Once Upon a Midnight Dreary

In 2021 I was invited to write an essay about my favorite glassware for Un Balloon, a beautiful hardbound journal published by Domestique Wine in Washington DC, designed and produced by Can Can Press in Mexico City. I think a glassware company was sponsoring the creation of it, hence the angle.

My favorite vessel is a rocks glass, grey-tinted and round, with the NFL logo on one side and the words Baltimore Colts above a helmet on the other side. I have a few of them, found in a thrift store on the eastern shore of Delaware, a real find considering the proximity to Baltimore. I remember them at my grandparents’ farm house, where my Gan would drink bourbon out of them. The glasses were a giveaway from Shell Oil in the early 1970s, every NFL team had a glass.

Maybe you don’t sports. Fair enough, I don’t really that much anymore. A lot of people I know don’t, and if they do, for most of them, the National Football League is not their cup of tea. Baseball? Wholesome with a rich history. Tennis? Classy and international. Basketball? Exciting and cool. OG football Soccer? The heartbeat of the world. American football? Too violent, too slow, too expensive, I get it. I grew up going to Towson State football games with my mom, who worked there. She and her friends would tailgate before the games. If you’ve never tailgated, you’re missing out. Drinking beer and grilling in a parking lot is pretty fun.

For those of us from Baltimore old enough to remember, we have a lasting, collective scar from the Colts. The Baltimore Colts left the city during training camp in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a complete surprise, but it was as close to one as it could get to move an entire sports facility, training camp, locker room and offices. I love these glasses, a relic of when the Colts were an ingrained in the fabric of the city, part of the wood-panelled tinged life and family I was also a part of. A world where no one thought twice about smoking indoors, even around children, and drunk driving laws were just beginning to be passed. I’m not waxing nostalgic about this period, this is no let’s go back! Not at all. It’s a reminder of having witnessed and lived through the 70s and 80s.

The Baltimore Colts and the Baltimore Orioles shared Memorial Stadium for decades. Memorial Stadium was located on 900 East 33rd Street, a residential neighborhood far away from the touristy din of the Inner Harbor, where both the professional football and baseball stadiums are now. As Memorial Stadium fell into disrepair over the decades, each team wanted their own new stadium, something there wasn’t enough taxpayer money to build. According to the then-mayor William Donald Schaeffer, “One-third of the people in Baltimore pay taxes. Unless private enterprise builds it, we won’t build it.”

Baltimore’s population has been on the steady decline for many factors over the decades. In 1950, Baltimore was the 6th largest city in the US with close to one million residents. Baltimore, like so many other industrial, working class American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, lost residents at a startling rate due to the closures of factories and the end of steel production at Bethlehem Steel.¹ The population is still decreasing, over 35% in total from 906,244 people in 1970 to 569, 931 in 2022.² During that time, Baltimore has struggled.

Colts owner Bob Irsay was shopping the team around with the blessing of the NFL after years of declining attendance and losing seasons. Irsay came to Baltimore in 1972, swapping ownership of the LA Rams for the Colts. He was difficult, opinionated and overbearing from the start, firing the coach who won the Super Bowl just two years previously and trading beloved winning quarterback Johnny Unitas. The winning culture and loyal fanbase of the Colts diminished during Irsay’s tenure. By 1984, the Colts had six straight losing seasons. Irsay visited Phoenix, Memphis, and Indianapolis, along with considering a few other cities to shop the Colts around. Indianapolis, in a real Field of Dreams moment, had finished construction on the $80 million Hoosier Dome. When Indy mayor Bill Hudnut took Irsay on a tour on February 23, 1984, the stadium *just happened* to have dark blue seats with silver accents and a white roof, outfitted in the Colts’ colors.

Faced with the inability to come to an agreement about the stadium and freaked out by Irsay’s trips to relocate the team, the Maryland State Legislature held a vote to seize the football team, using eminent domain to keep the Colts in Baltimore for urban renewal by a vote of 38 to 4 on March 27, 1984. That meant that the state could take the team from Irsay’s ownership. Usually eminent domain is used for public schools and roads. The next day, Irsay called Hudnut, ready to relocate to Indianapolis immediately.

Hudnut called his friend and neighbor, Johnny B. Smith, the CEO of Mayflower Trucking, who orchestrated the move, donating 14 trucks to move the Colts from Baltimore to Indianapolis. The eminent domain vote was on Tuesday, March 27.

