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It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space.
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That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bo and Yang. This is Bo and Yang from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bo and Yang.
You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try QP Mayo. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store.
And this mayo is different. Mm-hmm. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Cupie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery.
Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Chefs use it, restaurants use it, people who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand.
Cupie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Coming to you from the city where the west begins, Fort Worth, Texas. If football's an American religion, Vince Lombardi, the head coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1959 to 1967, is the patron saint. and Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin is football's holiest shrine.
Under Lombardy, the Green Bay Packers, the smallest city with a pro franchise, was renamed Tidletown, USA. This is the story of the NFL team that shouldn't exist. Let's take a listen. The 60s will be described. It's a decade in which football became the number one sport in America.
in which the Packers were the one number one team. And Bart Starr was proudly the number one packer. This is Green Bay. It sits at the southern end of Green Bay. and it's located in northeastern Wisconsin.
With a population of just over 100,000 residents, Green Bay is a city that shouldn't be known to many people outside of Wisconsin. But that's not the case, thanks to the Packers. Three seconds to go, the Packers trailing by one. Policeman made kick to the uprights and it is A three-way pick. And Lambo leaped to the stand.
An absolute pandemonium win. As Brandon McComander hints at the south end zone stands before two in his first Lambo leap, joined by some of his teammates. What an emotional victory. Touchdown, John. Hit a Lambo leap.
To the south end zone stairs. To the north end zone stairs. Hit a Lambo leap. But Yager! It's been a tradition repeated hundreds of times.
A celebration that perfectly embodies the shared triumph between team. and fans. Where every victory the Packers have won. feels like their victory. Leroy probably started the greatest thing that's ever been started was jumping in the stands with the fans.
And then Robert Brooks started doing it. And we just built a connection between ourselves and the fans.
So I proceeded to jump all in the stands.
Now you see, the rest is just history.
Now there's a special bum between the players and fans, you see. From now on, I'm gonna show him much love. Every time I score, I'm going to give me a hug. From a Packer fan, the best in the land. I'ma never stop jumping in the stands, my man.
Make you. This franchise, within the world's wealthiest sports league, has managed to put its city on the map. To put it in perspective, Green Bay has a smaller population than most cities with minor league baseball teams. There are more people on the waiting list for Packers season tickets than there are residents in Green Bay. And yet, somehow, this tiny paper mill city is home to one of the NFL's most powerful franchises.
On paper, that shouldn't be possible. Professional football abandoned small towns a century ago to chase bigger markets.
So why didn't the Packers follow the same path? The Packers' existence goes well beyond being an NFL outlier. They're a glitch in the league's evolution. A franchise that shouldn't exist, in a place that shouldn't work, surviving because of a mix of decisions that no modern team could ever replicate today. This is the story of how the smallest city in American sports held on to one of the world's most valuable franchises.
You can't tell the story of the Packers without looking at the league they were born into. Before the Packers ever existed, professional football belonged almost entirely to the industrial Midwest. Cities from New York to Wisconsin were the heart of early pro football, not because they were big, but because they were built for it. These were factory towns packed with physically demanding jobs, the kind of work that produced the sport's true generation of players. As labor conditions slowly improved in the early 1900s, workers began having Saturday afternoons freak.
That created something new. People suddenly had more free time and disposable income, which resulted in a hungry audience looking for entertainment. And naturally, gridiron football became the perfect outlet. Local businessmen recognized that a strong football team could get their towns together all while advertising their companies, so they began funding these teams directly. The Decatur Stalys were literally created by a food manufacturing company, and the Columbus Panhandles were railroad workers playing under their employer's banner.
This was the world the NFL was born into. a league built by small industrial cities within the Rust Belt long before major markets took over.
So under this context, Green Bay's presence didn't seem unusual at all. It was just another industrial town that had a packing company representing it on the field. This is how the name Packers came to be. The franchise joined the NFL in 1921 as its smallest market, but it didn't take long before towns in similar positions started vanishing from the league. Right.
The early NFL was chaotic to say the least. The same blue-colored towns that formed the backbone of the league were soon overwhelmed by financial pressure. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the NFL steadily shifted its attention toward larger cities, realizing that tiny industrial markets couldn't support the growing demands of professional football. and the numbers make the picture clear. More than 40 teams surfaced across the Rust Belt during the 1920s, but most were gone within just a few years.
There were several reasons for this collapse. Small towns struggled to draw enough fans to break even, relying almost entirely on ticket sales and local sponsorships. Unlike baseball, the country's favorite sport, The league had no major broadcast money and thus no national profile. Everything depended on local turnout. And to add fuel to the fire, the Great Depression of the 1930s absolutely destroyed disposable income, which bankrupted already fragile clubs.
This forced the NFL to step in and intentionally steer the league toward larger urban markets. Nothing symbolizes this shift more than when the Decatur Stalys moved to Chicago and became what we all know today as the Bears. That move foreshadowed the NFL's new direction, so you would think that the Packers were destined for the very same fate, at best. In almost any scenario, Green Bay should have folded or moved elsewhere. After all, they were small, broke, and incredibly isolated, with a major city located just a couple hours south.
