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How a former Roanoker became an architect of the modern-day National Football League.
In mid-January 1960, 12 men met in the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami–a meeting that would last 10 days and completely change the future of the National Football League. Front and center was Carroll Rosenbloom, then owner of the Baltimore Colts. Shrewd, driven and stubborn, Rosenbloom orchestrated the hiring of the NFL’s next commissioner Pete Rozelle, a relatively unknown 33-year-old who later claimed he got the job because he was the only one “who hadn’t alienated most of the people in that meeting.”
Rosenbloom, who had made the motion to hire Rozelle, was dispatched by the 11 other team owners to deliver the news. He found the new commissioner in the men’s room washing his hands, where Rozelle had idled himself to avoid the press, who had camped themselves in the hotel lobby.
Rosenbloom’s journey to eventually becoming an NFL team owner began in Roanoke with a struggling manufacturing company. Rosenbloom’s father, Solomon, owned the Blue Ridge Overalls Company in Roanoke, one of several enterprises he had acquired over the years. Sending his son to Roanoke in 1933 to close it down, Carroll Rosenbloom rented a small apartment at 119 Albemarle Avenue in the Highland Park neighborhood. Rather than close the mill, Rosenbloom decided to buy it with funds loaned to him by a few banks and his mother, who kept the loan a secret from her husband. When Rosenbloom purchased Blue Ridge Overalls, headquartered at 219 Shenandoah Avenue, NW, it had 80 employees and annual revenues of $350,000.
Rosenbloom was determined to turn the mill around to both make himself money and to prove to his father back in Baltimore that he had business acumen far above cleaning bathrooms, the job his father had given him in the family business after college. Rosenbloom, “C.R.” to his friends, began negotiating sales contracts with retail chains, such as Sears, Montgomery Ward and W.T. Grant, a departure from the company’s prior practice. C.R. also lobbied the federal government for contracts to help outfit Civilian Conservation Corps workers.
With production orders rolling in, Rosenbloom built more mills for Blue Ridge Overalls as the demand for his denim reached new records annually. Within three years, Rosenbloom had moved out of his apartment on Albemarle Avenue and into a new residence–the Hotel Roanoke. Between 1936 and 1939, the city directories listed the hotel as his address.
So successful was Blue Ridge Overalls, C.R. “retired” at age 33 to a 480-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, turning the company over to be managed by friends. Rosenbloom later reflected on his decision to leave Roanoke for Maryland: “I don’t know why anyone would work if they didn’t have to.”
Rosenbloom’s retirement ended abruptly with his father’s death in 1942. Forced to oversee his father’s companies, Rosenbloom also took a renewed interest in managing Blue Ridge Overalls. With America’s entrance into World War II, C.R. instinctively knew that the denim once needed by the CCC workers was now needed by America’s military. Thus, Rosenbloom’s mills churned out uniforms and parachutes. After 16 years of owning Blue Ridge Overalls, C.R. sold the company and walked away with a fortune. Blue Ridge Overalls had grown to 20,000 employees and annual revenues of $175 million.
So how did C.R. come into the NFL? Rosenbloom’s old college football coach, Bert Bell, was the commissioner of the league in 1953 and needed to solve what Bell called “the Baltimore problem.” Pro football had come to Baltimore in 1947 with the All-America Football Conference. The Colts franchise joined the NFL in 1950, but in 1951 with lackluster attendance and hemorrhaging money, the team folded. Bell needed a team in Baltimore and an owner with Baltimore roots and money to lose–literally. Carroll Rosenbloom was Bell’s man. Rosenbloom paid $250,000 for Baltimore’s new Colts franchise and put another $1.5 million in the team’s bank account. “That’s how much I was willing to lose,” C.R. later said.
Rosenbloom never had a money-losing season with the Colts and by the end of the decade his Colts were considered the NFL’s premier franchise. Rosenbloom eventually sold the Colts and became owner of the Los Angeles Rams in 1972. In a span of nearly three decades as an NFL team owner, C.R. helped create the player’s union, had been the first owner to suggest merging the NFL and the AFL, lobbied for mega coliseums, and along with Rozelle realized television contracts were key to the game’s popularity and profitability. Rosenbloom’s drive and, at times, abrasive personality often put him in conflict with Rozelle and other team owners, but his mark on the modern-day NFL is unquestioned.
When Rosenbloom died in 1979 in Florida from cardiac arrest while swimming, Rozelle said of him, “Carroll Rosenbloom played a major role in the growth and success of the NFL, both through the teams he produced and through his active participation in the league’s decision making.
”What is often lost in the discussion of Rosenbloom’s NFL legacy is how he got the money to be a team owner in the first place, where he learned to become a savvy businessman, where he first practiced the fine art of negotiation, dealing with unions, taking risks, spying opportunities and developed his legendary Midas touch.
The next time you watch an NFL game on a Sunday or a Monday night just know that what you are viewing was heavily influenced and in some ways created by a man that at age 25 during the height of the Depression was living in a three-room apartment on Albemarle Avenue.
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