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Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia
A radio/television sports announcer who moved to Baltimore in what turned out to be the final decade of the Baltimore Colts, Ted Patterson has amassed one of the world's premier collections of Baltimore sports memorabilia. In this short history of football in Baltimore, he takes us on a tour of his remarkable collection―not only to highlight memorable games and players but also to explore the pop culture that surrounded and has survived them. Patterson introduces us to the teams and early stars of Johns Hopkins and Morgan State; Army-Navy games in old Municipal Stadium; high-school rivalries like City-Poly, Loyola-Calvert Hall, Gilman-McDonogh, and the great years of Patterson High; the original Colts (colors silver and green); and, at considerable length, the legendary Baltimore Colts of Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, Alan "the Horse" Ameche, Artie Donovan, and Lydell Mitchell. He also includes the lastest chapters in this eventful the fight to bring pro football back to the city, the dawn of the Ravens' era, and the building of a new football stadium in downtown Baltimore. Football in Baltimore offers an engaging, wonderfully illustrated history of Baltimore's love affair with the game―a running essay on the large subject of football in Baltimore's past along with the varied and highly colorful material objects that the game generated for the sake of the fans and that fans generated for the fun of it. Here are game programs, autographed pictures, press guides, bubblegum cards, comic strips, advertising ephemera, and miscellaneous collectibles from championship banners to the special-issue sets of china that Carroll Rosenbloom once gave to the Colts and their wives as Christmas gifts. This altogether new take on the game and the storied Colts will appeal to every lover of the college and pro game―and may even inspire popular support for a Colts museum to match the Babe Ruth House and Museum. Patterson's engaging writing style keeps the pages turning. Dozens of color and black-and-white photographs from Patterson's collection will captivate Colts fans, football lovers, local history buffs, and sports memorabilia collectors.
- GenresFootball
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 2000
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November 23, 2025
Football in Baltimore has long enjoyed the status of a civil religion; and in his book Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, Ted Patterson shows how far back the gridiron history of Maryland's largest city goes. Patterson, a veteran radio broadcaster who provided play-by-play and color commentary for Baltimore's football teams, is also an avid collector of football memorabilia for Baltimore clubs, and his extensive collection provides a basis for this book.
If you're expecting to see the Baltimore Colts and Ravens discussed in this book, you will not be disappointed. But Patterson, a thorough and diligent student of the game, goes back much further than the Baltimore Colts' 1947 debut as a member of the old All-American Football Conference -- as far back as the 1890's-era beginnings of college football at area universities such as Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Naval Academy.
One gets to meet local college football luminaries like Earl Banks, longtime coach at Morgan State University. Of his players at Morgan State, an historically African-American university in North Baltimore, Banks says, “About two days a week I talk life, not football, to my boys….I tell it like it is and they know that. They know they’ll hear it straight from the shoulder, with no frills or fancy talk. I tell them if they act like a man they’ll be treated like one. They may come to us as boys but they leave as men. Good men with a purpose in life” (p. 51). Coach Banks’s ability to inspire his players comes through loud and clear.
The longtime football rivalry between City College High School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute -- folks in Baltimore just call the game "City-Poly" -- also receives its due. And while the University of Maryland plays most of its home games at the university's main campus in College Park -- much closer to Washington, D.C., than to Baltimore -- Patterson dutifully chronicles the times when the Terrapins have played at one or another of Baltimore's stadiums.
But the heart of the book, for many fans, will be Patterson's chronicling of the Baltimore Colts. First, we hear about the underachieving AAFC team in green and silver; then, we learn about the short-lived first NFL incarnation; and then, finally, we are introduced to the classic team of Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Art "The Gladiator" Donovan and Alan Ameche and Gino Marchetti. That team, a relocated Dallas franchise, was, oddly enough, “assigned to the Western Division [of the National Football League], even though they were farther east than most other teams in the league” (p. 102). It is for that reason that the Baltimore Colts almost never played against the team that, logically, should have been their main regional rival, just 35 miles down the road in Washington, D.C.