But they approach their situation from a new angle. This is how they survived. Within the first few years of the league's existence, Green Bay was heading toward the conclusion every other small-town NFL team would eventually face. But instead of folding or selling to a private owner to relocate, local leaders organized something unheard of at the time. A community stock sale.
Ordinary residents could buy small shares, not for profit, but to primarily keep the team alive. And not only did this strategy work, but it was exercised on more than one occasion. The Packers needed to lean on this process again in 1935 after the fallout of the Great Depression, and once more in 1950. But by then, the team had six championships to their name. Without those titles, the community may have been more reluctant to step in.
but with all of that winning, the Packers were seen as a team with protective. and this wouldn't be the last time a Packers dynasty arrived at the perfect moment. When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Send us your stories, small or large, to our email, oas at ouramericanstories.com.
That's OAS at ouramericanstories.com. We'd love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter.
Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bo and Yang. This is Bo and Yang from Los Culturistos with Matt Rogers and Bo and Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, wait.
That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Cupie Mayo. It's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it in the grocery store before. And if you've ever just walked past it, some people would say that's a huge mistake. Because this mayo is different.
Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Cupie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, and almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers.
Some fans even swear by dipping pizza crust in it. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. Chefs use it, restaurants use it. People who really care about flavor use it. Never tried it?
Grab the bottle with the red cap next time you're at the store. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Cupie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. You've watched racing.
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And we continue with our American stories and the story of the Green Bay Packers. And the first two voices you'll be hearing here are those of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Packers, and his daughter Susan. Let's take a listen. I had felt that I had uh I had done what I could for the Giants really and I I just felt that it was time for me to move really and I made it a point to try to move. I wasn't going to be satisfied as an assistant coach, and I wanted to be a head coach of a professional football team, and Green Bay gave me the chance to be one.
All right, the big announcement. We are moving to Green Bay, Wisconsin. I'm gonna Where's Wisconsin?
So the next day, my father comes home with a map. He said, this is the state of Wisconsin. Then he's walking. Playing bed. Then I get another map.
Um and I'm going, well I'm I'm not moving any place that's not on the map. And he said When I am done, it will be on that map. And you'll know exactly, Susan. where you live. The 1960s saw Green Bay climb even higher.
Winning five championships, including two Super Bowls, it was perhaps the most dominant period of any team in NFL history.
However, even at the height of the Packers' success, a new threat was beginning to form. and it came from down the road in Milwaukee. If the Packers were ever going to move anywhere, it would have been to Milwaukee. The city was bigger, wealthier, and far more recognizable on the national stage. For most NFL franchises run by profit-driven owners, a move like that would have been absolutely inevitable.
But as we know, the Packers weren't a normal franchise, and instead, they turned Milwaukee into a strategic battleground. For context, the Packers had included Milwaukee as part of their exclusive home territory ever since the 1930s. This involved the team playing several home games there every single season. By keeping a presence here early on in their history, the franchise essentially turned Milwaukee into Packers' country decades before it would have happened organically. But it nearly backfired on the franchise, because in the 1950s, Milwaukee was starting to look like the better home.
Green Bay's Old City Stadium was small. It seated barely 25,000 people, and it was so outdated that players dressed in the nearby high school's locker rooms. As other NFL teams moved into bigger, modern facilities, league officials began questioning whether Green Bay could realistically compete as a primary host city.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee County Stadium had just opened with nearly double the capacity, far better amenities, and a clear intention to attract major professional teams. From a business standpoint, Milwaukee looked far more viable and everyone in the league could see it. That's when pressures started to build it. The NFL warned that if Green Bay didn't build a new stadium, the team might need to shift permanently to Milwaukee. For a moment, the franchise's future genuinely hung in the balance.
But Green Bay would respond by building a new city stadium, which would later be renamed to Lambeau Field. The new venue preserved Green Bay as the team's primary home, even while they continued playing part of the schedule in Milwaukee. That secondary market was vital for the Packers, especially without a deep-pocketed owner behind them. But even going beyond the franchise, Milwaukee had become too big and too valuable to ignore. By the 1960s, the American Football League had arrived.
It quickly became a rival league to the NFL, and it was determined to plant teams in major cities across the country. One of these targeted cities was Milwaukee. It was one of the largest markets in the country, it had no full-time pro football team, and there was a brand new desirable stadium just sitting there. But the Packers had one advantage the AFL couldn't get around. They held an exclusive lease at Milwaukee County Stadium.
So Vince Lombardi, the Packers coach in GM at the time, enforced this immediately, then extended the deal to keep the Packers games locked into the city well into the 1970s. That move shut the AFL out entirely. Here was Lombardi, you know, this New York City kid born and bred, finally goes out to Little Green Bay. This godforsaken place that he'd only seen once before in his life. And he made it there and became sort of a transcendent figure.
