Dino Lucarelli remembers it as if it were only yesterday.
But in actuality, it was a lot of yesterdays ago.
It was 69 years ago today, on Sept. 6, 1946, that the Browns played the Miami Seahawks at Cleveland Stadium in their first regular-season game ever in the fledgling All-America Football Conference. Since it was so long ago – just a year after the end of World War II, in fact — not a whole lot of people among the 60,135 who attended, the largest crowd ever to see a pro football game to that time, are still around to tell the story. But Lucarelli is one of them.
Then a 12-year-old living in the Cleveland suburb of Garfield Heights, Lucarelli went to the game with his older sister and her fiancee. The two adults had tickets for the grandstand, and they gave him a quarter – all of 25 cents – for a ticket in the bleachers. They had him wear a bright red shirt and sit in the top row of the middle section of the bleachers, section 50, so they could keep an eye on him.
“They told me to go to the bathroom, buy a soda pop, a hot dog, a bag of popcorn or whatever else I wanted to do down underneath in the concourse, because once I sat down, I wasn’t allowed to move from my seat until the game was over,” said Lucarelli, now 81 and residing in Independence, just south of Cleveland, with his wife, Angie.
It was good that he remained in his seat and locked in to the action, for he saw quite a sight on a hot, humid Friday night to open Labor Day weekend. The Browns won going away, 44-0.
It was never close, as they led 10-0 after one quarter and 27-0 at halftime. They tacked on 17 more points in the fourth quarter to add an exclamation point to their performance.
Cliff Lewis, from nearby Lakewood, Ohio, started the game at quarterback and threw a 19-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Mac Speedie to open the scoring.
Lewis was replaced in the second quarter by a Northwestern product named Otto Graham, who fired a 39-yard TD pass to wide receiver Dante Lavelli, from Hudson, Ohio, in the second quarter. As such, Graham began his journey to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Lavelli joins him in Canton, as does Martins Ferry, Ohio’s Lou Groza, who kicked three field goals covering 22, 27 and 21 yards.
The Browns also got touchdowns on a 50-yard run by running back Tom Colella, a three-yard fumble return by cornerback Don Greenwood and a 76-yard interception return by cornerback Ray Terrell.
But it wasn’t just that the Browns won, but rather how they won, that impressed their fans, especially Lavelli.
“I had never seen anything like that, with the speed of the game, all the passing, the roar of the crowd and the way the Browns dominated in every facet of play,” he said. “It was all so exciting. From that first night, I was hooked as a Browns fan.”
Lavelli would later work for the Stadium Corp. that ran Cleveland Stadium, and then for the Browns themselves in media relations, player appearances and alumni relations, for nearly 38 years until retiring in 2013.
But the seed for all that was planted nearly 70 years ago.
“It was a great, great night,” Lucarelli said.
