HOWARD MAPLE

Howard Maple was one of the most amazing athletes ever to come out of Peoria. A football, basketball and baseball standout at Central High School, he went on to become a brilliant quarterback at Oregon State in the late 1920s and later played in both the National Football League and in major league baseball with the Washington Senators.

Playing at 5-foot-7 and 175 pounds, Maple was such a high school football star he was named captain of the All-State team.

At Oregon State he proved a West Coast sensation. In his junior season in 1926 he was selected to the second team on four West Coast teams and was an honorable mention all-American on teams picked by famed coaches Knute Rockne and Pop Warner.

The next season he was picked on six all-American second teams and was named to six West Coast first teams. He was a fine runner, an outstanding passer, an excellent kicker and a sure tackler on defense where he played safety.

In 1930 he appeared in eight games with the Chicago Cardinals of the NFL as a wingback. Two years later he was in the big leagues with Washington, playing in 44 games as a catcher. He hit .244. He was also in the Chicago White Sox farm system and played in the Three-I League with Springfield and Bloomington, with Keokuk in the Western League and with Harrisburg, N.Y. in the New York-Penn league. He managed both Harrisburg and Keokuk.

He later coached at both Oregon State and Willamette College, being head basketball and track coach and assistant football coach at Willamette.

A very successful businessman and civic leader in Oregon after his playing and coaching days were over, he died in Portland in 1970.

Howard Albert Maple (July 20, 1903 – November 9, 1970) was an American professional athlete. He played for the Chicago Cardinals of the National Football League (NFL) in 1930 and for the Washington Senators of Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1932. He was a college athlete at then-Oregon State Agricultural College.

Contents

1 Biography

2 See also

3 References

4 External links

Biography

Maple played college football and college baseball for the Oregon State Aggies (now the Oregon State Beavers).[1] As a quarterback, he led the team to an overall 16–7–1 record for the seasons of 1926 through 1928,[2] and was named a 1928 All-American.[3] Maple is the university's only alumnus to play in both the NFL and MLB.[4] He was inducted to the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 1981,[4] and the athletics hall of fame at Oregon State University in 1990.[5]

In 1930, Maple played in eight games for the Chicago Cardinals of the NFL.[6] The NFL's website lists him as a wingback.[7]

Maple played in minor league baseball from 1930 through 1935, appearing in over 400 minor league games.[8] Listed at 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m) and 175 pounds (79 kg), he batted left-handed and threw right-handed.[8] Maple appeared 44 major league games, all with the 1932 Washington Senators.[9] He posted a .244 batting average (10-for-41) with seven RBIs.[9] His best offensive game came on August 31, when he went 3-for-4 with an RBI and a run scored against pitcher Sam Gray, as the Senators defeated the St. Louis Browns, 7–6.[10] Maple appeared in 41 games defensively, all as a catcher, handling 39 total chances without an error for a 1.000 fielding percentage.[9]

Maple was born in 1903 in Adrian, Missouri, and graduated from Peoria High School in Illinois.[3] He coached basketball, football, and baseball at Willamette University from the early 1930s through 1941.[3] During World War II, he served in the United States Army.[3] He worked in several jobs after the war, and went on to manage the Oregon State Fair from 1957 to 1967.[3] He was married, and had one daughter and a foster son.[3] Maple died in 1970 in Portland, Oregon, and is interred in Salem, Oregon.[11]

(Jul. 20, 1903 – Nov. 9, 1970) Howard Maple earned the distinction of being the only Oregon State alum to ever play in both the NFL and Major Leagues after graduating from the school in 1928.

Born in Missouri in 1903, Maple found his way to Oregon State and lettered from 1926-28 as a halfback, earning recognition as a second-team All-American following his senior season. During his years in Corvallis, the Beavers were a combined 16-7-1, with three of the losses coming to USC.

Maple played eight games with the Chicago Cardinals of the NFL in 1930, and hit .244 in 44 games as a catcher with the Washington Senators in 1932.

He was inducted to the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Oregon State Athletics Hall of Fame in 1990.

The Washington Senators baseball team was one of the American League's eight charter franchises. Now known as the Minnesota Twins, the club was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1901 as the Washington Senators.

