For 100 years, 'essential businesses' helped Green Bay keep the Packers alive and in Green Bay

GREEN BAY - When panic-driven consumers stripped shelves of toilet paper because of the coronavirus pandemic, the essentialness of Green Bay's industries was again confirmed.

Georgia-Pacific and Procter & Gamble continue to turn out all the toilet paper they can, Schneider trucks keep goods flowing, and Schreiber and other processors keep food abundant. 

For more than 100 years, Green Bay businesses provided indispensable products and services that saw the region through financial downturns and other crises that more severely impacted the rest of the nation.

As a side benefit, they made it possible for Green Bay to hold onto the Packers when other similar-sized cities were losing their football teams.

Paper making, cheese making and distribution, railroads, and now trucking, formed the bedrock of the local economy. They were essential when the Packers were founded, essential during the Great Depression of the 1930s, during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, and, now during the coronavirus crisis. 

"They just made the right things in Green Bay," said Packers historian Cliff Christl. "People here were better off than in most cities in the United States."

The right things in the early 1920s, when the Packers were just getting started, and the 1930s, when as much as 25% of the population was out of work, were tissue/toilet paper, cheese and railroads.

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"Green Bay has always been a transportation point, with the railroads being here and the port," said Mary Jane Herber, local history and genealogy librarian at the Brown County Library. "If you look at the 1930 census, the railroads were employing more people than the paper mills were."

Green Bay was a meeting point for three rail lines and, as such, it was also a repair and maintenance hub.

Distribution as much as manufacturing was the basis of the cheese industry. Milk from southern Wisconsin went to Milwaukee and Chicago for drinking. Milk from Sheboygan north and west was made into cheese, which could sit on shelves for years, a big benefit in the years before consistent in-home refrigeration.

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Because of the port, Green Bay already was a large provider of cold storage for food, which also made it ideal for the cheese business. So much so that until the 1990s, Green Bay was home to the National Cheese Exchange, which set the prices nationwide for milk. 

The city was the home to Northern Paper Mills, now Georgia-Pacific Corp., which is credited with marketing the first splinter-free toilet paper in 1935, and to Hoberg Paper Co., now Procter & Gamble, the inventor of Charmin. 

In other ways, Green Bay was a typical small city.

Former Press-Gazette editor Tony Walter recounted in his book, "Baptism by Football," that Green Bay in 1922 had 24 barbershops and 53 dressmakers. There were 12 auto dealers — cars came to Green Bay by boat — and five blacksmith shops. Also, 16 cigar makers, seven junk dealers, 28 music teachers and nine billiard halls. And 27 hotels and boarding houses, four telegraph companies, six tinsmiths and five undertakers.

Without the Packers, Green Bay would have become Peoria. Instinctively, even if they couldn't see that far into the future, Green Bay's business leaders understood the Packers could give the city something nothing else could. 

"Another reason the Packers did well was because (Press-Gazette publisher) Andrew Turnbull was out there and he knew that would bring value to the community," Herber said.

Businessmen stepped forward time and again to bolster and rescue the team because they were prescient enough to realize the Packers gave out-of-the-mainstream Green Bay a panache it could not get any other way. And that's as true today as it was when the Packers were founded in 1919.

"I’m from Topeka," Herber said. "It’s  about the same size as Green Bay. You can bet any businessman in Topeka would like to say 'Hi, I’m from Topeka, home of the Topeka Packers.'"

Stable economy benefits Packers

A stable economy through the years offered multiple benefits to the Packers. Businesses could afford to support the team, fans could afford to attend games, and players, who needed jobs in the offseason, could find them.

A stock sale in 1935 netted about $12,000 from 100 buyers, mostly large companies.

"The fact that those businesses and corporations survived through the first four or five years of the depression allowed them to pitch in. That’s the closest the Packers came to folding. The fact there was a relatively health economy had a bearing on keeping the team alive," Christl said.

Before the NFL created the annual draft, teams recruited players. Green Bay dominated the league for many years, another key to its survival, because Curly Lambeau could get good players. 

"Because the economy was relatively strong, there was employment available here," Christl said. "Football wasn’t a year-round occupation. Some of these companies were able to offer jobs to the Johnny Bloods and others like that. That benefited Lambeau’s recruiting."

You also can't discount timing or on-field success, Christl said. 