From humble beginnings, the Baltimore Colts became the team that won the 1958 NFL championship, "the Greatest Game Ever Played" (and the 1959 NFL championship, too, though not as many people seem to remember that one). Patterson's comprehensive collection of all things relating to the Baltimore Colts really brings this part of the book to vivid life, particularly on the many pages of color plates.
Testimony from members of those historic Baltimore Colts team further emphasizes the strong ties that existed between the Baltimore Colts – then a new team that constituted their city’s first major-league franchise in any sport in the modern era – and the fan community of Baltimore, historically an industrial, working-class city whose people felt overlooked among larger, wealthier, better-known Eastern cities like New York and Washington, D.C. Defensive end Gino Marchetti, looking back from the perspective of the 1990’s, pays eloquent tribute to the Baltimore Colts fan community’s love for the team:
If someone told me during my rookie year that people would still be talking about us after 40 years, I’d have never believed them. We belonged to the Baltimore community. We’d go out and speak at banquets and make personal appearances. We didn’t make any money but we were out there. I used to say of the 57,000 who came to our games every week, I personally shook hands with every one of them. That made a big difference. If you talked with a fan for two minutes, that fan now knows you. You’re not a number, you’re a person to them. (p. 102)
The long sad story of the Baltimore Colts' decline in the 1970's and 1980's, and of owner Robert Irsay's midnight move of the team to Indianapolis in 1984, is here as well. A preview of those unwelcome times came after the 1971 season, when team owner Carroll Rosenbloom, unhappy that neither Baltimore City nor Baltimore County would commit to build and pay for a new stadium for the team, “announced after the season that the Colts would leave their Western Maryland training camp after 19 years and train in Tampa, where they would also play three exhibition games. Bumper stickers appeared on Maryland cars that read ‘Don’t TAMPA With Our Colts,’ reacting to rumors that the Colts were being courted by Tampa’” (p. 200).
History records, of course, that the Baltimore Colts did not move to Tampa; rather, that region of Florida got its own expansion team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But the Baltimore Colts did leave their city, in 1984, when then-team owner Robert Irsay loaded the team’s assets onto Mayflower moving vans in the middle of a snowy March night and moved the team west to Indianapolis. It is a moment that many Baltimoreans still look back upon with a certain bitterness.
Thorough as ever, Patterson chronicles oddities from the city's 12 years as an unhappily NFL-free zone. Examples of that time include the United States Football League's mid-1980's Baltimore Stars (a team that played in College Park and achieved the unusual distinction of winning a pro-football championship for Baltimore without ever setting foot in the city) and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore CFL Colts/Baltimore Stallions -- still the only U.S. team ever to win the Grey Cup as champions of Canadian football. I remember walking through the Inner Harbor one day in the mid-1980's, and looking up and seeing on the roof tiles of the old Power Plant an inscription that read, "The NFL Is Watching -- Support the Stars." Reading Patterson's book brought back those memories.
This edition of Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia was published in 2000, and therefore the city's second NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, is included as well. At the time that Patterson was collecting the memorabilia included in this book, the Ravens still had their old logo (a shield-shaped, winged-"B" curiosity that eventually got the team sued by a South Baltimore resident claiming copyright infringement), and the team had demonstrated dogged persistence but relatively little success. Few people at the time of the book's publication in 2000 would have made bold to suggest that the team would be Super Bowl champions by 2001. I certainly would not have done so; I saw the Ravens lose a perfectly boring 10-3 game to Washington's NFL team, at Landover in October of 2000, and was glad to be proven wrong about the Ravens a few months later.
As a Marylander and a fan of Baltimore football, I enjoyed Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, with its collection of Ted Patterson's football memorabilia. Any student of football history would probably enjoy this book as well.