The team was officially named the "Senators" during 1901–1904, the Nationals during 1905–1955 and the Senators again during 1956–1960, but nonetheless was commonly referred to as the Senators throughout its history (and unofficially as the "Grifs" during Clark Griffith's tenure as manager during 1912–1920).[1][2] The name "Nationals" appeared on the uniforms for only two seasons, and then was replaced with the "W" logo. However, the names "Senators," "Nationals" and shorter "Nats" were used interchangeably by fans and media throughout the team's history; in 2005, the latter two names were revived for the current National League franchise that had previously played in Montreal.

For a time, from 1911 to 1933, the Senators were one of the more successful franchises in Major League Baseball. The team's rosters included Baseball Hall of Fame members Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Joe Cronin, Bucky Harris, Heinie Manush and one of the greatest players and pitchers of all time, Walter Johnson. But the Senators are remembered more for their many years of mediocrity and futility, including six last-place finishes in the 1940s and 1950s. Joe Judge, Cecil Travis, Buddy Myer, Roy Sievers and Eddie Yost were other notable Senators players whose careers were spent in obscurity due to the team's lack of success.[3][4]

Contents

1 History

1.1 A losing start for a charter franchise

1.2 A new era

1.3 1924: World champions

1.4 Building a winning tradition

1.5 Fading fortunes

1.6 Relocation

2 Photos

3 The Washington Senators in popular culture

4 See also

5 References

History

A losing start for a charter franchise

When the American League declared itself a major league in 1901, the new league moved the previous minor league circuit Western League's Kansas City franchise to Washington, a city that had been abandoned by the older National League a year earlier. The new Washington club, like the old one, was called the "Senators" (the second of three franchises to hold the name).

The Senators began their history as a consistently losing team, at times so inept that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charley Dryden famously joked, "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League,"[5] a play on the famous line in Henry Lee III's eulogy for President George Washington as "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen". The 1904 Senators lost 113 games, and the next season the team's owners, trying for a fresh start, changed the team's name to the "Nationals" (and occasionally nicknamed the "Nats"). However, the "Senators" name remained widely used by fans and journalists — in fact, the two names were used interchangeably[6] — although "Nats" remained the team's nickname.[7] The Senators name was officially restored in 1956.[8]

A new era

The club continued to lose, despite the addition of a talented 19-year-old pitcher named Walter Johnson in 1907. Raised in rural Kansas, Johnson was a tall, lanky man with long arms who, using a leisurely windup and unusual sidearm delivery, threw the ball faster than anyone had ever seen. Johnson's breakout year was 1910, when he struck out 313 batters, posted an earned-run average of 1.36 and won 25 games for a losing ball club. Over his 21-year Hall of Fame career, Johnson, nicknamed the "Big Train", won 417 games and struck out 3,508 batters, a major-league record that stood for more than 50 years.

In 1911, the Senators' wooden ballpark burned to the ground, and they replaced it with a modern concrete-and-steel structure on the same location. First called National Park, it later was renamed Griffith Stadium, after the man who was named Washington manager in 1912 and whose name became almost synonymous with the ball club: Clark Griffith. A star pitcher with the National League's Chicago Colts in the 1890s, Griffith jumped to the AL in 1901 and became a successful manager with the Chicago White Sox and New York Highlanders. Walter Johnson blossomed in 1911 with 25 victories, although the Senators still finished the season in seventh place.[9] In 1912, the Senators improved dramatically, as their pitching staff led the league in team earned run average and in strikeouts. Johnson won 33 games while teammate Bob Groom added another 24 wins to help the Senators finish the season in second place behind the Boston Red Sox.[10] The Senators continued to perform respectably in 1913 with Johnson posting a career-high 35 victories, as the team once again finished in second place, this time to the Philadelphia Athletics.[11] Starting in 1916, the Senators settled back into mediocrity. Griffith, frustrated with the owners' penny-pinching, bought a controlling interest in the team in 1920 and stepped down as field manager a year later to focus on his duties as team president.

1924: World champions

Washington's Bucky Harris scores on his home run in the fourth inning of Game 7 of the 1924 World Series.

