September 2, 1948 - 65 years-ago today. the Los Angeles Rams become the first team in the NFL to have their teams logo on their helmets. Halfback Fred Gehrke had been an art major at the University of Utah, when as a walk-on, he got a tryout with the Cleveland Rams. Scoring a touchdown on a kick return, the team signed him to a contract at $135 a game. For two years, he led the league in yards per carry & yards per punt return. After WW2, it was announced that Paul Brown was bringing a team to Cleveland to compete in the new American Football League. So Rams owner, Dan Reeves, was given permission to move the team to Los Angeles. It was then that Gehrke thought of painting a helmet, & at the urging of his his coach, Bob Snyder, he 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 recieved from NFL was Youre the owner; do what you want! The stage was set. Dan Reeves commissioned Fred Gehrke to paint 75 helmets at $1.00 per helmet. The project took Gehrke all the summer of 1948. The first game of 1948 was an exhibition, (as pre-season games were called back then) versus the Redskins -- a night game at the Los Angeles Coliseum before a crowd of 105,000. Up to game time, only Gehrke, Coach Bob Snyder and the equipment manager knew of the new helmets. The team went through their warmups with out the headgear. When they returned to the dressing room, the team put on the ram horn helmets. As they bunched together in the tunnel ready to go out on the field, they wondered how th
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 01:40:15 +0000
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