True origin of Brownie the Elf

True origin of Brownie the Elf

Over 18,000 Autographed Items From Celebrity to Sports! Visit Press Pass Collectibles.com Today.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is the first of a two-part series on my search to find the true origin of Brownie the elf, the longtime caricature logo of the Browns.

By STEVE KING

Much has been made of the “1946” tag inside of the collar of the jerseys as the Browns unveiled their new/old uniforms recently.

That – 1946 — was the year, of course, that marked the Browns’ inaugural season. Another memory of that first season is their Brownie the elf caricature logo, which appears on all kinds of team apparel now. He was also born in 1946.

Here’s the initial story of Brownie’s birth – at least what is known of it, or, as I should say, what I thought I knew of it but really, truly didn’t – from my research done when I worked on clevelandbrowns.com for the first 10 years of existence of the team’s official website, from 2004-13.

I have always been interested in history, especially sports history, and I was older than anybody else working on the website then. As such, I was the perfect person to get all of the history assignments.

Advertisement: Buying or selling a home? Visit the Jacob Coker Group with Keller Williams Chervenic Realty

One of the tasks I was given by my boss, who at the time was Reagan Berube, now the director of content for the arch-rival Pittsburgh Steelers, was finding the genesis of Brownie. Where did he come from? When, how and why did he come? Why was he designed like that? Why was he an elf?

It sounded like a lot of fun, and it was.

And it still is fun, as I have found out recently, but more on that later.

I started my search at the Browns’ team archives room, which was located just off the Alumni Relations office on the second floor of what was then known as Cleveland Browns Stadium. There was a lot of cool stuff there – stuff the likes of which you can’t even imagine – but possibly the best items were these big, heavy scrapbooks of newspaper clips going back to 1944, when the All-America Football Conference was born and Cleveland was awarded a franchise in it.

Certainly, the answer to Brownie’s birth would be there somewhere in those scrapbooks, I thought. I just had to find it.

I had used the scrapbooks a number of things previously to do research for other stories, so I knew the kinds of information – real treasures and historical gold nuggets – that were tucked away in them.

After digging, digging and digging over several days, I finally located what – at least part of what, anyway — I was looking for with the unveiling of Brownie. It came in a Cleveland Press advertisement in late August 1946, about two weeks before the Browns’ first-ever regular-season game, against the Miami Seahawks on the Friday night of Labor Day weekend, Sept. 6. The ad was for tickets for that game, especially, and also for the club’s six other home contests that season at Cleveland Stadium, including also against the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, Los Angeles Dons, San Francisco 49ers and Buffalo Bisons.

There, featured prominently in the middle of the ad, was Brownie, a frowning, imposing look of determination on his face while he ran with a football tucked under one arm and his other arm extended out, ready to stiff-arm would-be tacklers.

Advertisement: For a free insurance review visit Allstate Agent Clint Stott

I looked high and low through the clips for months before the ad appeared, and for months after it, for any mention at all of Brownie. There was none. He just seemingly appeared out of thin air.

Nowadays, the Browns – or any other sports team in either the pros or college – would call a big press conference to introduce their new logo/mascot. But back then, there were no such marketing or promotional campaigns for logos/mascots, so Brownie more or less slipped in the back door when no one was looking. His appearance on the scene had all the pomp and circumstances of buying a bag of new footballs.

Whoop-de-do.

Hmmm.

That – the lack of any mention of Brownie in and around that ad — flummoxed me a bit, but I was undaunted. I was confident I could find something. I just had to dig deeper.

First, I asked Dino Lucarelli, the former longtime publicist with the Browns, and before that the Cleveland Indians and hockey’s Cleveland Barons, going all the way back to the 1950s. Lucarelli, who by then had become Browns Alumni Relations director, knew everything about, and everyone in, Cleveland sports. He was a walking, talking encyclopedia. As such, he was the go-to guy for information.

But, surprisingly, he didn’t know, even though as a 12-year-old boy growing up in the Cleveland suburb of Garfield Heights he had gone to that first game. And, possibly even more surprising, he couldn’t find anyone who knew among his long list of Cleveland sports personalities.

