On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell

32. At Home in Narberth

B ert Bell’s daily ritual at home in Narberth rarely changed. An early riser, he dressed quickly, went downstairs, and fried himself some eggs. “I always dreaded what came next,” his son Upton explained. ‘GET UP, GET UP . . . THE SUN IS UP . . . THE BIRDS ARE IN THE ROOM . . .’ “Then he would follow with: ‘OH, HOW I HATE TO GET UP IN THE MORNING. . . . OH HOW I HATE TO GET UP IN THE DAY . . .’ “You could hear him all over the house. But he loved to sing. His words were always kind of keyed in with something he wanted you to do.” The Saturday before Bell passed away, he was at home dressed in a sweatshirt, talking on the phone. As usual, he had the Penn football game on television. “Barney Berlinger catches a pass and they beat Princeton or somebody ,” Upton recalled. “And in the middle of the telephone conversation, he breaks out singing: ‘FIGHT ON, PENNSYLVANIA . . . BRING THE BALL RIGHT DOWN THAT FIELD . . .’ “He’s screaming it all over the house, he was so thrilled by Penn. And then he would call another friend and start singing again: ‘RED AND BLUE WE’RE WITH YOU . . .’” Next to his family and his NFL cohorts like Joe Donoghue and Art Rooney, Bell got his greatest enjoyment hanging out with friends from the neighborhood at The Tavern, at 261 Montgomery Avenue in Bala Cynwyd in Lower Merion Township, and at Davis General Store, at 224 Haverford Avenue, in Narberth. He hardly ever missed a day at either place, stopping for newspapers and coffee in the morning at The Tavern or for a soda after dinner at Davis. 32. At Home in Narberth 234 • Chapter 32 Every summer, Bell took the whole gang to Hershey for a few days— “Everything’s on me, guys!”—where they sat in the upper deck of the old Memorial Stadium watching their beloved Eagles. Then they often partied into the wee hours of the morning. Bert’s cronies at the Narberth Sunrise Society, as he called it, included people like Ed Dixon, the neighborhood landscaper, Ox the Roofer, Clyde the Soda Jerk, and Jakes (Jiggs) Torchiano, the local gas station owner. There were others who occasionally stopped by like Bing Miller, who played in two World Series for the Philadelphia Athletics; Willie Draper, a local basketball standout who was one of the few African Americans who lived in the town; and Bill Campbell, who would drop by after his morning radio show on WCAU. “The days I didn’t show up, he’d get on me,” Campbell recalled.“He’d say, ‘Willie, where were you yesterday?’” “They were a great bunch of characters,” Upton Bell explained. “It was hilarious for me as a kid watching my dad playing Liar’s Poker with them. If he had a really sticky problem going on in the National Football League, or a new innovation he was considering, he would come down to the corner and discuss it with them. That’s where he got his best advice unless he needed technical advice from an expert. They were all smart guys, town characters, who had their own businesses.” “After dinner, my father would change his clothes, walk down and get my mother a soda,” Bert Jr. recalled. “Often, he’d have a milk shake that he wasn’t supposed to have. Then, if it wasn’t too hot, they’d all go outside , lean on the parking meters, and talk sports. He was never too much of a big shot that he couldn’t be around them.” “Everybody knew Bert in Narberth,” said Bell’s colleague Austin Gunsel in an interview for The Sporting News. Gunsel was a neighbor who never formally met the commissioner until he called on him at his NFL office during the Department of Justice antitrust investigation in 1950–1951. “We weren’t close neighbors, but we used to see him on the street, in Davis’ store, places like that,” Gunsel remembered. Bell felt especially close to Howard E. Davis, the owner of the general store—now known as Mapes 5 & 10—because his grandson, Eugene H. Davis Jr., had served as captain of the University of Pennsylvania football team in 1941. But the old man didn’t always feel the same way toward the commissioner. Victoria Donohoe, the longtime art critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a neighbor of the Bell’s, remembered why.“The Davis Store had a long marble soda fountain,” she said.“Bert...