In 1924, Griffith named 27-year-old second baseman Bucky Harris player-manager. Led by the hitting of Goose Goslin and Sam Rice, and a solid pitching staff headlined by the 36-year-old Johnson, the Senators captured their first American League pennant, two games ahead of Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees.

The Senators faced John McGraw's heavily favored New York Giants in the 1924 World Series.[12] Despite Johnson losing both of his starts, the Senators kept pace to tie the Series at three games apiece and force Game 7. The Senators trailed the Giants 3–1 in the eighth inning of Game 7, when Bucky Harris hit a routine ground ball to third which hit a pebble and took a bad hop over Giants third baseman Freddie Lindstrom. Two runners scored on the play, tying the score at three.[13] In the ninth inning with the game tied, 3–3, Harris brought in an aging Johnson to pitch on just one day of rest – he had been the losing pitcher in Game 5. Johnson held the Giants scoreless into extra innings. In the bottom of the 12th inning, Muddy Ruel hit a high foul ball near home plate.[14] The Giants' catcher, Hank Gowdy, dropped his protective face mask to field the ball but, failing to toss the mask aside, stumbled over it and dropped the ball, thus giving Ruel another chance to bat.[14] On the next pitch, Ruel hit a double and, then proceeded to score the winning run when Earl McNeely hit a ground ball that took another bad hop over Lindstrom's head.[13][14] It was the only World Series triumph for the franchise during their 60-year tenure in Washington.

Building a winning tradition

On behalf of the Elks of Washington, Joe Judge (front left), captain of the Senators, was presented with a floral tribute for the team before the start of a game in 1929

The Senators repeated as American League champions in 1925 but lost the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates. After Johnson's retirement in 1927, the Senators endured a few losing seasons until returning to contention in 1930, this time with Johnson as manager. But after the Senators finished third in 1931 and 1932, behind powerful Philadelphia and New York, Griffith fired Johnson, a victim of high expectations.[15]

For his new manager in 1933, Griffith returned to the formula that worked for him in 1924, and 26-year-old shortstop Joe Cronin became player-manager. The change worked, as Washington posted a 99–53 record and swept to the pennant seven games ahead of the Yankees. But the Senators lost the World Series to the Giants in five games, and after that, the city would not host another World Series until 2019, when the Washington Nationals, its current National League team, defeated the Houston Astros.

Fading fortunes

The Senators sank all the way to seventh in 1934. Attendance plunged as well, and after the season Griffith traded Cronin to the Red Sox for journeyman shortstop Lyn Lary and $225,000 in cash (even though Cronin was married to Griffith's niece, Mildred). Despite the return of Harris as manager in 1935–42 and 1950–54, Washington remained mostly a losing ball club for the next 25 years, contending for the pennant only in the talent-thin war years of 1943 and 1945.

In the fall of 1953, the second major baseball franchise shift of the mid-20th century took place (after the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1952), with long suffering Baltimore civic and business interests purchasing the perennially cellar-dwelling St. Louis Browns from controversial but enterprising owner Bill Veeck and moving them 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Washington to the Chesapeake Bay port city. In the spring of 1954, the Browns moved to a newly renovated and modernized Memorial Stadium on the site of their former northeastern city collegiate football bowl, and replacing the earlier minor league level "Triple A" "Orioles" (also sometimes nicknamed the "Birds") of the International League where they had been consistent champions since the 1910s. The additional competition in the same League for Maryland and Virginia area baseball fans added to the complexion around the nation's capital for the rest of the 1950s as the new "Baltimore Orioles" swiftly built their team prospects with astute trades and farm system output during the rest of the decade, finally becoming pennant contenders by 1960. They continued their winning ways as one of the most dominant teams in professional baseball for the next two decades overpowering even the hapless third Senators franchise in 1961–1971.

The Senators were also the butt of many nationwide jokes during the 1950s, with the debut and running of a Broadway musical play in 1955 in New York City called "Damn Yankees" (based on an earlier best-selling novel and later movie in 1958), which followed a hapless elderly D.C. fan being given a "Faustian" or "devil's bargain," selling his soul to transform the team by becoming a young powerful new Senators player (played in the movie version by heart-throb leading-man actor Tab Hunter) and lead the lowly team to a pennant versus the Yankees.

