-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Interference Dan E. Moldea©1989 William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, NY ISBN 0-688-08303-X ---[6]-- 7 Boss Colt THE CLEVELAND BROWNS, BALTIMORE Colts, and San Francisco 49ers were the only three teams from the defunct AAFC that were merged into the NFL in 1950.[1] The deal was cinched by Mickey McBride and his two close NFL friends Tim Mara and Art Rooney, who had been convinced by Bert Bell to warmly welcome the AAFC teams into the NFL—so as to avoid potential antitrust problems with the federal government. However, the Colts folded at the end of the 1950 season after team owner Abraham Watner had lost $760,000. Part of the void left by the Colts was filled by the new Dallas Texans. But the owners of the Dallas team found themselves in even worse financial shape than Watner had been and gave up their franchise during the 1952 midseason. The Texans then went into a receivership controlled by Bert Bell and the NFL. The final five games of the Dallas Texans season were played in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The city of Baltimore desperately wanted the return of its NFL franchise. And commissioner Bell was happy to accommodate the Baltimore sports fans. But his major concern was finding an owner who had enough money to carry the team beyond a single season. Carroll Rosenbloom had all the looks of a winner. Born on March 5, 1907, in Baltimore, he was handsome, charming, witty, and frequently generous. But friends and associates have also said that his generosity sometimes carried a price, and that he could be thin-skinned, condescending, and mean-spirited. Because his ego was as big as his financial portfolio, he seemed to enjoy keeping people guessing. Totally unpredictable, he was the kind of guy who could slap a newspaper boy around for throwing the morning edition in the bushes-and then the next day offer to put the same boy through college. One NFL team owner said, "Carroll always gave you the feeling that if you crossed him, he was capable of slitting your throat, then donating your blood to the Red Cross blood drive."[2] Of course, those who crossed him were rarely forgiven. If he was in the midst of a war with someone and discovered that he had been wrong, he would rarely apologize. Instead, he would simply send flowers with a funny note attached and pretend that nothing had happened. His tone was slow and deliberate, as he switched between his Ivy League speech and racier, "mothahfuckah" street talk. He was intensely competitive and also a heavy gambler. A ruthless businessman, he was the son of Solomon Rosenbloom, a manufacturer of denim work clothes. Carroll Rosenbloom's older brother Ben Rosenbloom told me, "When our father came over from Russia, he couldn't speak English. In about 1888, he became a partner in the Standard Overall Company in Baltimore. But, as his sons got older, he decided to start a business that they could participate in. He sold out to his partners in Standard and then founded S. Rosenbloom, Inc. We manufactured all kinds of denims and sportswear. And everything just evolved from there. "When another overall company, [which eventually became] Blue Ridge Manufacturers of Roanoke, Virginia, went up for sale, we bought it [in or about 1900]. Soon, we had plants all over the country. We sold our products to all the big chains, like Sears and Montgomery Ward." The athletic, five-feet-eleven Carroll Rosenbloom grew up on Hollins Street—near the home of writer H. L. Mencken—before the family moved into a large home on Auchentroly Terrace, across from Druid Hill Park in northeastern Baltimore. A psychology major at Baltimore City College, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. There were nine children in the family, six boys and three girls.[3] All the boys were raised to work in the family business; the girls were brought up to be good wives. Carroll went to work for his father when he graduated from college. But Carroll wanted more responsibility and soon helped expand the family business, creating new companies and opening new plants. During the mid-1930s, he became the head of Blue Ridge and its subsidiaries-which, at the time, had eighty employees and included the Imperial Shirt Company. "Carroll's father was a genius," said another member of the Rosenbloom family. "Although his oldest son, Isadore, was the obvious heir, and he ran another Rosenbloom company, Marlboro Shirts, while Solomon was alive, really none of the sons were very ambitious, with the exception of Carroll. He was special. He was dynamic but totally self-centered and gruff. He wasn't a very classy man, and despite his education, he didn't appear to be well educated." When Solomon died in 1942, Carroll Rosenbloom assumed control of all the family's business interests, as directed by the elder Rosenbloom's will. "Upon my father's death, Carroll consolidated all our family's holdings under Blue Ridge," says Ben Rosenbloom. "Carroll did a hell of a job for all of us. He was the man who made it tick. He was a terrific guy." Solomon had named Carroll as the executor of his estate, passing over all the other, older sons. A member of the Rosenbloom family recalls, "Although there was a lot of trouble over the will, all the children received enough money to retire on after Blue Ridge and Marlboro were later sold. No one ever had to work again. Carroll was really the only member of the family to remain active and in business for himself." Ben Rosenbloom explains, "I had a sister Rose and she objected to some of the things in the will. We went to court, and it was settled. She basically challenged Carroll's authority over the estate. But everyone else was on Carroll's side because we knew he was doing the right thing." According to a close friend of the family, Rose had contended that her brother had handled the corporate affairs in a manner to -enhance the family's wealth at her expense. She charged that