Many of Lambeau's players were graduates of Green Bay East and West high schools who had returned after fighting in World War I. After the war ended in November 1918, they found jobs at home, even as the nation went into recession for two years. They also wanted to play and be entertained, and the founding of the Packers in 1919 provided an outlet for those energies.

"Would it still have happened if not for the fact these guys were coming from overseas and looking for something to do?" Christl said. "Curly Lambeau didn’t fight in the war. He might have (started the team) anyway. It wouldn’t have worked if he had done that a year earlier."

The Packers had winning records every year in the 1920s, and in 1929, the opening year of the Great Depression, the team won the first of a leading 13 NFL championships. 

The city was popular to players and opposing teams from 1920-1933, the prohibition years, because for all intents and purposes, prohibition didn't exist in Green Bay.

"(Former Press-Gazette business reporter) Tom Murphy said one reason the mob never got a foothold in Green Bay was because they were never bringing any product into town that people didn’t already have access to," Herber said. 

A house on fire in Green Bay during prohibition was found to have 15,000 gallons of sour mash stored there. Mash was used for making whisky.

"And nobody in the neighborhood knew anything about it," Herber said. 

Packers thrived during Depression

The excesses of the Roaring 20s came to a screeching halt in October 1929 when the stock market crash launched the decade-long Great Depression. Banks failed, businesses followed, and at its height, 25 percent of the population was out of work.

By 1934, the other smaller cities had all lost their teams and it could have been a dangerous time for the Packers. The team went into bankruptcy after losing a lawsuit to an injured fan in 1931, but a friendly court-appointed receiver, and businessman Lee Johannes, a grocery wholesaler, stepping up to pay the judgement, presaged the formation of The Green Bay Packers Inc. in 1935, the entity that exists today. 

"That certainly could have doomed the Packers," Christl said of the depression and the lawsuit. "By then, most of the small-town teams were out of the league. The Packers actually flourished then."

The Packers became the first NFL team to win three consecutive championships, from 1929-1931, and won again in 1936 and 1939, more than any team during that decade.

Another factor, Herber said, is that Green Bay always had a bit of a chip on its shoulder, seeing itself as David against many Goliaths, on the football field and off. The town was going to support its Packers, perhaps more than any of those cities that lost their teams.

For much of the 20th century, Green Bay's businesses were locally owned, and the paper mills, especially, built a strong middle class. That meant money was available to invest.

At the turn of the century, many residents in the city directory were identified as day laborers, a less than stable sort of existence.

"When the railroads and the paper mills got established, that was solid employment," Herber said. "I say to people, what’s on Quincy Street now to the (Fox) river, that’s what built the middle class in Green Bay."

That area includes the Georgia-Pacific and Procter & Gamble mills and Green Bay Packaging. 

John Brogan, a Green Bay banker and entrepreneur, summed up the role of the business community in supporting the construction of a new City Stadium in 1956 and 1957, in 2010 on a PBS Wisconsin episode of Wisconsin Hometown Stories about Green Bay. That stadium is now known as Lambeau Field.

"Instinctively, we all know that if anything is going to get done (in Green Bay), it ain't going to be done by anybody but us. If we don't build a new Packers stadium (in 1956-57), the league would take the franchise away," Brogan said.

"If we don't put the money ourselves into funding the food processing companies, the paper mills, it isn't going to get done, because we got to do it. It's a sense that this is where God dropped his tools. Beyond here is nowhere."

That support was again key in 2000, when Brown County residents approved a 0.5% sales tax for the renovation of Lambeau Field, ensuring the team would remain in Green Bay for the foreseeable future. 

Voters understood, as earlier generations did, that Green Bay is more with the Packers than without and were willing, and able, to pay to keep the team. 

As was true 100 years ago, and even in the midst of the worst pandemic since the outbreak of Spanish Flu from 1918 to 1920, Green Bay workers and the community continue to benefit from the presence of major employers that provide essential products and services, including toilet paper, food and transportation.

According to personal financial website WalletHub, Wisconsin had the sixth-lowest increase in unemployment in the country through March 23. 

And the Packers continue to thrive.

Contact Richard Ryman at (920) 431-8342 or rryman@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @RichRymanPG, on Instagram at  @rrymanPG or  on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RichardRymanPG/