In 1954, Senators scout Ossie Bluege, with help from longtime third base coach Alan Rupprecht, signed a 17-year-old Harmon Killebrew. Because of his $30,000 signing bonus, an enormous amount for that time, baseball rules required Killebrew to spend the rest of 1954 with the Senators as a "bonus baby." Killebrew bounced between the Senators and the minor leagues for the next few years. He became the Senators' regular third baseman in 1959, leading the League with 42 home runs and earning a starting spot on the American League All-Star team.

Relocation

Clark Griffith died in 1955, and his nephew and adopted son Calvin took over the team presidency. He sold Griffith Stadium to the city of Washington and leased it back, leading to speculation that the team was planning to move, as the Braves, Browns and Athletics had done in the early 1950s, and the Giants and Dodgers would do later in the decade. After an early flirtation with San Francisco (with a "Triple A" Pacific Coast League team, the San Francisco Seals), by 1957 Griffith was courting Minneapolis–St. Paul in the Upper Midwest state of Minnesota, a prolonged process that resulted in his rejecting the Twin Cities' first offer[16] before agreeing to relocate. The American League opposed the move at first, but in 1960, in the face of the Continental League's proposed Minnesota franchise, a deal was reached. The Senators moved and were replaced with an expansion Senators team for 1961. The old Washington Senators became the new Minnesota Twins; the expansion Senators would become the Texas Rangers in 1972, and baseball would not return to the city until 2005, when the former Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals.

Photos

Washington Senators around 1925

 

Washington Senators in the 1920s

 

Washington Senators Team Picture in the early 1930s

The Washington Senators in popular culture

The longtime competitive struggles of the team were fictionalized in the 1954 book The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the 1955 Broadway musical Damn Yankees and the 1958 film starring then "heart-throb" leading-man actor Tab Hunter). The plot centers on Joe Boyd, a middle-aged real estate salesman and long-suffering fan of the Washington Senators baseball club. In this musical comedy-drama of the Faust legend, Boyd sells his soul to the Devil and becomes slugger Joe Hardy, the "long ball hitter the Senators need that he'd sell his soul for" (as spoken by him in a throwaway line near the beginning of the drama). His hitting prowess enables the Senators to win the American League pennant over the then-dominant Yankees. One of the songs from the musical, "You Gotta Have Heart", is frequently played at baseball games.

The (expansion) Washington Senators were mentioned several times in Tom Clancy's book Without Remorse. As they performed even worse than the team they replaced, they were the subject of an updated joke: "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and still last in the American League." When the current Nationals had their own struggles, the joke was updated once again, this time to "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League."

The professional American football team now known as the Arizona Cardinals previously played in Chicago, Illinois, as the Chicago Cardinals from 1920 to 1959 before relocating to St. Louis, Missouri, for the 1960 through 1987 seasons.

Roots can be traced to 1898, when Chris O'Brien established an amateur Chicago-based athletic team, the Morgan Athletic Club. O'Brien later moved them to Chicago's Normal Park and renamed them the Racine Normals, then adopting the maroon color from the University of Chicago uniforms.

In the 1920s the Cardinals became part of a professional circuit in Chicago. The Cardinals, along with the Chicago Bears, were founding members of the National Football League in 1920. Both teams are the only two surviving teams from that era. The Bears and the Cardinals also developed a rivalry during those NFL first years.

After some irregular campaigns during the 1950s, the Cardinals were largely overshadowed by the Bears in Chicago and almost fell into bankruptcy. After some efforts to buy the Cardinals, a group of investors including Lamar Hunt, Bud Adams, Bob Howsam and Max Winter, joined forces to form the American Football League to compete with National Football League. The Cardinals would later move to St. Louis, Missouri, beginning with the 1960 season.