she lost $700,000 as a result of Rosenbloom's actions. Rosenbloom claimed that he had increased the worth of the family's businesses tenfold. He ended up settling with his sister for $500,000. As part of the final agreement, the paperwork in the case was sealed by court order. After taking over the family business, Carroll quickly became known as the "Overalls King of America" during World War II. Doing work for the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, he built upon the family fortune by cornering the market on the blue-green battle fatigues and parachutes for American soldiers. He had also expanded the business to include the manufacturing of industrial garments, leather jackets, children's play clothes, and various adult sportswear, which included matched sets of shirts and slacks. Two years after the war ended, Rosenbloom bought the twenty-one-year-old, eight-hundred-employee Blue Buckle Overall Company of Lynchburg, Virginia, and Marshall, Texas, for $2 million. The takeover of Blue Buckle, one of the largest producers of work clothes and sportswear in the United States, had the effect of merging three of the top brand names in overalls—Blue Ridge, Blue Buckle, and Blue Jay—under the control of Rosenbloom and his management team. The entire company employed nearly seven thousand workers.[4] Carroll Rosenbloom, a former second-string halfback at the University of Pennsylvania, had caught the eye of his old college football backfield coach, Bert Bell. Witnessing the collapse of the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Texans, Bell approached Rosenbloom. Rosenbloom told Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Maher, "Bert had a home near me in Margate, New Jersey. He kept telling me I ought to come into the league and I kept saying I didn't have time. Finally, to get away from him, I took the family to my home in Palm Beach and shut off the phones. But one of my brothers flew down and said, 'Carroll, you're really in a hell of [a] jam. Bert Bell has told the press the only way Baltimore can keep the franchise is if you will come in as owner.' So Bert had me on the spot. If I didn't take the team, they'd 'hang the Jew bastard.' But I got the franchise for nothing, really." Bell offered Rosenbloom membership in the National Football League, which was "a very private club," and the Colts franchise at a bargain price: $13,000 as a down payment for majority ownership. Rosenbloom bought his 52 percent interest in the Colts on January 23, 1953.[5] His four partners each laid down $3,000 as their down payments.[6] If that wasn't attractive enough, Bell even offered to guarantee his investment if the Colts continued to lose money. "Bert Bell was very anxious to get someone to take over the Colts," Ben Rosenbloom explains. "Carroll was doing him a favor by taking it over. But it turned out to be a very good favor." In 1953, his first season as the Colts' owner, the team sold 15,755 season tickets, worth nearly $300,000, to Baltimore fans. Rosenbloom had banked $1.5 million at the time of his purchase and vowed that when this money had been spent then he'd pull out of the NFL. But the Colts were so successful that Rosenbloom never had to touch his reserve funds. At first, Rosenbloom was a passive owner until he saw one particular play. The Colts' great halfback George Taliaferro told me, "We were playing the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay in 1953 and the game, for all intents and purposes, had been decided. We were getting beaten badly. When Green Bay kicked off to us after one of their many touchdowns, I took the ball and just took off. I went down the sideline and took a big hit. Rosenbloom later asked me why I just didn't go out of bounds. And I told him, 'Because you can't make a touchdown if you go out of bounds.' To me, it was just playing football. "Rosenbloom said that it was that kind of determination that helped him make his decision. If I wanted to play that badly and wanted to go that extra yard, he wanted to put together an organization that would challenge the champions in the National Football League." After witnessing Taliaferro's unbridled devotion to the game of football, Rosenbloom decided to become more active in team matters, and he promised the city of Baltimore a championship team within five years. Before long, season ticket holders numbered over fifty thousand. pps. 76-80 --[notes]— CHAPTER 7 1. Briefly, after the AAFC-NFL merger, which was announced on December 11, 1949, the joint league was called The National-American League. That lasted just over two months. 2. Gene Klein and David Fisher, First Down and a Billion: The Funny Business of Pro Football (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1987), pp. 75-76. 3. The boys in the Rosenbloom family were Isadore, Hess, Ben, Leon, Harry, and Carroll; the girls were Rose, Ethel, and Mildred. 4. In May 1949, Blue Ridge moved its executive offices to Lynchburg, Virginia, about thirty-five miles east of Roanoke. At the time, Blue Ridge and its subsidiaries had twenty-four manufacturing plants in twelve states, including Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. In 1952, Blue Ridge purchased another large overalls firm, Big Jack Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Virginia, for $3 million. The purchase of Big Jack increased Blue Ridge's annual revenues to nearly $70 million. Blue Ridge continued to do work for the United States government and received a huge contract from the Armed Services Textile and Procurement Agency the following year. The order was for 1,424,120 pairs of U.S. Navy dungarees. 5. Rosenbloom was named as the president of the Colts on February 4, 1957. 6. Rosenbloom's partners were former Colts directors, local businessmen, and racehorse owners, including Zanvyl Krieger, Bill Hilgenberg, Tom Mullan, and R. Bruce Livie. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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