from “le détroit” · the strait
The owner of WJR thought his first-year Lions were getting lost behind the Tigers, so he booked the champion Bears for Thanksgiving 1934 and sold out the stadium two weeks early.
The Tigers had just lost a World Series. Richards, who owned the Lions, figured his football team was getting lost on the sports pages behind them. So he booked the Bears for the holiday. Then he used his station's connection to the NBC Blue Network, where WJR was an affiliate, to get the game carried live across the country. Tickets were gone two weeks out.
On November 29, 1934, George A. Richards put his first-year Detroit Lions against the champion Chicago Bears at University of Detroit Stadium on Thanksgiving Day, and NBC carried the game on 94 stations coast to coast. Graham McNamee and Don Wilson called it from University of Detroit Stadium, and the league had a national audience. On the day, 26,000 packed the stands, and another 25,000 people wanted in and couldn't get seats.
The Lions led 16-7 at the half on two Ace Gutowsky touchdowns and a 34-yard Glenn Presnell field goal. Chicago won 19-16 on Bronko Nagurski's touchdown pass to Bill Hewitt. Three days later the Bears beat Detroit again in Chicago for the division.
Richards was a radio man. He had sold Oaklands and Pontiacs before he took over WJR in 1927, and he moved the station into the Fisher Building's Golden Tower in December 1928. On April 10, 1934, NFL president Joseph Carr handed his Detroit group the Portsmouth, Ohio Spartans franchise, which Richards bought for roughly $15,000. On July 22 the team got its name: the Lions.
They opened at University of Detroit Stadium on September 23, 1934, with a 9-0 win over the Giants, in a town about to watch a World Series. The 1934 Tigers went 101-53, the best winning percentage in club history, drew 919,161 fans to Navin Field to lead the American League, and lost a seven-game World Series to the Cardinals on October 9.
The football team gave Richards something to sell. Potsy Clark coached, and quarterback Dutch Clark led the league in total offense with 1,146 yards. The Lions won their first ten games, seven by shutout, and the defense didn't give up a touchdown until the eighth game. The only loss before Thanksgiving came at home to Green Bay on November 25. Chicago came in at 11-0 as the reigning champions.
A year later the Lions got their title on that field. On Thanksgiving 1935 they beat the Bears to clinch the West, then beat the New York Giants for the championship at University of Detroit Stadium, with Dutch Clark at quarterback. It was Detroit's first NFL title.
Richards, in poor health, sold the club to Fred L. Mandel Jr. in 1940 for roughly $200,000, on his doctor's advice. He died in 1951 at 62.
The Thanksgiving game skipped 1939 and 1940 and the war years through 1944, then came back in 1945, and the Lions have played every Thanksgiving since. The game moved from University of Detroit Stadium to Tiger Stadium, to the Pontiac Silverdome, and in 2002 to Ford Field, built on Brush Street around a 1920s Hudson's warehouse, with about 65,000 seats. In 2025, the game at Ford Field drew 47.7 million TV viewers.
Photo: George A. Richards, owner of WJR, 1939, from a WGAR station album via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
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