Mayflower found 14 empty moving trucks, expanding the search from a 200 mile radius to a 300 mile radius from the Colts’ Owings Mills complex. The trucks showed up one by one to be packed, starting at 7 pm on Wednesday, March 28th. “The first thing they loaded when the trucks got to the complex were the business records. That first truck went north, the shortest distance to the state line. They wanted to get the records out of the state as soon as possible.” (Marty Heckscher, Colts front office)

Even if the eminent domain vote didn’t eventually hold up in court, it would take a while to get there. Oakland, California previously used the same reason to stop the Raiders from moving to Los Angeles. It did not hold up, two years later, but the California Supreme Court stipulated “providing access to recreation to its residents in the form of spectator sports is an appropriate function of city government,” thus not completely shutting the door on the use of eminent domain in this manner.

Mayflower hired movers to help pack up, a busload of forty Hell’s Angels arrived at the compound with the first truck. One of them walked off the bus and asked “Is this an embassy, man?” Apparently the Hell’s Angels were used to pack up embassies in the middle of the night at this time. As each truck was filled, it left, taking a different route out of the state, to avoid the entire convoy from being detained by Maryland state police. When it was all said and done, it took eight hours to pack up the equipment, training center and offices. As the sun rose on Thursday, March 29,the entire organization was on its way to Indianapolis.

Except for one thing: The Baltimore Colts marching band uniforms. They were at Kirsh Cleaners on York Road in Lutherville, waiting to be picked up.³ Upon learning the Colts left, Mr. Kirsh called John Ziemann, the head of the marching band, letting him know the uniforms were in one of their vans, unlocked with the keys inside. The Colts head offices, looking for anything left behind, had these uniforms on the list. Ziemann hid them in one of the band members’ family mausoleum. The band continued to play for years, keeping the fact that the city of Baltimore was left without a professional football team in the public eye. They marched at Fourth of July parades and barbeques, then they were invited to march at football games. Their perseverance paid off, twelve years later.

Baltimore ended up negotiating with Art Modell, owner of the Cleveland Browns, and his business owner Al Lerner to move the team with the promise of $200 million of public money earmarked for a new stadium. Modell had been in Cleveland for a much longer time than Irsay was in Baltimore, more connected to the city but still in a situation where the Browns weren’t going to get a modernized stadium. Lerner, his partner, was the real push behind the move. Baltimore, frustrated by the passing years without a team, earmarked $200 million of public money for a new football stadium, impressed with the success of the Orioles’ Camden Yards. The NFL overlooked Baltimore in 1993 after expanding the league, giving the team to Jacksonville, Florida. NFL commissioner Paul Taglibue told the city to build “another museum” with the stadium money.

After finishing the season in Cleveland in 1995, the Browns organization moved to Baltimore, playing their first game on September 1, 1996. Cleveland kept the rights to the Browns’ logo and team colors, orange and brown and resumed their existence playing football in a new stadium in Cleveland for the 1999 season. The Baltimore team was named the Ravens, inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Raven.” The name was chosen by fans.

Since then, Cleveland and Baltimore have been rivals, a great storyline for the NFL. They’re both working class cities, devastated by the loss of industry and suburban sprawl. The old American Dream, crappy houses with no soul or character. Regardless of what politicians say, crime increases when poverty does, when people’s access to resources declines.

I wonder what kind of city Baltimore would have been had the Colts stayed. I’m no fool, a football team can’t fix racism, poverty, or the effects of the dismal war on drugs. But sports can unify a city, giving people with seemingly nothing in common something to celebrate or commiserate, even momentarily. I like to imagine what would have happened if eminent domain had been used, for urban renewal, if the city of Baltimore got to keep the Colts for the greater good. Would we still be acting for the greater good now, rather than the highest dollar?

1. My uncle John Lambros was an executive at Bethlehem Steel, he did business with Greek shipping giant Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy’s second husband. Uncle John attended their wedding on the Onassis yacht, as family lore goes. That’s the money side of the family.

2. https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/maryland/county/baltimore-city/?endDate=2022-01-01&startDate=1970-01-01

3. Filmmaker Barry Levinson made a short film “The Band That Wouldn’t Die” about the marching band for ESPN’s 30 for 30. My sister Molli worked at Kirsh Cleaners (not then, she was too young) for years. Just to add to the hometown feel of it all.