Chris Matthews is an Idiot

If Chris Matthews and Ed Rendell are going to shoot off their mouths about their expertise on the NFL, they should know that the Green Bay Packers are named after the fish packing industry in northern Wisconsin, not the meat packing industry. I hold no torch for the Packers, and I think the Steelers will win, but it's the fish packing industry, you morons.

Update, Sunday 7:00am: Our commenter makes an interesting point. My authority was simply living in Milwaukee for ten years and suffering through many hours of adoring fans' converstion about the team.

The Indian Packing Company, it turns out, was actually the initial sponsor of the team. While the sponsorship did not survive even the first season, the name did. It was a Delaware company and was indeed a meat packer. However, Green Bay had a significant commercial fishing industry at the time and the town had many fish packing plants. I'm inclined to doubt that there was one meat packing plant in than kind of fishing town, so I suspect that the company, while a meat packer elsewhere, might very well have been a fish packer in Green Bay.

That also points out that the team was not named in behalf of an industry after all, it was named after the individual company that sponsored their creation, something that I did not know. It's also possible the team was named after an individual meat packer, in which case I stand corrected, but they still were not named after a non-existent "meat packing industry."

Green Bay did not have meat packing industry. It did have, at the time the Packers were created, a fish packing industry but it turns out the team was not named in its behalf. It was named for an individual company which may have been a meat packer or may, and I'm sticking to my story, have been a fish packer. Have I lost track of my original point? Whatever.

Interestingly, had the team been named for the predominant local industry, they would probably be called the "Green Bay Tissues" after the paper industry, which has always been the major support of Green Bay's prosperity. That would be cool; the "Green Bay Tissues."

If they were named after Green Bay's best product, they would be named the "Green Bay Bratwurst," which is so good that I won't buy it anywhere else in the country. (Actually, Sheboygan, just a few miles south of Green Bay.) If you don't know what that is, it's a German kind of weenie. Yes, I sort of called the team from Wisconsin weenies.