Harold "Red" Grange, Forksville, Sullivan County

March came in rainy and chilly, which I don't especially like. It's going to be an extremely busy month for me, for multiple reasons, although the panic has not quite set in. Not yet. Probably next week, when it hits me that Zenkaikon is coming up fast and I need to be ready to present. Did you ever hear that advice about how, if you get nervous when public speaking, you should picture audience members in weird costumes? At Zenkaikon I don't have to picture anyone, because half the audience is in costume. I don't get very nervous anyway, but the costumes make it a little easier to relax.

But before I head to Lancaster and prattle about historic buildings and Japanese cherry blossoms and samurai visiting the White House (yes, those are my topics this year), we'll take a run up to lovely Sullivan County and talk about a guy who played football. That is, of course, putting it mildly.

Lehigh-Lafayette Football Game, Bethlehem and Easton, Northampton County

The weather this week has been really hard on me. I've been taking pain medicine at night in order to be able to sleep. Between the excessive heat warnings, the (sometimes fulfilled) threat of thunderstorms, and the rising humidity pushing the barometer down, I haven't been exactly well. My longtime readers know that I'm very much at the mercy of the weather for a lot of things, and it's hard to be awesome when you don't want to move. But I'm doing my best here.

Being subject to the weather isn't helping with another problem - I'm running low on stockpiled markers, as I've mentioned. I'll be fixing that a bit in the coming weeks; I have a planned day trip to Schuylkill County near the end of July to collect markers with a college friend, and a few other possibilities up my sleeve. I have some plans for posts on the other blog as well, such as next month when some of my friends and I go to Dorney Park in Allentown and celebrate the 100th birthday of the roller coaster Thunderhawk.

All of that is to tell you why this week's post is about a football game. I just collected the second of the two relevant markers during a trip to Bethlehem with best friend Andrea last week; we were a little bored, the weather was decent, and we decided to grab a few markers in the nearby city and follow up with ice cream at the historic Bethlehem Dairy Store, familiarly known as "the Cup." I'd heard of it but never been, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in the vicinity of Lehigh University. A proper marker hunt always involves ice cream, you know, it's a rule.

Veterans Stadium, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County

Here we are, the final blog post of 2022! Well, almost - next week I'll be sharing my annual wrap-up post, where I talk about the statistics of the blog and the new friends I've made and what I've got in mind as I head into the next year. I will then be radio silent, apart from occasional posts on Facebook, for the month of December. (Why? Because as my longtime readers know, my day job is retail. That pretty much says it all.) In 2023, I'll be heading into my fifth year of this blog, which kind of astounds me.

We're going to close out the active blogging year with a visit to a place that has been gone for many years. Unlike many of the buildings I've profiled on this blog, however, this one is like the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - I've actually been inside. I grew up roughly an hour's drive away from Philadelphia, depending on traffic anyway, and the two big settings for much of anything in those days were Veterans Stadium and the Spectrum Arena. Nothing else really compared to the two. Both were part of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex; both were home to Philadelphia pro sports teams (baseball and football at the Vet, hockey and basketball at the Spectrum); and both were popular venues for concerts and other large-scale events. Both are also gone.

Pottsville Maroons, Pottsville, Schuylkill County

Today we're going to be looking at a subject that doesn't usually interest me: football. After all, this is Super Bowl weekend coming up! Sure, I cheered as much as anybody else when the Eagles won the 2016 Super Bowl - I live in Eagles Country, after all. And I did spend my final two years of high school as a member of the varsity football team. (No, really, I did. I was the equipment manager.) But in general, I'm not super enthused about the sport. 

However, today's story is one that I find pretty intriguing despite my usual apathy for the topic, because the controversy has endured for nearly a century. Who really won the NFL championship of 1925?