Born in the Gold Rush: The History of the 49ers Part 1: The 49ers and the AAFC (2024)

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Before joining the NFL in 1950, the 49ers spent their first four years as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference, a league created as a direct competitor to the National Football League. Most of the teams struggled, and as they did, so did the AAFC. Only the Cleveland Browns reigned supreme, but the 49ers acquitted themselves well.

During the spring and summer of 1849, hordes of men began descending like locusts upon a small, burgeoning town at the end of a peninsula located in the U.S. territory of California, which had recently been wrested away from the Californios after the signings of the Treaty of Cahuenga (1847) and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ended the Mexican-American War. The men (and a few women) came from miles around, from as many directions as there were stars in the sky. Some sailed from the East Coast around South America or through the Isthmus of Panama. Others rumbled across the country in wagons. Still more floated in from China or from Europe. They all had one singular goal in mind:

To get rich. Really, really freaking rich.

For it was in January 1848 that gold was discovered up at John Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, a tiny town in the Sierra Nevada foothills (not to be confused with Colma, the town south of Daly City where much of the region’s deceased are interred), and despite Sutter’s best efforts to place a gag order on everyone within earshot, the news eventually leaked throughout the territory, prompting the founder of the California Star, the first paper of record in the infant settlement of San Francisco, to announce the discovery to as many receptive ears as he could reach. “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Samuel Brannan is reported to have screamed to anyone who would listen. Word having gotten out, the enterprising Brannan, with his mutton-chop beard and dark mischievous eyes, set up a store that hawked prospecting supplies. Soon, his clientele – “Forty-Niners,” they would be called, in reference to the year they arrived – began patronizing his shop, as well as other similar retailers that had sprouted up all over San Francisco to meet the sudden, ravenous demand. Gold fever had become an epidemic, and Brannan soon became a rich man, but a divorce and some bad investments rapidly stripped him of his wealth. Brannan died in 1889, penniless and in obscurity, but a street south of downtown San Francisco bears his name.

Fast forward to the twentieth century. San Francisco had grown from a tiny hamlet of ships and clapboard houses and grim, flinty-eyed men hell-bent on finding the shiny stuff. It was destroyed by a major earthquake and subsequent fire in 1906, only to rise from the ashes to become a sturdy city of around 700,000 and the financial capital of the West Coast (not a single San Francisco bank failed in the crash of 1929). The city also had a fruitful maritime industry, several hills that afforded a fantastic view in any direction, two Army posts (the Presidio and Fort Mason), a state college and a Jesuit university, and soon would become one of the premier tourist destinations in the country.

San Francisco did not have a major professional sports team.

Neither did the Bay Area, for that matter.

Tony Morabito, who made himself into a well-off man thanks to a successful lumber-hauling business, realized that the Bay Area was a potential hotbed for professional football. The college game was a large and steady presence, with the University of California, Leland Stanford Junior University, San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, St. Mary’s University, and the aforementioned Jesuit university, the University of San Francisco, regularly holding their own against elite competition. Morabito also concluded that this newfangled idea of coast-to-coast air travel made possible the idea of coast-to-coast National Football League rivalries. Since the NFL’s founding in Canton, Ohio as the American Professional Football Association (APFA) in 1920, its teams were located primarily on the Eastern Seaboard and along the Rust Belt: places like Buffalo, Canton, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, and Rochester; later, Boston, Brooklyn, New York City, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Teams typically traveled by train from city to city.

Tony Morabito dreamed big.

There was only one problem, though. For years, Morabito had tried – unsuccessfully – to land an expansion team in the NFL. Stodgy and sclerotic, the league’s power brokers were not a tiny bit interested in expanding their footprint west of the Windy City. Nope, never, not gonna happen. However, at their suggestion, Morabito reached out to Archie Burdette Ward, the bald, bespectacled sports editor of the Chicago Tribune who in 1933 had created Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, a midsummer exhibition tradition that carries on to this day and in ’33 featured the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Carl Hubbell, Bill Terry, Lefty O’Doul, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, and others–19 players from that initial contest would go on to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Ward also had created the Golden Gloves tournament that put amateur boxing in the national spotlight.

