, football fans in, uh, Chicago, you know, thank God they had the bears, I'm not sure the bears, I think were pretty decent in that era, but you had to think about those, uh, mid-forties and late forties between the Rockets and, you know, the, the Pittsburgh, uh, Cardinal team that they put together.

There's some horrific teams that they had to watch, uh, in their home stadiums there in Chicago. You did. And the Bears and the Cardinals did rebound late in the forties.

The Bears won the 46 NFL championship, and the Cardinals won in 47 and lost in the title game in 48, of course. But it's interesting when you, when you talk about some of the attendance, the Rockets, uh, opening day attendance, we mentioned about 52,000. That very first game was probably their best.

And at the time, the Tribune claimed it was the biggest crowd ever to see a pro football game in Chicago. But as the days and weeks and years wound down, uh, was not unusual to see a little over 2000 paying customers. See the Rockets play at soldier field, which at the time sat about 120,000.

It must've looked pretty darn vacant. Yeah, geez, I'll say, oh, that is some great history, some great digging and research on that. Joe, we really appreciate you telling the stories of the Chicago Rockets.

Uh, maybe, uh, what do you have coming up on When Football was Football that we can look forward to? Well, coming up on football is football. I think our current show is about Billy Cross, perhaps the smallest man ever to play for the Cardinals. And in modern times, um, we have, uh, a couple of brothers coming up that even though no one knew the real names, they were quite influential and, uh, steering the Cardinals in the NFL to some subsistence in the early 1920s.

Um, so there's always something that we're looking forward to sharing. One of our favorite ones was when we got a lot of good responses talking about Doug Atkins. Uh, instead of the smallest man in football, he was one of the larger six foot eight and a prodigious drinker, as well as a prodigious force on the field.

So, uh, on the Sports History Network, these shows are always logs. So you can go back and take a look at them if you'd like. So, uh, always fun to work with yourself and with, uh, Arnie Chapman over the Sports History Network.

Yeah. I have to comment both that Doug Atkins and, uh, the smallest man. Uh, I forget the comment.

You said you see the mascot, I think is the way you, you titled that one. Those were both great episodes and I highly encourage listeners out there to check those out. So those, well, as all the rest of the podcast that Joe does and the rest of the guys do, but those are some, some classics that you did, Joe, we really appreciate the stories and those as well.

Oh, thank you so much, Darin. They're always fun to, uh, look back into some of these kind of foggy topics and then, uh, go ahead and, and share them with the listeners. Uh, Joe, again, I appreciate you spending time and sharing with us again and, uh, sharing that great Chicago football history that we love to hear.
So, uh, thanks again. Yeah. Thank you as well for having me again.
I'm hoping that you can stay awake through all of our conversation today. I know it was one side and I apologize, but certainly a blast. And, uh, always great to talk with you, Darin.
 

The picture in the banner above is from the Wikipedia Commons photo collection of the Public Domain of a cropped installment The Soyuz rocket with Expedition 33/34 crew members, Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy, Flight Engineer Kevin Ford of NASA, and Flight Engineer Evgeny Tarelkin of ROSCOSMOS onboard the TMA-06M spacecraft launches to the International Space Station on Tuesday, October 23, 2012, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin will be on a five-month mission aboard the International Space Station., taken by Bill Ingalls of NASA.

Special thanks to Pro Football-Reference.com, Stathead.com and Joe Ziemba.