Contents

1 Early history

2 1920s

3 1930s

4 1940s

5 1950s

6 Notable players

6.1 Pro Football Hall of Famers

6.2 Retired numbers

7 Trivia

8 See also

9 References

Early history

Morgan Athletic Club, established in 1898, was a predecessor of the Cardinals

In 1898, Chicago painting and building contractor Chris O'Brien established an amateur Chicago-based athletic club football team named the "Morgan Athletic Club". O'Brien later moved them to Chicago's Normal Park and renamed them the "Racine Normals", since Normal Park was located on Racine Avenue in Chicago. In 1901, O'Brien bought used maroon uniforms from the University of Chicago, the colors of which had by then faded, leading O'Brien to exclaim, "That's not maroon; it's cardinal red!" It was then that the team changed its name to the "Racine Street Cardinals".[1]

The original Racine Street Cardinals team disbanded in 1906 mostly for lack of local competition. A professional team under the same name formed in 1913, claiming the previous team as part of their history. As was the case for most professional football teams in 1918, the team was forced to suspend operations for a second time due to World War I and the outbreak of the Spanish flu pandemic. It resumed operations later in the year (one of the few teams to play that year), and has since operated continuously.

1920s

At the time of the founding of the modern National Football League, the Cardinals were part of a thriving professional football circuit based in the Chicago area. Teams such as the Decatur Staleys, Hammond Pros, Chicago Tigers and the Cardinals had formed an informal loop similar to, and generally on par with, the Ohio and New York circuits that had also emerged as top football centers prior to the league's founding.

The Chicago Cardinals in 1920

In 1920, the team became a charter member of the American Professional Football Association (later renamed the National Football League (NFL) in 1922), for a franchise fee of $100. The Cardinals and the Chicago Bears (the latter founded as the Decatur Staleys before moving to Chicago in 1921 and being renamed the Chicago Staleys, then in 1922 being renamed the Chicago Bears) are the only charter members of the NFL still in existence, though the Green Bay Packers, which joined the league in 1921, existed prior to the formation of the NFL. The person keeping the minutes of the first league meeting, unfamiliar with the nuances of Chicago football, recorded the Cardinals as from Racine, Wisconsin. The team was renamed the "Chicago Cardinals" in 1922 after a team actually from Racine, Wisconsin (the Horlick-Racine Legion) entered the league. That season the team moved to Comiskey Park.

The Staleys and Cardinals played each other twice in 1920[2] as the Racine Cardinals and the Decatur Staleys, making their rivalry the oldest in the NFL. They split the series, with the home team winning in each. In the Cardinals' 7–6 victory over the Staleys in their first meeting of the season, each team scored a touchdown on a fumble recovery, with the Staleys failing their extra point try.

The Cardinals' defeat of the Staleys proved critical, since George Halas's Staleys went on to a 10–1–2 record overall, 5–1–2 in league play. The Akron Pros were the first ever league champions; they finished with an 8–0–3 record, 6–0–3 in league play, ending their season in a scoreless tie against the Staleys. Since the Pros merely had to tie the game in order to win the title, they could afford to play not to lose. Had the Staleys not lost to the Cardinals, they would have gone into that fateful game with an 11–0–2 record, 6–0–2 in league play. As it was, it all but assured that the Staleys/Bears and Cardinals would be intense rivals.

The 1921 Chicago Cardinals

The two teams played to a tie in 1921,[2] when the Staleys won all but two games, thus the Cardinals came within 1 point of costing the Staleys a second consecutive championship in the league's first two years of existence.

In 1922, the Staleys, now renamed the Bears, went 9–3–0,[3] losing to the Cardinals twice. The Bears still edged the Cardinals for 2nd place in the league, but those losses dashed all hopes of the Bears repeating as champions.[4]

In 1923 and 1924, the Bears got the better of the Cardinals all three times the two teams played.[5][6] But in 1925, the Bears went 0–1–1 against the Cardinals with the tie meaning the Cardinals were only a 1⁄2 game in front of the Pottsville Maroons heading into their fateful 1925 showdown.[2]

Thus, in the first 6 years of the NFL's existence, the Bears-Cardinals games had a direct impact on the league championship 4 times. The Bears and Cardinals each took home 1 title during that span. But the Bears nearly cost the Cardinals their title, the Cardinals nearly cost the Bears their title, and had it not been for the Cardinals' tenacity against the Bears, the Bears very well might have won two more. The Bears were a dominant team against everyone but the Cardinals in the league's early years. From 1920 to 1925, the Canton Bulldogs, champions in 1922 and 1923, beat the Bears just 2 times and no other team in the NFL defeated the Bears more than once over that entire 6-year span... except for the Cardinals. The Cardinals battled the Bears to 4–4–2 split between 1920 and 1925 and established the NFL's first rivalry.[2]

Legend has it that the Cardinals played the Chicago Tigers in 1920, with the loser being forced to leave town. While this has never been proven, the Tigers did disband after one season.