Now, Arch Ward was looking get into professional football. He was certainly familiar with the NFL, and they, him; in 1941 the league offered Ward $250,000 (about $4.6 million in today’s money) to serve as commissioner for ten years.

Arch Ward told them to go kick rocks.

No, he wanted to start his own league, one that would be free of territorial restrictions and challenge the NFL’s hegemony over pro football. He dreamed that the yearly champion of his new federation would play the NFL’s best team in a championship match. Of course, he needed some accomplices. For commissioner, Ward chose “Sleepy Jim” Crowley, a star halfback at the University of Notre Dame who was part of Knute Rockne’s “Four Horsem*n.” It was an interesting pick considering Crowley’s NFL counterpart was Elmer Layden, his Four Horsem*n teammate in 1924. Eleanor Gehrig was brought on to be the league’s secretary and treasurer. Eleanor was the widow of baseball star Lou, who had played in Ward’s inaugural All-Star showcase in 1933 and in several more after that, before passing away in 1941 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Mrs. Gehrig’s time on the job didn’t last long, as she quickly resigned because she, by her own admission, “couldn’t even balance my own bank account.” Mrs. Gehrig was eventually promoted to league vice president.

Ward also needed people who wanted to birth and own the teams.

One of them was Don Ameche, the handsome radio and movie actor with the pencil-thin moustache who would co-own the Los Angeles Dons with crooner Bing Crosby and comedian Bob Hope, serving as the team’s first president. Another was Dan Topping, best known as the highly-successful co-owner and chief executive of the baseball New York Yankees from 1945 through 1964. Topping was already in the football business as the owner of the NFL’s Brooklyn Tigers, but the Tigers, thanks to World War II, had become a dismal trainwreck for the past few years and when he was offered an opportunity to run the New York entry for this new football league, Topping jumped at the chance. The NFL folded the Tigers and reassigned the players to the Boston Yanks (a team that also folded, in 1948). Other owners included real estate mogul Arthur “Mickey” McBride, who founded the Cleveland Browns, and trucking magnate John Keeshin. And, of course, lumber baron Tony Morabito. Because the new league’s owners made their fortunes in other businesses outside of sports, they were generally richer than their NFL counterparts and were the collective moniker of “the millionaires’ coffee klatch.”

The date was June 6, 1944. Half a world away, on the beaches of Normandy, the Allies began their liberation of France as part of Operation Overlord, which would set the stage for victory on the Western Front. On the home front, in St. Louis, Missouri, Arch Ward’s All-America Football Conference held its first meeting. It was here that Tony Morabito officially signed on to form a San Francisco entry for this new football league, which would begin play after World War II concluded. He would not go it alone; Allen E. Sorrel, his lumber company co-owner; and Ernest J. Turre, the general manager of the Del E. Webb construction company, would shoulder some of Morabito’s burden of running an inchoate team in a developing league. They would be named the “Forty Niners,” because, as Sorrell explained it, “San Francisco was born in the Gold Rush.”

Indeed, the 49ers would take on the character and symbolism of those rough and rugged times. Take the mascot, for example. Fans today can get an eyeful of Sourdough Sam, he of the toothy, wide-mouthed, beatific smile and floppy brown hat and gold bandana, who merrily (or menacingly) totes a massive replica pickaxe around Levi’s Stadium. The early iteration of the Niners mascot was not a living manifestation, but a hilarious cartoon depiction of a freewheeling and buffoonish Gold Rush miner. He is in mid-air, his black Cordovan hat fluttering leisurely to the ground, legs and feet pointed in odd directions. He is firing a pistol in each hand: one of them had, apparently, fired a bullet that whizzed just past his own head, while the other gun is aiming vaguely towards the ground. Maybe he was shooting at his own foot. It’s likely he was intoxicated.