If you're expecting to see the Baltimore Colts and Ravens discussed in this book, you will not be disappointed. But Patterson, a thorough and diligent student of the game, goes back much further than the Baltimore Colts' 1947 debut as a member of the old All-American Football Conference -- as far back as the 1890's-era beginnings of college football at area universities such as Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Naval Academy.
One gets to meet local college football luminaries like Earl Banks, longtime coach at Morgan State University. Of his players at Morgan State, an historically African-American university in North Baltimore, Banks says, “About two days a week I talk life, not football, to my boys….I tell it like it is and they know that. They know they’ll hear it straight from the shoulder, with no frills or fancy talk. I tell them if they act like a man they’ll be treated like one. They may come to us as boys but they leave as men. Good men with a purpose in life” (p. 51). Coach Banks’s ability to inspire his players comes through loud and clear.
The longtime football rivalry between City College High School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute -- folks in Baltimore just call the game "City-Poly" -- also receives its due. And while the University of Maryland plays most of its home games at the university's main campus in College Park -- much closer to Washington, D.C., than to Baltimore -- Patterson dutifully chronicles the times when the Terrapins have played at one or another of Baltimore's stadiums.
But the heart of the book, for many fans, will be Patterson's chronicling of the Baltimore Colts. First, we hear about the underachieving AAFC team in green and silver; then, we learn about the short-lived first NFL incarnation; and then, finally, we are introduced to the classic team of Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Art "The Gladiator" Donovan and Alan Ameche and Gino Marchetti. That team, a relocated Dallas franchise, was, oddly enough, “assigned to the Western Division [of the National Football League], even though they were farther east than most other teams in the league” (p. 102). It is for that reason that the Baltimore Colts almost never played against the team that, logically, should have been their main regional rival, just 35 miles down the road in Washington, D.C.
From humble beginnings, the Baltimore Colts became the team that won the 1958 NFL championship, "the Greatest Game Ever Played" (and the 1959 NFL championship, too, though not as many people seem to remember that one). Patterson's comprehensive collection of all things relating to the Baltimore Colts really brings this part of the book to vivid life, particularly on the many pages of color plates.
Testimony from members of those historic Baltimore Colts team further emphasizes the strong ties that existed between the Baltimore Colts – then a new team that constituted their city’s first major-league franchise in any sport in the modern era – and the fan community of Baltimore, historically an industrial, working-class city whose people felt overlooked among larger, wealthier, better-known Eastern cities like New York and Washington, D.C. Defensive end Gino Marchetti, looking back from the perspective of the 1990’s, pays eloquent tribute to the Baltimore Colts fan community’s love for the team:
If someone told me during my rookie year that people would still be talking about us after 40 years, I’d have never believed them. We belonged to the Baltimore community. We’d go out and speak at banquets and make personal appearances. We didn’t make any money but we were out there. I used to say of the 57,000 who came to our games every week, I personally shook hands with every one of them. That made a big difference. If you talked with a fan for two minutes, that fan now knows you. You’re not a number, you’re a person to them. (p. 102)
The long sad story of the Baltimore Colts' decline in the 1970's and 1980's, and of owner Robert Irsay's midnight move of the team to Indianapolis in 1984, is here as well. A preview of those unwelcome times came after the 1971 season, when team owner Carroll Rosenbloom, unhappy that neither Baltimore City nor Baltimore County would commit to build and pay for a new stadium for the team, “announced after the season that the Colts would leave their Western Maryland training camp after 19 years and train in Tampa, where they would also play three exhibition games. Bumper stickers appeared on Maryland cars that read ‘Don’t TAMPA With Our Colts,’ reacting to rumors that the Colts were being courted by Tampa’” (p. 200).
History records, of course, that the Baltimore Colts did not move to Tampa; rather, that region of Florida got its own expansion team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But the Baltimore Colts did leave their city, in 1984, when then-team owner Robert Irsay loaded the team’s assets onto Mayflower moving vans in the middle of a snowy March night and moved the team west to Indianapolis. It is a moment that many Baltimoreans still look back upon with a certain bitterness.
