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24. Finally a Home of Their Own
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
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T he summer of 1950 turned out to be quite hectic for the Bert Bell family. For the first time in more than a dozen years they were going to own their own home again. It wasn’t necessarily by choice. After his death in 1935, John C. Bell left his magnificent, 100-acre estate in Radnor to his two sons, John C. Jr. and Bert. “I remember it very slightly as a kid, Upton said.“It was really something. It had horses, homes, everything.” Unfortunately, just before World War II, Bert needed the money to keep the Eagles alive and persuaded his brother to sell the property. “I’m sure they sold it for under value, maybe $100,000, which was still a fortune in those days,” Upton explained. “But it was a huge mistake, because the estate would be worth millions today. “I can’t tell you how many times we moved after that. For a couple of years, we even lived in the Ritz Carlton Hotel that my grandfather owned in Philadelphia. That’s where I learned how to operate the escalators and run the elevators. I thought life couldn’t be any better, moving to all these places. Little did I know that we were moving because he needed money to keep the Eagles afloat. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that all these big mansions we lived in were all rented until we bought a house in Narberth. That’s because he didn’t have the cash to buy a house and he could rent a mansion for a helluva lot less.” Bert Bell’s father had cut off all Bert’s inheritance back in the 1930s before he married Frances Upton. From time to time, whenever she had some extra cash saved, she would give some to him. So did his grandfather, occasionally, but Bert was really on his own financially. “My father never had a lot of money, which surprised a lot of people ,” Upton recalled. “We will never know how much money he went through in his lifetime. Or how much was owed to him. He really gave it away. He took care of his family. He took care of his friends. He took 24. Finally a Home of Their Own Finally a Home of Their Own • 167 care of every bum that wanted to borrow money. He was the most generous man I’ve ever met. To a fault. Money was not a driving force with him. He didn’t think money should be an important thing in life. That was just his nature. “My father was so anxious to move on as commissioner, he didn’t get the amount that he should have received for his 50% ownership in the Steelers. He felt that he took a real financial beating on it.” “My father had great character,” explained Bert Jr. “He was noble. He wouldn’t think of any kind of theft or doing anything underhanded. He even turned down a basketball scholarship at La Salle College for Upton because he said, ‘We can afford it.’ He didn’t want another kid to fail to make the team because he couldn’t get the scholarship that Upton got.” Upton played at La Salle without an athletic grant. After selling the estate in Radnor, Bert moved his family to the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Center City for a while, then to a residence on Bryn Mawr Avenue, a block off of City Line Avenue on the Philadelphia side. At the beginning of World War II, the family began renting a property owned by Presbyterian Hospital at 1073 Montgomery Avenue in Narberth. “My dad was an air raid warden there during the war,” Upton recalls. “He loved going out and marching everybody around. It was a time of rationing and victory gardens and all that stuff. The air raid sirens would be blaring and here the chief executive of the Pittsburgh Steelers would be strapping on a warden’s helmet, going into the street like everybody else, taking names and numbers. It was quite exciting.” In March 1950, Presbyterian Hospital officials decided to sell Bell’s home and initiated eviction proceedings. The family then purchased a large Victorian corner house at 323 Haverford Avenue, in Narberth. That’s where Bert lived for the remaining years of his commissionership. Dinners at the Bell household were never dull. “There were always a lot of their friends dropping in because at...