America's Game

On the forty-second page of “America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation” author Michael MacCambridge wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

newspaper reporter, "or he'll go to hell." Bell indeed went to Penn in 1914, majoring in English and playing football for three years as a quarterback. In 1916, Penn went 7-2-1 and expected a bid to the Rose Bowl. Bell started at quarterback in the game, January 1, 1917, where unbeaten Oregon prevailed 14-0. After a two-year stint with an army medical unit in France, he returned to captain Penn's football team in 1919, graduated in 1920, and returned that fall as an assistant for Penn head coach John Heisman, where he remained on staff through 1928.

Though he worked nominally as a stockbroker during the '20s, Bell spent the decade living a life not unlike the romanticized cinematic visions of the '20s, frequenting nightclubs, dancehalls, and speakeasies, tooling around town in a cherry-red Marmon roadster and a coonskin coat, playing with equal vigor the stock market, the gambling halls, and the horses, devoting the month of August to the summer season at Saratoga. On summer Saturdays in Chelsea, when his father would leave for Philadelphia to attend church services the following morning, Bert Bell would often throw a party, hosting his eclectic assemblage of friends—ranging from entertainers like Bob Hope and Cesar Romero to blue-collar acquaintances from the resort town.

After a series of financial setbacks, Bell was working for his father, managing the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Broad Street. It was there he met the musical comedy actress and former Ziegfeld dancer Frances Upton, a sweet, vivacious dazzler with a dramatic streak and a staunch moral fiber, a perfectly complicated Catholic beauty of the modern age. Between starring roles in such Broadway hits as Whoopee!, with Eddie Cantor, Frances Upton often performed sets at the Ritz's small, swanky rooftop lounge. Doting on Frances, the smitten Bell would wait until she finished her performance, then escort her to a nearby Catholic church where a mass was held at two in the morning for late-shift printers and newspaper workers. While the daily communicant Frances went inside, Bert remained outside on the street, reading the paper, joshing with the police officers, and watching the nightlife. One summer night when Bert professed his undying love to Frances, she told him she could never marry a drinking man. Surrounded by friends, he ordered one last drink and downed it, then vowed to her he would never touch alcohol again. By all accounts, he didn't; they were married January 4, 1934.

The previous summer, Bell had borrowed $2,500 from his fiancée and along with his former Penn teammate Lud Wray, headed a syndicate that bought the NFL's defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets francise, a pro power in the '20s that had gone bankrupt during the 1931 season. Renaming the team the Eagles, after the eagle logo on the National Recovery Administration's em[blem]

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