The 1925 season ended in perhaps the greatest controversy in professional football history. In those days, there was no fixed schedule nor any playoff games. The championship was decided by winning percentage. At season's end, after losing in a Chicago snow storm to the Pottsville Maroons 21–7, the Cardinals found themselves in second place. Hoping to improve their record, they scheduled and won two hastily arranged games against weaker teams, the Milwaukee Badgers and the Hammond Pros. The ploy was within the NFL's rules at the time because of the open-ended schedule. Chicago finished the season with a record of 11–2–1. However, the league sanctioned them because a Chicago player, Art Folz, had hired four Chicago high school football players to play for the Milwaukee Badgers under assumed names to ensure a Cardinals victory.

Meanwhile, because Pottsville had played an unauthorized exhibition game in Philadelphia against the University of Notre Dame All-Stars, the Maroons were stripped of the title. The League decided not to award a championship for 1925. Later, it was offered to the Cardinals, whose owner, Chris O'Brien, refused to accept the championship title for his team. He argued that his team did not deserve to take the title over a team which had beaten them fairly. It was only after the Bidwill family bought the Cardinals in 1933 that the franchise began to claim the 1925 title as its own. (For more on the controversy, see 1925 NFL Championship controversy.)

The Chicago Cardinals were one of the few NFL teams to host African-American players in the 1920s—most notably Duke Slater. After the folding of the first American Football League after its lone season, Slater, against all odds, successfully joined the Chicago Cardinals of the National Football League.

Not only was Slater pro football's first African-American linemen, he was also one of the NFL's most outstanding linemen of his era. In 1928, he encouraged the team to sign Harold Bradley Sr., who became the NFL's second black lineman. Slater and Bradley played alongside each other in the first two games of the 1928 season. A steel plate in Bradley's leg, due to a childhood injury, contributed to Bradley ending his NFL career after only two games—the shortest among the 13 African American players who played in the NFL before World War II.

Between 1926 and 1927 a movement began among the owners of the NFL to follow the racist[citation needed] example of professional baseball and in 1927 every African-American player was out of the league, with the sole exception of Duke Slater.[7] The color ban faced by Slater and other black players was not ironclad, however, and four other African-American players managed to draw salaries in the NFL during short careers interspersed from 1928 through 1933.[7] Slater was once again the only black player in the league in 1929.[8]

On November 28, 1929 Slater participated in an NFL record as a lineman in front of Ernie Nevers in a game in which he scored six rushing touchdowns in a 40–6 victory over the Chicago Bears.[7] Slater played all 60 minutes of the contest, alternating between the offensive and defensive lines as well as participating on special teams.[7]

By the time of his retirement in 1931, Slater had achieved All-Pro status a total of six times.[7] During his NFL career Slater never missed a game because of injury, starting in a total of 96 of the 99 games he played between the AFL and NFL.[9]

1930s

The Cardinals posted a winning record only twice in the 20 years after their 1925 championship (1931 and 1935); including 10 straight losing seasons from 1936 to 1945.

Dr. David Jones bought the team from O'Brien in 1929. In 1932 the team was purchased by Charles Bidwill, then a vice president of the Chicago Bears. The team has been under the ownership of the Bidwill family since then.

1940s

In 1944, owing to player shortages caused by World War II, the Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers merged for one year and were known as the "Card-Pitt", or derisively as the "Carpets" as they were winless that season. In 1945, the Cardinals snapped their long losing streak (an NFL record 29 games, dating back to the 1942 season and including their lone season as Card-Pitt) by beating the Bears 16–7. It was their only victory of the season. In 1946, the team finished 6–5 for the first winning season in eight years.