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If the mascot was a lout, then the product on the field was an opposite representation. The 49ers were among the better teams in what would be the four-year history of the AAFC, never finishing lower than second place or with fewer than eight victories. For his team’s first head coach, Morabito hired Lawrence Timothy “Buck” Shaw. Like Crowley and Layden, a former Notre Dame star under Knute Rockne. Shaw had gone on to coaching success at nearby Santa Clara University, posting a 40-10-4 record with a pair of Sugar Bowl wins over seven years, before one lackluster (4-5-1) season at the University of California. Behind the passing ability of quarterback Frankie Albert, the strong running of fullback Norm Standlee, and the receiving prowess of Alyn Beals and Len Eshmont, the 49ers in their maiden campaign of 1946 went 9-5 and finished three games behind the Cleveland Browns in the AAFC’s West Division. Their first game, on September 8 at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium, was a 21-7 loss to the New York Yankees. The 49ers drew first blood as Eshmont hauled in an Albert pass for a touchdown, but the Yankees scored the next three touchdowns – including one on a blocked punt – to take control of and win the game. Bad luck and bad hands doomed the 49ers, as lamented by San Francisco Chronicle sports editor Bill Leiser:

SAN FRANCISCO’S first major league football Sunday at Kezar Stadium could easily have gone either way. A couple of not at all difficult pass-catches would have made a game hero out of Pitcher Frankie Albert and would have won for his 49ers. One sudden 15-yard penalty probably cut off another touchdown. And there were other instances in which, had luck been running their way, the San Francisco men could have won.

You read that correctly: Leiser identified the 49ers’ quarterback as a “Pitcher.”

He continued:

One thing: Albert’s passes won’t click unless he has pass catchers. Sunday the predetermined or improvised plan, whichever it was, was apparently to use Alyn Beals as a decoy and throw to somebody else. It worked. Albert got the passes to somebody else, but they weren’t caught.

The 49ers won their next game 21-14 over the Miami Seahawks and would emerge victorious in five of their next seven contests after that. A two-game losing streak to the Browns and the Yankees sunk their chances at winning the division, but winning the final three games, over the Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago Rockets, and Los Angeles Dons, was a nice consolation, a little momentum to hopefully carry into 1947.

They did just that.

The 49ers kicked off their second season of existence with three straight victories, disposing of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Los Angeles Dons, and Baltimore Colts. The previous year, the Baltimore Colts were the Miami Seahawks, a team that was so bungling and burdened with debt –$350,000 in arrears, to be exact – that the AAFC confiscated it and its assets subsequently purchased by a Washington D.C. lawyer, Robert D. Rodenberg, and four businessmen, who relocated and renamed the franchise.

Following those three straight wins, the Niners then fell to the Yankees – San Francisco was now 0-3 all-time versus the Yanks – then defeated the Buffalo Bills, a charter member of the league who had played under the Bisons nickname the year before. A rematch with the Colts resulted in a 28-28 tie in front of “29,556 sun-basking, but rabid, fans” at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, a game in which the Niners needed a late fingertip touchdown grab by Earle Parsons, a second-year halfback out of the University of Southern California, to secure the draw and keep pace with the division-leading Browns.

They were not able to keep pace for long, going just 4-3 over the next eight weeks, while Cleveland went 6-1-1 over the same period to pull comfortably ahead. During that eight-week stretch, the two teams met twice. The first, on October 26 at fog-shrouded Kezar Stadium, was a close-fought 14-7 Browns victory in which their quarterback, Otto Graham, was able to execute a passing attack with a nine-man protection and only Mac Speedie flying down the field; the twenty-seven-year-old left end (receivers were then commonly referred to as “ends”) from the University of Utah had ten catches for 141 yards and a touchdown. “This,” Admiral Jonas Ingram, the new league commissioner, said to Chronicle sports columnist (and future editor) Art Rosenbaum, “is professional football at its finest. Two great teams, a great crowd of 54,325, no one leaving the stadium until the last gun – ah, it makes me feel mighty proud, mighty proud to be the commissioner. Have a cigar.”(Ingram took over the league when Crowley suddenly stepped down and assumed the head coaching duties of the shambolic Chicago Rockets.) In the rematch, on November 16 at the massive Cleveland Municipal Stadium, over 76,000 partisans watched a game that was not quite as competitive as the earlier matchup in San Francisco. The Browns went into halftime with a 16-7 lead and pulled away in the second half, winning by the final score of 37-14. It was easily the worst loss in the 49ers’ short history. The Browns’ offense was so explosive that they didn’t even need the services of their field-goal kicker, Lou Groza, who’d pulled a muscle during the pregame workout; the Browns didn’t sweat using offensive tackle Chet Adams and linebacker Lou Saban to convert the point-after tries.

