Tonawanda Kardex

One of the early pro teams somewhat lost to time is the Tonawanda Kardex Lumbermen who were granted a franchise on August 27, 1921. Our guest in this episode grew up in the Buffalo area, where Tonawanda is found, and his name is Ken Crippen. Ken is an astute football historian with great knowledge of teams from Western New York. Ken is also the President of the Professional Football Researchers Association or PFRA that has members who have a common, bond the love of Pro Football History.

The franchise according to our guest expert Ken Crippen has their story start in the years of 1915 and 1916 where they first appear as the All-Tonawanda Luberjacks. In that era many towns put together these squads of the best local talent to form All-Star squads to compete against other nearby communities that were doing the same. The surrounding competition was teams from Buffalo, Niagara Falls among others. According to a Ken, Tonawanda was led by former Syracuse football star and Tonawanda High School athletics director Walter "Tam" Rose. They were popular because they were a pretty good team of players. Enter the fact that with the advent of the American Professional Football Association or APFA in 1920, semi-pro squads like Buffalo and Tonawanda were watching. A nearby original team in the APFA was the Rochester Jeffersons, led by Leo Lyons. The semi-pro Lumberjacks reportedly knocked of the Jeffs twice in independent games between the two squads in 1920, making the popularity of the All-Tonawandans grow and soon cries for them to join the Pro circuit came to fruition.  With seeming success of the American Professional Football Association in 1920, both Buffalo and nearby Tonawanda decided to sponsor and place teams in the newly formed Professional League. Tonawanda, a northern suburb of Buffalo, along with the help of their former foes Niagara Falls, entered their official franchise name as the Tonawanda-Niagara Kardex Lumbermen in 1921 as their neighbors, the Buffalo All-Americans took second place in the new League that season on 1921. Their partial sponsor was the American Kardex Company which staked their claim by making the index card of business organizational systems in the early twentieth century.

The Kardex go down in history as the shortest lived NFL franchise of all time as due to weather related financial issues they played less than a game an a half after joining the APFA. One full game in a loss to the Rochester Jeffersons and then only 17 munutes of an independent contest against a Syracuse All-Star squad as the game was called due to the field just being too sloppy and unsafe because a recent rain storm brandishing a lot of mud. Though the team did make an attempt to reassemble in 1922, they never did and the Buffalo All-Americans swallowed up the star players as they were the big APFA attraction of the area at that time. And let's not forget that Rochester was only a short two hours away as well. And thus the history of the Tonawanda franchise is a short one but one that helped the emerging professional football league on its course to future success.

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