Only a few years later, the AFL-NFL merger erased any chance of Milwaukee getting its own competing franchise. From that moment forward, Milwaukee was officially sealed inside the Packer's orbit. It had the population and economic base for an NFL team, but not the political access or territorial rights to make it possible. Let that sink in. A small city of 100,000 people was influencing decisions between Milwaukee officials and multi-million dollar leagues.
And the only way this was even possible was all because of their ownership structure. If you're a shareholder of the Packers, you don't earn any profit and you have minimal voting rights. Your shares can't even be sold publicly. No individual can own a significant portion of the franchise, which prevents anyone from steering the team toward drastic moves like relocation. The Packers operate essentially as a community-run non-profit.
The setup removes the financial incentives that often push franchises to pursue new stadium deals or flirt with other markets. As we've seen in the NFL in recent decades, several cities have learned the hard way when relocation power rests with a single owner. Those teens moved because one person decided they could make more money elsewhere. Yeah. Green Bay, however, is the exception.
With no owner to uproot the franchise and no mechanism that allows for a sale, the Packers are anchored in Wisconsin in a way no modern NFL team can match. And that's never going to change. Fast forward to today, the Packers no longer resemble the small-town underdog fighting for survival. Modern NFL economics have simply flipped the script. Revenue sharing, the foundation of the league's financial model, distributes national television money evenly across all 32 teams, which means market size matters far less than it once did.
In an era where the bulk of revenue comes from national TV deals rather than bums and seats, Green Bay suddenly stands on relatively equal footing with New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The Packers are special to these people. You know, if they had a 150,000-seat stadium, you couldn't get a ticket here. There'll be 25,000 people outside the stadium. Just listening.
They just want to be around it. They don't have a ticket to get in. and it's an unusual spot, it always has been. Today, the Packers' waiting list for season tickets is now one of the longest in world sports. It stretches decades.
Their brand is international, their games draw huge ratings, and their value sits among the highest in the world. This franchise is far more than a success story. The Packers are the last living link to the NFL's origins. They survived the chaos of the early NFL. They avoided the collapse of small-town teams, the rise of big cities, financial crises, and a rival league trying to carve out their territory.
A franchise that should have vanished instead became one of the sport's defining institutions. And that's what makes them so appealing to fans outside of Wisconsin. Their historical significance and classic stadium is the allure to those attracted by tradition. Their community-owned nature provides a breath of fresh air to those turned off by the corporate nature of sports leagues across the world. Under almost any other circumstances, the Packers wouldn't be here.
A publicly owned team could only have taken root in an era as unsettled as the 1920s and 30s. But what truly carried Green Bay through though, was the way its success arrived exactly when it was needed. Each dynasty run arrived from the franchise could have slipped away. Those victories helped unify Green Bay along with the rest of Wisconsin behind the Packers. The team gave its fans something worth fighting for, and in return, the fans gave the team a future.
Anybody who has the idea that just to play or just to take part, and that's all that's necessary, I think he's in the wrong business. I think he's in. The wrong Country. Let me put it that way. I think one of the things that made America great is to try to be the best in everything that they do.
And the best again is signified by winning. Their presence today is a reminder that professional football wasn't built in boardrooms. It was born in factory towns, on dusty fields, and in places where the sport mattered long before it paid well. Green Bay still carries that legacy. They represent a blue-color past in an ownership model that modern NFL could never recreate.
In a league driven by corporate ambition and constant relocation, the Packers stand alone yet continue to thrive because its people never allowed any other outcome. Ah! And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And we'd like to thank Mapify for this story. That's M-A-A-P-I-F-Y.
You can find more stories about sports and geography on Mapify's YouTube channel. And you can find NFL stadium map posters and Major League Baseball Ballpark t-shirts at mapify.com. Again, that's M-A-A-P-I-F-Y. And what a story you heard about this unlikely city. That well rose to the ranks of one of the great national and international brands in all of sports, and did so because the community decided during the Great Depression to do something that had never been done before or since, and that is, they all bought shares, but yet the type of shares in which, in essence, nothing could change.
In short, They were a community-run non-profit, the story of the Green Bay Packers. here on Our American Stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q.
Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the US and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Yeah.
Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Uh You've watched racing.
Now get behind the wheel. At Kaizen Autosport Racing School at VIR, professional race drivers teach you how to drive faster, safer, and with more confidence on one of America's legendary racetracks. Never driven on track? We'll get you started. Already experienced, we'll take you to the next level.
Ready to race? Earn your competition license and learn real wheel-to-wheel racecraft. Stop watching, start driving. Go to racevir.com. That's racevir.com.
Upgrade to elite checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 3.5% APY. Plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with early pay. Don't settle. Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values. Visit America's ChristianCU.com forward slash iHeart.
Minimum balance of one cent required to earn advertised APY. Early pay not guaranteed. APY equals annual percentage yield. Membership eligibility required. And CUA insured.
Working forest professionals in the U.S. plant more than they harvest, while also caring for water, wildlife, and more. It's how we grow a sustainable future. Learn more at WorkingForestsInitiative.com. Uh
