LAMBEAU, Earl Louis ("Curly")

(b. 9 April 1898 in Green Bay, Wisconsin; d. 1 June 1965 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin), founder and quarterback of the Green Bay Packers and Pro Football Hall of Famer who pioneered the passing offense during the earliest years of the National Football League (NFL).

Lambeau was one of two children of Belgian immigrants Marcel Lambeau, a successful building contractor, and Mary Lambeau. Nicknamed "Curly" because of his curly hair, Lambeau developed a natural flair for assuming command of situations from his youth. He attended Green Bay's East High School, where in his fervor for the gridiron he honed his natural athletic talents and developed a passing game that was singularly impressive for those times.

After graduating from high school in 1917, Lambeau attended the University of Wisconsin, where his main interest lay in playing college football. Thus it was with little regret that he scrapped his college plans when the school suspended its football program at the onset of World War I. He returned to academia on a full football scholarship at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 1918, playing for the famed coach Knute Rockne. Although Lambeau was still a freshman, he earned one of only thirteen athletic letters awarded by the school that year for football.

In August 1919 Lambeau married Marguerite Van Kessel; the couple later had one child. Also that year he abandoned his scholarship and his education after a single season of play at Notre Dame in order to accept a $250-per-month position with the Indian Packing Company in his hometown of Green Bay. This decision to work for the packing company set the stage for Lambeau to found a football team that evolved into the Green Bay Packers.

In the autumn of 1919, Lambeau approached his boss Frank Peck with a suggestion that the packing company sponsor an employee football team that might be dubbed the Packers. When Peck agreed to provide $500 for uniforms and other expenses, Lambeau picked up the proverbial ball and hit the ground running. One particularly brutal game, dominated by a primitive running offense against the team from Ishpeming, Michigan, left three of the Packers with broken bones and led the enterprising coach-quarterback to devise his trademark passing game—the rushing game produced too many injuries. On the strength of this passing game during a time when rushing was the general rule, Lambeau captained, coached, and quarterbacked the Packers through ten straight wins that year, garnering support from the local citizenry and earning $16.75 for each player during the first season of operation. Though a very small amount—the first professional football player earned $500 for one game—that the players pocketed any money at all was surprising. The fledgling Packers were unable to charge admission to their home games because their stadium was not enclosed by a fence, and funding was limited as a result.

In 1921 Lambeau brought the Packers into the American Professional Football Association (APFA)—the immediate precursor to the NFL. Although the Packers finished in a respectable fourth place, the NFL (the name APFA changed to NFL during the 1921 season) dropped the Green Bay franchise after the season when it was discovered that Lambeau committed an infringement of the rules by hiring amateur college players using aliases. After winning reinstatement in 1922, Lambeau's Packers strung together consecutive winning seasons through 1928. With the recruitment of future Hall of Famers Mike Michalske, Cal Hubbard, and Johnny Blood as new team members in 1929, Lambeau steered the Packers through three championship seasons from 1929 through 1931. After hiring Hall of Fame receiver Don Hutson in 1935, Lambeau led the Packers to additional championships in 1936, 1939, and 1944.

In the midst of the Packers championship years, Lambeau retired from active play in 1930. He remained with the Packers as head coach until 1950, when an ongoing series of management disputes led to his discharge. When Lambeau left the Packers after thirty-one years, he had a record of twenty-eight winning seasons. He spent the 1951 and 1952 seasons as head coach of the Chicago Cardinals and coached the Washington Redskins through a single season in 1953, posting his resignation during the preseason of 1954. After resigning from the Redskins, he retired to a ranch in California, which he had purchased during his years with Green Bay. In 1963 he was named among the seventeen charter members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Lambeau's career accomplishments included 229 victories, 212 with Green Bay.

Lambeau had less success in marriage than he did in football. He and Marguerite divorced in 1934; he was married to his second wife, Sue, from 1935 until their divorce in 1940. Lambeau married Grace Nichols on 16 July 1945; they divorced in 1955. Lambeau was with a girlfriend, Mary Jane Sorgel, when he died after suffering a heart attack while mowing the lawn.

Lambeau held a reputation as a rigorous disciplinarian and was known as the "Bellicose Belgian," a reference to his parents' country of origin. He anticipated a level of intensity from his players that was rarely achieved by competing teams. Under Lambeau's coaching standard, Packers players received stiff fines for missing daily practice and for insubordination. Although his aggressive tactics back-fired on occasion, he was a knowledgeable coach, having played halfback and fullback with the Fighting Irish under Knute Rockne. Lambeau prudently drew from lessons learned from Rockne, adopting innovative attack formations and leading the Packers to six league championships. Likewise, Lambeau tempered his trademark pass offense with equally effective power plays, an approach that brought to bear the solid strategy of his coaching style. He was one of the earliest coaches to review game film with his players as a method of improving play, and he was perhaps the first coach to observe a game from the vantage of the press box in order to obtain a better perspective of the field.

A biography of Lambeau is in George Sullivan, Pro Football's All-Time Greats: The Immortals in Pro Football's Hall of Fame (1968). Arthur Daley, Pro Football's Hall of Fame: The Official Book, (1963), includes individual articles on the seventeen charter members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Further biographical information is in Jeff Savage, Top 10 Professional Football Coaches (1998). An obituary is in the New York Times (2 Jun. 1965).

Gloria Cooksey