Thorough as ever, Patterson chronicles oddities from the city's 12 years as an unhappily NFL-free zone. Examples of that time include the United States Football League's mid-1980's Baltimore Stars (a team that played in College Park and achieved the unusual distinction of winning a pro-football championship for Baltimore without ever setting foot in the city) and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore CFL Colts/Baltimore Stallions -- still the only U.S. team ever to win the Grey Cup as champions of Canadian football. I remember walking through the Inner Harbor one day in the mid-1980's, and looking up and seeing on the roof tiles of the old Power Plant an inscription that read, "The NFL Is Watching -- Support the Stars." Reading Patterson's book brought back those memories.
This edition of Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia was published in 2000, and therefore the city's second NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, is included as well. At the time that Patterson was collecting the memorabilia included in this book, the Ravens still had their old logo (a shield-shaped, winged-"B" curiosity that eventually got the team sued by a South Baltimore resident claiming copyright infringement), and the team had demonstrated dogged persistence but relatively little success. Few people at the time of the book's publication in 2000 would have made bold to suggest that the team would be Super Bowl champions by 2001. I certainly would not have done so; I saw the Ravens lose a perfectly boring 10-3 game to Washington's NFL team, at Landover in October of 2000, and was glad to be proven wrong about the Ravens a few months later.
As a Marylander and a fan of Baltimore football, I enjoyed Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, with its collection of Ted Patterson's football memorabilia. Any student of football history would probably enjoy this book as well.
September 14, 2014
Football in Baltimore has long enjoyed the status of a civil religion; and in his book Football in Baltimore, Ted Patterson shows how far back the gridiron history of Maryland's largest city goes. Patterson, a longtime radio broadcaster with a substantial history of providing play-by-play and color commentary for Baltimore's football teams, is also an avid collector of football memorabilia for Baltimore clubs; and his extensive collection provides a basis for this book.
If you're expecting to see the Baltimore Colts and Ravens discussed in this book, you won't be disappointed. But Patterson, a thorough and diligent student of the game, goes back much further than the Baltimore Colts' 1947 debut as a member of the old All-American Football Conference -- as far back as the 1890's-era beginnings of college football at area universities such as Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Naval Academy. The longtime football rivalry between City College High School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute -- folks in Baltimore just call the game "City-Poly" -- also receives its due. And while the University of Maryland plays most of its home games at the university's main campus in College Park -- much closer to Washington, D.C., than to Baltimore -- Patterson dutifully chronicles the times when the Terrapins have played at one or another of Baltimore's stadiums.
But the heart of the book, for many fans, will be Patterson's chronicling of the Baltimore Colts -- first, the underachieving AAFC team in green and silver; then, the short-lived first NFL incarnation; and then, finally, the classic team of Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Art "The Gladiator" Donovan and Alan Ameche and Gino Marchetti. That is the team that won the 1958 NFL championship, "the Greatest Game Ever Played" (and the 1959 NFL championship, too, though not as many people seem to remember that one). Patterson's comprehensive collection of all things relating to the Baltimore Colts really brings this part of the book to vivid life, particularly on the many pages of color plates.
The long sad story of the Baltimore Colts' decline in the 1970's and 1980's, and of owner Robert Irsay's midnight move of the team to Indianapolis in 1984, is here as well. Thorough as ever, Patterson chronicles oddities from the city's 12 years as an unhappily NFL-free zone. Examples of that time include the United States Football League's mid-1980's Baltimore Stars (a team that played in College Park and achieved the unusual distinction of winning a pro-football championship for Baltimore without ever setting foot in the city) and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore CFL Colts/Baltimore Stallions -- still the only U.S. team ever to win the Grey Cup as champions of Canadian football. I remember walking through the Inner Harbor one day in the mid-1980's, and looking up and seeing on the roof tiles of the old Power Plant an inscription that read, "The NFL Is Watching -- Support the Stars." Reading Patterson's book brought back those memories.
