Did you know there was once an NFL team so close to this spot you could walk to the game? And these hometown Orange boys twice got to compete for the early (kind of) equivalent of the Super Bowl?
Here’s a statement designed to spark a fight: If you’re a loyal North Jersey resident, then the NY Giants should be your most hated rival, and instead you should be a die-hard Redskins fan!
Sounds like I have some ‘splaining to do…
We have to jump back to 1929-1930, when professional football was still in its infancy, and while it was huge in the rural Midwest, it had yet to really catch on with fans in the East, where college powerhouses like Princeton were a much bigger draw. [Useless trivia alert: There are only two surviving founding franchises from the NFL’s 1920 creation—the Chicago Bears (then called the Decatur Staleys) and the Arizona Cardinals (then the Chicago Cardinals)—because the Green Bay Packers, although the oldest franchise with no name or location change, didn’t join the league until 1921.]
Back then, the forming and folding of NFL teams was an almost yearly occurrence, with at least 51 teams from the league’s first 40 years now long gone. When the Duluth (Minnesota) Eskimos folded in 1929, their owner Ole Haugsrud sold the franchise rights to Orange, New Jersey meat salesman Edwin “Piggy” Simandl, who had high hopes for a group of football players he managed who had, until then, been known as the Orange Athletic Club (an amateur club since 1887 that had turned semi-pro in 1919). Orange had even had the honor of playing in the brief World Series of Football tournament at the old Madison Square Garden in 1902 and 1903, the official first-ever indoor football games.
So when Piggy Simandl bought the defunct Eskimoes franchise, he started with his existing lineup and gave this unexpected town of Orange, New Jersey an NFL team: The Orange Tornadoes (or sometimes Golden Tornadoes).
It’s tough to find a lot of solid info about the club and its players, and a big reason for that was its brief life and nomadic home games: The team played all around Orange and even East Orange, from Knights of Columbus Stadium to Casey Stadium to Orange's Central Playground to Ashland Field (now Paul Robeson Stadium) and Orange Oval Park.
The NFL’s Orange Golden Tornadoes opened their season at Knights of Columbus stadium with an impressive 34-0 exhibition game shutout of the Elizabeth Collegians on Sept. 22, 1929. In their first league game on Sept. 29, they faced off against the New York Giants and managed to hold them to a 0-0 tie in front of 9,000 fans at Casey Stadium.
Unfortunately, the rest of the season didn’t go quite as well, with the Orange Tornadoes losing a November 10 rematch against the Giants at the Polo Grounds 22-0 before 20,000 fans, and a December 8 26-0 shutout loss to the Chicago Cardinals. By the end of the season, they had a 3-4-4 NFL record and were 6-5-4 overall, good enough for 6th in the league.
But there were other challenges beyond the play on the field that would doom the Orange Tornadoes existence: One was the stock market crash on October 29, 1929. Another was poor attendance at home games by the end of the season (about 1,500 fans showed up), which led owner Simandl to relocate the team to Newark for the 1930 season.
The third challenge came from within: After another NFL team, the Dayton Triangles, folded at the end of the season, Orange Tornadoes coach Jack Depler bought that franchise and started a new team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, who played at Ebbets Field—and took most of the Tornadoes’ players with him. When the Newark Tornadoes opened the 1930 season, they did so with a roster mostly filled with college players—Simandl himself even took the field as fullback for a few games. They finished the season 1-11-1, including two shutout losses to the turncoat Brooklyn Dodgers, and Simandl gave up his NFL franchise (although the Orange A.C. would continue, and play exhibitions against the NY Giants, for several more years).
Depending on who you ask, the Orange Tornadoes’ history either ended or lived on from there. Although the NFL officially says the franchise was discontinued, the next year a franchise was granted to the Boston Braves, who other sources say was a purchase of the Orange franchise. The Braves renamed themselves the Redskins and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1937, where they have played against the rival Giants ever since.
The mostly forgotten Orange (sometimes Golden) Tornadoes, meanwhile, will always be remembered for one particular quirk: Some teams in that era were just starting to use jersey numbers to help fans and officials tell which player was which. Orange, for reasons long since lost, instead used different letters instead of numbers to distinguish between players. That idea, like NFL football in Orange, never quite caught on…
What, you were here looking for a cache? Well, I'll warn you, this one is tough to find if there are muggles around — they abound here if there's a game being played or there are kids on the playground. But if you happen to be here in the early morning or when there's not much going on, it should be a relatively quick grab.
Congrats to BigA800 for the FTF!!!