On the Friday before the Super Bowl, Behringer-Crawford Museum launched an exhibit devoted to all things Bengals. It was an exciting and tense time.
“When we put the exhibit up, the Super Bowl hadn’t happened. We were hoping, of course…” Curator Jason French said. “Then Sunday happened.”
The loss by the Bengals to the L.A. Rams prompted him to unofficially retitle the Bengals History Exhibit as “Heal Your Who Dey Heartbreak,” he said. And so, the healing began.
The exhibit, which runs through April 24, is based on an extensive treasure trove of sports memorabilia from a local collector who goes by the first name Roy. While the exhibit focuses on Bengals history dating back 1968, the collection actually goes back much further, more than 30 years to the very beginnings of football in our region.
New items added
French and Roy have continued to add to the collection since the opening. Last week, in fact, they added a rare Paul Brown board game dating to 1947.
“This is actually something that’s really special that no one has seen. We’ve reached out to the Hall of Fame Museum in Canton, and they didn’t even know this existed… It really is a pretty interesting piece and significantly rare,” said French.
The game box was signed by three players who later landed in the Hall of Fame.
“That’s just a perfect storm. It’s cool to see it because you will probably never see it anywhere else,” said French.
In fact, the museum has been adding new items all along to the exhibit. In addition to the board game, more mementos of Paul Brown’s early career in college and coaching the Navy team also came in recently.
The Paul Brown factor
The first case is devoted to Brown and his early career before the Bengals.
“You gotta talk about Paul Brown if you’re going to talk about the Bengals, right?” said French. “And you gotta show why he was so pivotal, so important.”
Brown grew up in Massillon, Ohio, in the early 1900s and played football at Massillon Washington High School and then Miami University before taking his first coaching job for a private school in Maryland. He returned to Ohio to coach at Massillon. Known for several innovations throughout his career, it was at Massillon that he invented the football playbook and developed hand signals to send plays to the quarterback from the sidelines.
After Massillon, he joined the Ohio State Buckeyes as coach, but in 1942 the war encroached; many college players went off to fight. Brown joined the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant in 1944 and coached the Navy Blue Jackets.
While football was big on college campuses, there had been several professional teams and efforts to establish various leagues. In 1945 Brown was again recruited, this time to build a brand new team in Cleveland, part of the new All-American Football Conference (AAFC).
That team was, of course, the Cleveland Browns, where he would coach until his departure in 1963. In 1968 he helped found the Bengals and the rest, as they say, is history.
The exhibit includes memorabilia from Brown’s high school, Navy and college coaching as well as the formation of the Browns and the Bengals. Another case includes materials from Mike Brown’s career as well.
Also in the early case are photos and other items from an earlier Cincinnati Bengals team formed in 1937. Unrelated to the Bengals of today, the early Bengals played professional football through 1941. Brown named his new team honor of the that earlier team.
Many little stories
The rest of the exhibit focuses on the Bengals since 1968. There is the requisite Super Bowl mementos, as well as trading cards, pennants, jerseys, photos, scrapbooks and more than 200 autographs. The “fun stuff” includes a wide array of toys, bobble heads, Bengals pop cans and unique pieces such as a small model version of the Bengals first mascot, a tiger cub named Benzoo.
The team would borrow a tiger cub from the Cincinnati Zoo for several years, but the practice of live mascots was banned in the 1990s, so the Bengals made the move to their lovable Who Dey mascot.
One wall displays a trading card of 1970s’ player Mike Reid next to a 45 rpm record.
“There’s so many little stories here,” noted French. “Mike Reid played ball for the Bengals, but he was also a singer and was in the Country Music Hall of Fame.” In fact, Reid charted seven singles on Billboard’s “Hot Country Singles & Tracks.”
You’ll also find RC cola cans and Pepsi bottles featuring players. A series of “newspaper cuts” from the Dayton Daily News allowed fans to cut out their own trading cards from the paper. One case features Spanish language trading cards from Venezuela.
Capturing memories
What you won’t see much of in this exhibit are items from the modern era. It’s more about capturing the past and keeping it with us.
“When I was growing up, well, I didn’t get cards and stuff. You just got necessities,” said Roy.
One day he walked into a Walmart and bought his first Topps baseball card. “This was probably 40-plus years ago and I said, you know, I’ve never had a baseball card in my life. So, I bought some, and I was hooked ever since…But now I just go after vintage stuff.”
French said the exhibit is in large part an attempt to preserve the older items and the memories that go with them, an opportunity to capture the stories before they are lost.
“This is a disposable thing, right? A kid would get something, keep it and throw it in a drawer somewhere. One day, mom cleans house or it gets busted,” he said.
Much of the bubble gum machine toys, football helmet ice cream scoops and printed pop cans are not particularly valuable, Roy said. Perhaps, one day they will be. Yet, he agrees with French that the real value is in presenting all the items as a whole and sparking memories.
“So that’s the great thing about museums,” said French. “The artifacts are here to help us tell stories, part of the our human experience…It’s the little things that happen to us, all of our memories add to that experience.”
The Bengals history exhibit runs through April 24. The Behringer Crawford Museum is located at 1600 Montague Road in Covington, within Devou Park.