The 49ers finished 1947 with a record of 8-4 and two ties, a disappointing mark compared to the previous season’s won-loss total, and it was good for their second-straight second-place finish in the AAFC’s West Division.

The 1948 season was something special.

The 1948 season was another second place finish.

This edition of the 49ers was their best yet, as they won their first ten games and finished the season with a 12-2 record. They even recorded their first-ever victories over their Big Apple nemesis, the New York Yankees. Nonetheless, the Cleveland Browns still reigned supreme, going undefeated with a 14-0 record– they were responsible for the Niners’ only two losses – and capturing their third straight AAFC championship. Nonetheless, it was a spectacular showing for the Niners. Over that ten-game season-opening streak, San Francisco outscored its opponents 359 to 142, including big victories over Yankees (41-0), the Dons (36-14), the Rockets (31-14 and 44-21), and the Colts (56-14). For the season, Frankie Albert was magnificent, passing for 1,990 yards and 29 touchdowns to just 10 interceptions, and sharing that year’s MVP award with Cleveland’s Graham. Right halfback Johnny Strzykalski rushed for 951 yards, caught for another 485, and scored 11 total touchdowns. Strzykalski’s left-side counterpart, Len Eshmont, ran for 296 and caught for 214. But the 1948 season was best known for the emergence of the first member of what would later become the “Million Dollar Backfield”: Joe “The Jet” Perry, a twenty-one-year-old rookie fullback who had played a season at Compton Community College in Los Angeles before he was spotted playing for a U.S. Navy team at Naval Air Station Alameda, across the Bay. Upon his discharge from the military, Perry accepted the team’s contract offer. In this, his first season, Perry led the league with 10 rushing touchdowns, while averaging 7.3 yards per carry.

The 1948 San Francisco 49ers led the AAFC in points (495), total yards (5,767), passing touchdowns (30), rushing touchdowns (35), and they finished second in first downs gained (227, behind Cleveland). The Niners were also flagged the most, drawing 89 penalties for 794 yards. Defensive statistics weren’t tracked back then, so it is not possible to paint any sort of picture as to how good – that is, down to a granular level that is afforded by modern analysis – the San Francisco defense was. But their 248 points allowed was the second best in the league after the Browns, who surrendered just 190.

And all it got them was runner-up status in the West.

The Browns made short work of the East champions, the 7-7 Buffalo Bills, destroying them 49-7. Graham threw for 118 yards and a touchdown, while Marion Motley, the league’s leading rusher, carried 14 times for 133 yards and three scores. Cleveland wrapped up pro football’s second perfect season, following the 1937 Los Angeles Bulldogs, a team in an earlier version of the American Football League (there were four total iterations of the AFL) that lasted just two seasons.

The Cleveland Browns were AAFC champs for the third season in a row. In San Francisco, despite the team’s best showing, it was Wait ‘til next year once again.

Why were the Browns so good?

The seeds of Cleveland’s AAFC dominance were planted before the league even began play. One was when founding commissioner Crowley decided against a collegiate draft, instead electing for an open-market system in which the owners were encouraged to sign as many good players as they could grab with the intention of competing with the NFL as quickly as possible. This favored Browns founder and coach Paul Brown, who, as head coach at Massillon Washington High School, at Ohio State University, and with the Bluejackets of Great Lakes Naval Training Station (Chicago), had built an extensive recruiting network and had ready access to top amateur talent, allowing him to assemble the strongest rosters year-in and year-out. Key contributors, such as Groza, Motley, Speedie, and receiver Dante Lavelli had either come from Brown’s teams, or were players whom Brown had coached against and was familiar with. The other seed was the departure of the NFL’s Cleveland Rams to Los Angeles, opening the entire market up to Brown and the Browns. Citing poor weather, poor attendance, and financial losses, Rams owner Dan Reeves began courting the warmer climes of a booming Tinseltown. After winning the NFL championship in 1945, Reeves and the Rams said adios to Cleveland and began trucking their operations to Southern California.

