Most boys of my generation bonded with their dads over baseball.
My dad and I bonded over football.
That wouldn’t be at all unusual today; pro football is king. But in the mid-1960s, baseball was America’s pastime. Pro football was just a few years removed from the game that put it on the map and still a few years away from the game that changed everything, the Super Bowl.
We were hardly pioneers or visionaries, my dad and I. Coming of age in Milwaukee at that time, there was no baseball team. The Braves had left for Atlanta after the 1965 season before I was old enough to know what I would be missing. The only baseball in Milwaukee was the annual Poilcemen-Firemen game — one team in blue, the other in red. It was played at County Stadium, home of the Braves and later the Brewers. We were regular attendees of that game not because my father was baseball-starved, but because the game always coincided with a family event he didn’t want to attend.
And we had the Packers, the world champion Green Bay Packers of Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Willie Davis, Ray Nitschke, Willie Wood. I could go on. I still can recite the jersey numbers of every one of them, not just these Hall of Famers, but pretty much anyone on the roster.
I came aboard during the 1965 season, the season that culminated in a championship, the first of three in a row for the Packers and one of five they would win from 1959-1967. I missed that championship game in 1965, a 23-12 win over Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns in the rain and mud at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. I was 7. I went to see Mary Poppins with my sisters. I refuse to believe this was my idea.
It was the last game I missed for many years. That said, I missed just about every big play in the Packers’ glory years. I had become so deeply attached to the team and its fortunes that a loss would devastate me for most of a week. Fortunately, the Packers didn’t lose often. They lost only nine times in those three years.
And still ye of little faith, I couldn’t bear to stay in the room whenever the Packers faced a crucial play. I often left the house altogether, standing on the porch in the frozen tundra of a Wisconsin winter day, waiting to hear the cheer go up from my dad. It almost always did. I would run into the house to watch what I had missed, limited usually to one replay. Bart Starr’s winning sneak to win the Ice Bowl and send the Pack to the Super Bowl. Tom Brown’s endzone interception of Dandy Don Meredith, Dave Robinson (No. 89) draped all over him, to preserve the 34-27 win in Dallas that sent the Pack to Super Bowl 1, then known as the NFL-AFC Championship Game.
My dad ensured we would never miss a game. Back then, it was a 14-game regular season: 7 home, 7 away. The Packers would play three of their home games in Milwaukee, instead of Green Bay, an effort to grow the sport. The games in Milwaukee were blacked out, could not be seen on TV even if they were sold out, which they always were.
We couldn’t afford to go. My dad worked two jobs and my mom worked one to support a family of six. Somehow he put together enough money, disposable income — don’t ask, won’t tell — to buy a large TV antenna that he mounted on the roof of our home in suburban Milwaukee.
Every time the Packers played in Milwaukee — and it was always a Sunday at 1 p.m. because there was no Sunday Night Football or Monday Night Football or Thursday Night Football — my dad would be up on the roof to turn the TV antenna north toward Green Bay to pull in the game from there, where it was not blacked out.
We developed a system, a crew, a three-man crew and dad was the captain. We became a team, my brother, me and my dad, a team the way Lombardi built a team.
While my dad stood on the roof, slowly turning the TV antenna toward Green Bay, one of us boys would be inside to monitor the TV picture and relay instructions to the other boy standing outside and shouting up to the roof.
“A little more, a little more!” I would shout through the sliding glass door, and my brother would relay the message to my dad, shouting to him on the roof.
“A little more a little more.”
And then, invariably.
“No. No. Too much. Tell him to go back.”
The goal was simple: Get the best possible picture, everything else be damned. We could audio from the radio and as much as we loved the booming-baritone of Ray Scott and his simple delivery — Starr, Dowler, Touchdown. — Ted Moore on WTMJ probably was more widely known as the voice of the Packers. After all, he narrated the Packers Glory Years, the 33lp I have to this day. Somewhere.
I don’t recall there being a 7-second delay in the action. What I do recall is the commercials: A Pabst Blue Ribbon beer commercial on TV and a Miller beer commercial on the radio. Or a Ford vs. Chevy clash of audio and video.
My dad has been gone six years. The memories of those Sundays are more than a half-century old. But I still hear his laughter, I still see him on the roof turning that antenna, I still hear the cheers that would bring that boy in from the driveway, next to his dad forever.
