Founding the Packers: Lambeau, Calhoun, and Five Hundred Dollars
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
On a summer afternoon in nineteen nineteen, a twenty-one-year-old former Notre Dame fullback named Earl Louis Lambeau walked into his boss's office at the Indian Packing Company and asked for five hundred dollars. He got it, on the condition that the team he wanted to form be named after the company that funded it. He agreed.
The Green Bay Packers were born. Lambeau's partner in the venture was George Whitney Calhoun, city editor of the Press-Gazette and great-grandson of Daniel Whitney, one of Green Bay's founding businessmen. Calhoun ran the publicity.
Lambeau ran the football. For the first two seasons they played against regional teams from Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, working out of a neighborhood park. They joined what would become the NFL in nineteen twenty-one.
The team nearly folded twice in its first decade. In nineteen twenty-three, facing bankruptcy, team officials sold shares to the public at five dollars apiece, raising five thousand dollars and establishing the community-ownership structure that defines the franchise today. The nineteen fifty crisis brought the second near-death: Lambeau had resigned after thirty years, and competition from the All-America Football Conference was bleeding the organization dry.
Another public stock sale stabilized it. Today the Green Bay Packers are the only non-profit, community-owned major professional sports franchise in the United States. Approximately five hundred thirty-nine thousand shareholders hold over five million shares.
No individual can own more than two hundred thousand shares. The stock pays no dividends. It cannot be traded.
It confers no season-ticket privileges. Shareholders receive voting rights, an invitation to the annual meeting, and an exclusive certificate. What they actually own is a piece of civic identity.
No other city in North America has this. A metropolis of a hundred thousand people, roughly the size of Peoria or Berkeley, owns outright one of the most storied franchises in the history of professional sport. The Indian Packing Company is long gone.
The Packers are not going anywhere.