However, the imbalance was creating a problem for the league. In 1948, only the Browns and the 49ers had winning records. None of the other six teams finished higher than 7-7, including the pathetic Chicago Rockets, who endured a rough 1-13 season (with a minus-237 point differential); and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who ended up 2-12.

The league also lost money as attendance totals slipped. The NFL took notice and initial talks towards a truce between the two leagues began. At the outset, the more established league was willing to absorb the Niners and Browns, but the AAFC wanted to send four, even though the struggles of the Chicago and Brooklyn teams weakened that argument. The NFL would later relent.

The 1949 season would be the final hurrah for the All-America Football Conference, and it the most tumultuous of its four seasons. Ingram stepped down as league commissioner, and was replaced by another Navy admiral, Oliver Owen Kessing.

Under Kessing, the AAFC underwent a massive realignment. The Dodgers merged with the Yankees to form the Brooklyn-New York Yankees, the Rockets were sold and renamed the Hornets, and the Baltimore Colts also underwent an ownership change. With now just seven teams, the AAFC cut the schedule from fourteen games to twelve and ditched the two-division West-East format and went with just a single division, consisting of the Bills, Browns, Colts, Dons, Forty-Niners, Hornets, and Yankees.

The Niners began the ’49 season winning their first three games and six of their first seven, including a stunning 56-28 rout of the Browns on October 9 in front of 59,770 “charged up” fans at Kezar Stadium. After San Francisco cornerback Lowell Wagner intercepted Graham and ran it back 25 yards, twisting an ankle in the process, he received a thunderous ovation as he jogged off the field under his own power while eschewing assistance from trainer Bob Kleckner and equipment manager Ziggy Zamlynsky. Browns radio announcer Bob Neal (misspelled “Neill” in the Chronicle account) was impressed. “I’ve never seen anything like this tremendous crowd enthusiasm,” Neal effused. “Is this common at [University of] California football games or is it just for the pros?”

The unexpected and crowd-backed victory launched the 49ers into first place, an unfamiliar position for them to be in halfway through a season. The following week, the Niners thrashed the Bills 51-7. Joe Perry scored three touchdowns on the ground and Frankie Albert tossed three more through the air, connecting with Paul Salata twice and Alyn Beals once.

After that, the balance of power shifted back to the Browns. The 49ers dropped their next two games, one against the Yankees and their rematch with the Browns, allowing Cleveland to jump back ahead in the standings. A three-game win streak to close out the season did little for the Niners’ fortunes, as the Browns would go 5-0 with a tie in their final six contests. Cleveland edged ahead of San Francisco on percentage points, as they went 9-1-2 (.900) to the Niners’ 9-3-0 (.750). But, for the first time in their history, the 49ers would enter postseason play.

With the dissolution of the two-division layout, Kessing had opted for a four-team playoff setup. The first-place Browns would host the fourth-place Bills while the second-place 49ers would take on the third-place Yankees at Kezar in the divisional round. The two winners would then square off for the AAFC championship.

Not surprisingly, the Browns dispatched the Bills, but it was a closer contest than most had anticipated. Buffalo actually had a 14-10 lead going into halftime, but Cleveland outscored them 21-7, pitching a shutout in the fourth quarter to secure a 31-21 victory. At Kezar, the 49ers quietly sent the Yanks packing, scoring touchdowns in the first and third quarters and winning 17-7.

Niners-Browns III, for the whole enchilada, and for the last game ever in the All-America Football Conference, would be held on December 11, 1949, at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