Hmmm. Hmmm.

I then wrote a story on clevelandbrowns.com about the search, wondering out loud what the true origin of Brownie the elf was. I figured if I put it out that there were some missing details and stated that help would be welcome, then someone with the correct information would see it and respond.

In years working in the newspaper business, whenever I would write a story and state that I couldn’t find the answers to some questions I had, I’d hear from people who were only too glad to provide them. It had worked every single time I had tried it.

Every streak eventually comes to an end.

I was only half-right this time. People responded with lots and lots and lots of answers, but they just didn’t seem to be the right ones. They sounded like merely guesses – pure speculation – as to how Brownie came about. All seemed plausible, and may in fact have had some shred of truth to them, but I just couldn’t get proof to support any of those theories.

Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm.

I then worked with the Cincinnati Bengals media relations department to contact owner Mike Brown, the son of Paul Brown, the founding head coach of both the Browns and Bengals. Mike grew up in the Cleveland area when his dad coached there. and graduated from Shaker Heights High School. Paul Brown had a say in everything that went on with the Browns, including when the organization was being pieced together from scratch in 1945 and ’46. Surely, he had said something to his son about Brownie at one point.

Apparently not.

Mike Brown’s reply: “I have no idea.”

Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm.

Now what?

As a last resort, while I was waiting for the answer to come in, I went back through the scrapbooks to look for clues about the people in the Browns organization. Was there anything about them, their likes, their interests or their background that would shed some light?

It was a small group. Including Paul Brown and his assistant coaches, along with owner Mickey McBride, the 1946 Browns had only 19 employees, which is a little more than 10 percent of the number of employees teams have today, thus providing an example of just how much pro football has grown in the last nearly 74 years.

Since they were the men calling all the shots, the true origin of Brownie the Elf had to have something to do with either Brown or McBride, or both.

Piecing together everything I could find, and attempting to fill in the holes with educated guesstimates, I came up with something I thought was plausible and even probable. It was, in fact, what I ended up telling people when, during my time with the Browns as I conducted public tours of what is now known as FirstEnergy Stadium, they would ask about Brownie the elf.

And my response was: McBride was a Chicago native and a huge Notre Dame football fan. The school, of course, has long had its Fighting Irish mascot caricature, which is the pint-sized, mean-looking, putting-up-his-dukes leprechaun.

In addition, in my scrapbooks research I found that the some of the wives of the coaches and players on that first Browns team were den mothers for their daughters’ Brownie scout troops.

Add together the leprechaun, the fact that an elf is also a small creature and the Brownie name, and you can come up with something quite resembling the Brownie elf as the mascot for a football team named the Browns.

The problem, as I told our stadium tour groups, was that 1946 was so long ago that the people who were involved in the decision-making process of bringing Brownie to the Browns have unfortunately passed away, taking the story, or stories, with them.

There’s nothing more to say.

So, this, then, was supposed to be the end of my story here of the true origin of Brownie the Elf. It has always been the end of the story any of the countless times I have told it over the years.

The late, great Paul Harvey used to say, “And now the rest of the story,” when he was about to get to the end, and best part, of the interesting tales he spun in his syndicated radio broadcasts for decades.

Likewise, just as I was within minutes of putting this piece to bed and beginning to write another unrelated piece for Browns Daily Dose, I have found, shockingly and much to my delight, that the rest, and best, part of the story of the true origin of Brownie the Elf is yet to come. It will be told in part 2.

NEXT: Pop, Paul and Paws.

Cleveland Browns News

1 Comment on "True origin of Brownie the Elf"

Ryan | April 22, 2020 at 7:31 pm |

I’ve been obsessed with Brownie recently. A mix on the new uni’s and Brownie would’ve been awesome. I know we’re trying to get back to our roots based on the disaster of uni redesign of 2015, but I think they tried too hard last time and too little this time. It would be cool if they found a spot for Brownie on the jersey at least.