Green Bay

I'd figured Green Bay for a football town, and that seems to be the right guess.  But it's more than that.  It has 104,000 residents and is known in some circles for the National Railroad Museum, which I'm doing a separate post for.  It seems to be a lovely town with a number of historic buildings. 

But it's also heavily invested in the Green Bay Packers football team.

The Packers are the only publicly owned franchise in the NFL.  Rather than being the property of an individual, partnership, or corporate entity, they are held as of 2016 by 360,760 stockholders.  No one is allowed to hold more than 200,000 shares, which represents approximately four percent of the 5,011,558 shares currently outstanding.  It is this broad-based community support and non-profit structure which has kept the team in Green Bay for nearly a century in spite of being the smallest market in all of North American professional sports.

Green Bay is the only team with this public form of ownership structure in the NFL, grandfathered when the NFL's current ownership policy stipulating a maximum of 32 owners per team, with one holding a minimum 30% stake, was established in the 1980s.  As a publicly held nonprofit, the Packers are also the only American major-league sports franchise to release its financial balance sheet every year.

I copied this off the Wikipedia page labeled Green Bay Packers, Inc., to give an idea of how unusual this team is - the only NFL team that isn't owned by one person or a small group of people and the only one in such a small town.

I saw Bart Starr Drive, Mike McCarthy Drive, and of course Lombardi Drive - a primary road in town that runs past the stadium.

my photo of Lambeau Field

Streets around the area have official street signs that say, "No Parking Day of Packers Game."  And I'm sure the traffic is intense.  Just off to the right of this photo there's a huge area that's labeled Tailgaters Field, though it's paved - nothing field-y about it.  I'm sure that, like a more informal area around the Univ. of Texas stadium, competition for tailgating spaces is intense.

I couldn't help but notice that it's an open air stadium, and I thought about the town being situated at the end of a long body of water off the Great Lakes and about the NFL season lasting into full-on winter, and this is Wisconsin after all, not Florida.  These are hardy players and fans.

I talked with several people who said they loved living in Green Bay, that it's a really pleasant place to live and that people are really nice.  So there you have it.