The Rams NFL Franchise history

In this episode of the the Sports Jersey Dispatch it is all Rams as Rick Loayza, of the popular Basketball History 101 Podcast,  talks Kurt Warner and Darin backfills with some Rams franchise history.

The Los Angeles Rams were originally known as the Cleveland Rams. This team was the first successfully prolonged pro football franchise in the city of Cleveland. Organized by Damon"Buzz" Wetzel and Ohio State buckeye star fullback in 1936 when they joined the American Football League. Their main financeer and franchise owner was Homer H. Marshman. They did alright placing second in the standing but financially tough times hit when the Boston franchise cancelled the championship game. The Rams on February 12, 1937 announced that they were leaving the failing AFL and jumped on board with the NFL. They were a struggling club there too never doing better than third place and in 1941 Marshman sold his rights to the franchise to Daniel Reeves and Fredrick Levy.  Fortunes changed and they improved and eventually in 1945 won the NFL Championship with Rookie QB Bob Waterfield. The AAFC was coming to town with a new team the Cleveland Browns, so The Rams decided to go to a town with little competition and moved to LA.

The Rams thrived in LA, Waterfield was soon given weapons like Tom Fears and Crazy Legs Hirsch and soon a second star QB arrived in Norm Van Brocklin. Later on in the 1960s and early 1970s it was the great defensive lines manned by Rosie Greer, Merlin Olsen and Fred Dryer. The LA Rams even played in Super Bowl XIII with a quarterback namd Vince Feragamo, but in the 1990s it seemed that fandom in the City of Angels had other attractions to go to other than pro football so the franchise packed up and moved to St. Louis. In Mssouri they assembled one of the top offenses in football history, the Greatest Show on Turf with Kurt Warner slinging the ball to Marshall Faulk, Ricky Proehl, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, as well as Az-Zahir Hakim. And they won the clubs first Super Bowl. Super Bowl LVI had all the magic again when they coupled their great defensive players of Aaron Donald  and company with new quarterback Matthew Stafford.

The first use of a logo on an NFL helmet is credited to by Fred Gehrke, a running back for the Los Angeles Rams on June 18, 1948. According to a PFRA article written by Peter Vischansky for the organization's Coffin Corner Publication in 2000, Gehrke sat down in his garage during the summer of 1948 to paint a yellow laquer on his team’s leather helmets. He did not realize at the time that he was creating a muti-million dollar business and placing his name football immortality as well. Peter V. goes on to write that it was the blandness of helmets and uniforms of that time didn't sit well with the art major Gehrke. He toyed with the idea of painting a helmet. Later after expressing this and at the urging of his coach, Bob Snyder, Fred made a pen and ink drawing to illustrate what the design would look like. Coach Snyder suggested the halfback paint a helmet with the ram horns on it that he could present to owner Dan Reeves. Using his skills as a technical illustrator, Fred painted two ram horns on an old college helmet. An intrigued Reeves had reservations about the legality of having an adornment on a helmet and said he would have to check with NFL. According to Gehrke, the answer Reeves got back from NFL was "You're the owner; do what you want!" That did it! Dan Reeves commissioned Fred Gehrke to paint 75 helmets at $1.00 per helmet. The project took Gehrke all the summer of 1948 and history that stuck was made!

The picture in the banner above is from the Wikipedia Commons photo collection of the Public Domain of the 2000 version of a Script logo for the NFL franchise St. Louis Rams contributed by an unknown.

Special thanks to Pro-Football-Reference.com, Stathead.com and Rick Loayza of the Basketball History 101 Podcast