In 1947, the NFL standardized on a 12-game season. This would be the most celebrated year in Cardinals history as the team went 9–3, beating Philadelphia in the championship game 28–21 with their "Million Dollar Backfield", which included quarterback Paul Christman, halfback Charley Trippi, halfback Elmer Angsman, and fullback Pat Harder, piling up 282 rushing yards. However, Bidwill was not around to see it; he had died before the start of the season, leaving the team to his wife Violet. Prior to the season he had beaten the Chicago Rockets of the upstart All-America Football Conference for the rights to Trippi. This signing is generally acknowledged as the final piece in the championship puzzle. The next season saw the Cardinals finish 11–1 and again play in the championship game, but lost 7–0 in a rematch with the Eagles, played in a heavy snowstorm that almost completely obscured the field. This was the first NFL championship to be televised. The next year, Violet Bidwill married St. Louis businessman Walter Wolfner, and the Cardinals fell to 6–5–1.

1950s

The 1950s were a dismal period for the Cardinals, with records of 5–7 (1950), 3–9 (1951), 4–8 (1952), 1–10–1 (1953), 2–10 (1954), 4–7–1 (1955), 7–5 (1956; the best year of the decade), 3–9 (1957), 2–9–1 (1958), and 2–10 (1959). With just 33 wins in ten seasons, the Cardinals were nearly forgotten in Chicago, being completely overshadowed by the Bears. Attendance at Cardinals games was sparse. With the team almost bankrupt, the Bidwills were anxious to move the Cardinals to another city. However, the NFL demanded a hefty relocation fee which the Bidwills were unwilling and/or unable to pay. Needing cash, the Bidwills entertained offers from various out-of-town investors, including Lamar Hunt, Bud Adams, Bob Howsam and Max Winter. However, these negotiations came to nothing, probably because the Bidwills wanted to maintain control of the Cardinals and were only willing to sell a minority stake in the team.

Having failed in their separate efforts to buy the Cardinals, Hunt, Adams, Howsam and Winter joined forces to form the American Football League. Suddenly faced with a serious rival, the NFL quickly came to terms with the Bidwills, engineering a deal that sent the Cardinals to St. Louis, Missouri, beginning with the 1960 season in a move which also blocked St. Louis as a potential market for the new AFL, which began play the same year. Despite the presence of a baseball team already named the St. Louis Cardinals, the football team kept its name upon relocation there, and would be referred to as "the football Cardinals" until it departed for Arizona following the 1987 season.

Notable players

Pro Football Hall of Famers

Chicago Cardinals Hall of Famers[10]

Players

No. Player Position(s) Tenure Inducted

1 John "Paddy" Driscoll QB

Coach 1920–1925

1920–1922 1965

2 Walt Kiesling G / DT

Coach 1929–1933

1944 1966

4 Ernie Nevers FB

Coach 1929–1931

1930–1931, 1939 1963

13 Guy Chamberlin End & Coach 1927–1928 1965

16 Duke Slater T 1926–1931 2020

33 Ollie Matson RB 1952, 1954–1958 1972

62, 2 Charley Trippi RB 1947–1955 1968

81 Dick "Night Train" Lane CB 1954–1959 1974

— Jim Thorpe RB 1928 1963

Coaches and Contributors

Name Position(s) Tenure Inducted

Charles Bidwill Team Owner 1933–1947 1967

Jimmy Conzelman Coach 1940–1942

1946–1948 1964

Earl "Curly" Lambeau Coach 1950–1951 1963

Joe Stydahar Coach 1953–1954 1967

italics = played a portion of career with the Cardinals and enshrined representing another team

Dierdorf, Smith, Wehrli and Wilson were members of the St. Louis Football Ring of Fame in The Dome at America's Center when the Rams played there from 1995 to 2015.

Retired numbers

Chicago Cardinals retired numbers

N° Player Position Tenure Retired

77 Stan Mauldin 1 OT 1946–1948

99 Marshall Goldberg HB 1939–1943

1946–1948

Notes:

1 Posthumously retired.

Trivia

The Chicago Cardinals have the distinction of being the only team in American professional football history to score exactly 4 points in one game, or two safeties. On November 25, 1923, the Cardinals lost to the Racine Legion 10–4.

While a student at the University of Chicago, American sociologist Herbert Blumer played with the Cardinals from 1927 to 1933. Blumer was a member of the 1929 All-Pro Team. He played a total of 58 games for Chicago.