Cleveland Browns vs. Yankees Ad – Dec. 17, 1946

We’re all still happy that the Cleveland Browns snapped their losing streak last Sunday, so it’s a good time for me to post this Richman Brothers ad dating back to the team’s very first season as a team. It ran in the Lorain Journal on December 17, 1946 and promotes the Browns’ appearance in the first All-America Football Conference championship game, against the New York Yankees. (The Browns won. You can read more about that season here.)

The ad has a great illustration of the Browns’ Brownie mascot in a tug of war over the crown with the Yankee.

The game was also the final appearance that season of George Bird's Musical Majorettes, an all-girl marching band that played during halftime for the Browns during their 1946 and 1947 seasons. (George Bird had been director of the Massillon Tigers high school marching band. Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown – formerly the football coach at the Massillon high school early in his career – enlisted Bird to be entertainment director of the new Browns organization.)

Here’s a photo of the group taken on December 8, 1947, courtesy of www.ohiomemory.org.

The Reminisce magazine website has a nice story by Elvira Lausche Flynn of Willoughby Hills, Ohio about her time as a trombonist with the group. You can read it here.

Elvira Lausche Flynn is second from the right in this photo.
(Photo courtesy www.reminisce.com)

Happily, the Musical Majorettes held a 50th anniversary get-together in 1996, which you can read about it here in this Washington Post article.