Over 22,000 fans clambered through the turnstiles, an amount rendered paltry by the fact that the gigantic iron horseshoe perched on the shore of the fetid Lake Erie could hold around 80,000. Besides an Edgar “Special Delivery” Jones 2-yard plunge to give the Browns the game’s first points, the fans had little to cheer about in the early going. Otto Graham was awful. He consistently overthrew his wide open receivers and would finish the game with an ugly 7-for-17 stat line. A missed Joe Vetrano field goal was the closest the 49ers could come to scoring in the first two periods, and the two teams went into halftime with Cleveland holding a 7-0 lead. In the third quarter, a Jones 39-yard touchdown run was called back on a penalty, and the Browns ended up turning the ball over to San Francisco on downs. Outside of moving the chains a couple times, the Niners did nothing with the generous gift and had to kick the ball back to Cleveland. That paved the way for the put-away score. After yet another Graham overthrow, fullback Marion Motley took a handoff 68 yards for a touchdown, eluding Lowell Wagner’s diving tackle attempt in the process, and giving the Browns a 14-0 lead that given the 49ers’ sputtering offense thus far seemed insurmountable. Yet, an Albert-to-Salata touchdown connection on fourth down from the 6-yard line early in the final stanza breathed new life into the San Francisco sideline and gave hope to those listening back in the Bay Area that their gridiron squad could still sneak by and grab the victory. Alas, the Niner offense fell back into pathos, and when right halfback William “Dub” Jones toted the ball across from the 4-yard line late in the quarter, giving Cleveland a 14-point lead, the Browns’ fourth-straight AAFC championship was all but assured. The 49ers had one more possession, but it fizzled when they failed to convert on a fourth down. Cleveland celebrated another championship, and the All-America Football Conference would come to an end.

“You’ve come a long way on spirit, further than many may honestly have believed possible,” head coach Buck Shaw told his vanquished team during their after-game dinner. “You deserve congratulations, not sympathy.”

(wnp14.5054; Examiner Negative Collection / Courtesy of a Private Collector)

Peace was at hand.

On December 9, 1949, two days before the championship game, the AAFC and the NFL struck an agreement. The NFL would agree to take on the 49ers, the Browns, and the Colts, while the Los Angeles Dons merged into the L.A. Rams. The Bills, Yankees, and Hornets folded. A new Buffalo Bills team would be born in 1959, to begin play in 1960 as part of the fourth and final iteration of the American Football League. Some of the old Bills players joined the Colts for the team’s first season in the NFL, but after a ghastly 1-11 performance in 1950, the Colts dissolved.In 1953, a new Baltimore Colts franchise would be born into the NFL.

The Browns were an immediate success upon their jump, winning the NFL title in 1950, and again in 1954 and 1955. In between, they lost three straight NFL title games, but had cemented themselves as one of the league’s elite franchises of the time. The Browns’ 1950 triumph came at the expense of the Rams and their compliment of old Dons players, and, ironically, the same franchise that they essentially pushed out of Cleveland in 1946.

The 49ers, on the other hand, were not quite as successful in those early NFL days.

They also weren’t terrible, at least most of the time. They just weren’t Cleveland Brownsgood. And it ultimately cost Buck Shaw his job.

The 1950 Niners went 3-9, finishing fifth in the seven-team National Division. But they rebounded to 7-4-1 (second) in 1951, 7-5 (third) in 1952, 9-3 (second in the newly-organized six-team West Division) in 1953, and 7-4-1 (third) in 1954. On December 14, Tony Morabito held a press conference at the Flatiron-shaped, terra-cotta-adorned Phelan Building on San Francisco’s Market Street to announce that Shaw, the only head coach the 49ers had ever known, would not be back. Joe Vetrano, the Niners’ former placekicker, by now an assistant coach, was lingering in a hallway when the announcement came. Told by reporters that the assistants would be retained, but subject to the approval of the new head coach, Vetrano deadpanned solemnly, “Oh. Merry Christmas.” Shaw would be replaced by Red Strader, recently the Yankees’ head coach. Vetrano would stick around for another two years.

Today, the 49ers’ early legacy in the All-America Football Conference is largely forgotten, which is too bad, because it featured some fantastic football. In those four seasons, the Niners won 38 games, lost 14, finished in second place each year, and played in one AAFC title game. Quarterback Frankie Albert won a co-MVP, and fullback Joe “The Jet” Perry emerged as a future star, rushing for a league-leading 783 yards in 1949. Perry would become the first African-American player to win MVP, and he would be voted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1969 as well as the Hall’s All-1950s team. The 49ers retired his jersey number 34, and it is currently depicted above the west-side suites at Levi’s Stadium.

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