This edition of Football in Baltimore was published in 2000, and therefore the city's second NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, is included as well. At the time that Patterson was collecting the memorabilia included in this book, the Ravens still had their old logo (a shield-shaped, winged-"B" curiosity that eventually got the team sued by a South Baltimore resident claiming copyright infringement), and the team had demonstrated dogged persistence but relatively little success. Few people at the time of the book's publication in 2000 would have made bold to suggest that the team would be Super Bowl champions by 2001. I certainly would not have done so; I saw the Ravens lose a perfectly boring 9-7 game to Washington's NFL team, at Landover in the fall of 2000, and was glad to be proven wrong about the Ravens a few months later.
If you're a fan of Baltimore football, then Football in Baltimore, with its collection of Ted Patterson's football memorabilia, deserves a place in your book collection.
If you're expecting to see the Baltimore Colts and Ravens discussed in this book, you won't be disappointed. But Patterson, a thorough and diligent student of the game, goes back much further than the Baltimore Colts' 1947 debut as a member of the old All-American Football Conference -- as far back as the 1890's-era beginnings of college football at area universities such as Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Naval Academy. The longtime football rivalry between City College High School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute -- folks in Baltimore just call the game "City-Poly" -- also receives its due. And while the University of Maryland plays most of its home games at the university's main campus in College Park -- much closer to Washington, D.C., than to Baltimore -- Patterson dutifully chronicles the times when the Terrapins have played at one or another of Baltimore's stadiums.
But the heart of the book, for many fans, will be Patterson's chronicling of the Baltimore Colts -- first, the underachieving AAFC team in green and silver; then, the short-lived first NFL incarnation; and then, finally, the classic team of Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Art "The Gladiator" Donovan and Alan Ameche and Gino Marchetti. That is the team that won the 1958 NFL championship, "the Greatest Game Ever Played" (and the 1959 NFL championship, too, though not as many people seem to remember that one). Patterson's comprehensive collection of all things relating to the Baltimore Colts really brings this part of the book to vivid life, particularly on the many pages of color plates.
The long sad story of the Baltimore Colts' decline in the 1970's and 1980's, and of owner Robert Irsay's midnight move of the team to Indianapolis in 1984, is here as well. Thorough as ever, Patterson chronicles oddities from the city's 12 years as an unhappily NFL-free zone. Examples of that time include the United States Football League's mid-1980's Baltimore Stars (a team that played in College Park and achieved the unusual distinction of winning a pro-football championship for Baltimore without ever setting foot in the city) and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore CFL Colts/Baltimore Stallions -- still the only U.S. team ever to win the Grey Cup as champions of Canadian football. I remember walking through the Inner Harbor one day in the mid-1980's, and looking up and seeing on the roof tiles of the old Power Plant an inscription that read, "The NFL Is Watching -- Support the Stars." Reading Patterson's book brought back those memories.
This edition of Football in Baltimore was published in 2000, and therefore the city's second NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, is included as well. At the time that Patterson was collecting the memorabilia included in this book, the Ravens still had their old logo (a shield-shaped, winged-"B" curiosity that eventually got the team sued by a South Baltimore resident claiming copyright infringement), and the team had demonstrated dogged persistence but relatively little success. Few people at the time of the book's publication in 2000 would have made bold to suggest that the team would be Super Bowl champions by 2001. I certainly would not have done so; I saw the Ravens lose a perfectly boring 9-7 game to Washington's NFL team, at Landover in the fall of 2000, and was glad to be proven wrong about the Ravens a few months later.
If you're a fan of Baltimore football, then Football in Baltimore, with its collection of Ted Patterson's football memorabilia, deserves a place in your book collection.
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