six

MARIANNE

By that point in her life, Marianne Hanes had been following her own muse for more than a decade.

She had blanched, as far back as the eighth grade, in Portsmouth, Ohio, at the different set of standards she was expected to observe because she was a female. She’d been sent to the principal’s office, more than once, and told that to be argumentative or opinionated was acceptable for boys but not girls.

The pretty, willful daughter of peripatetic grocery executive father and a schoolteacher mother, Marianne had grown up, creative and observant, in a number of small southern Ohio towns, mostly in and around Portsmouth, on the southern edge of the state, at the confluence of the Ohio and Scioto rivers. Bright, questioning, vibrant, she grew up wondering about the social norms that existed in southern Ohio in the ’40s. Her mother, a sophisticated woman with a keen fashion sense, still lapsed into the old Southern lady roles. Marianne used to think to herself, Why do you do that? You don’t have to do that.

At Portsmouth High, Marianne joined the cheerleading squad, dated a football player or two, and quickly learned the value of a knowing smile and a pleated skirt. There was still resistance to her carefree attitude—people taking pains to explain to her that girls shouldn’t be hanging banners from a ladder or organizing other students in class.

After a couple of brief, unhappy spells at college, she had arrived at Terminal Station in Cleveland in 1953, aged twenty years with a suitcase, $50, and the stubborn belief that she had the poise and wherewithal to succeed in the big city. In this respect, she was correct.

In the three years since, she’d found both steady work and a full social life working in the physical medicine department of the Cleveland Clinic. She had alert, wise eyes, supple lips, and the soft cadences of southern Ohioans cut with a with a dollop of worldliness.

Like her three roommates, Marianne Hanes had found her way to the single life in Cleveland through a circuitous path, requiring smarts, persistence, and a kind of self-reliance that was not commonly associated with single women in the 1950s. In time, she would meet Chuck Noll. And she would be unlike any of the other women he had ever known.

Rollie William Hanes and Elizabeth Muriel Henson had met in the late ’20s in Portsmouth, when he was working for the A&P grocery chain, moving from city to city in southern Ohio towns where the company was opening a new supermarket. Bill was authoritative without being domineering. He’d played football, but hadn’t lettered, at Ohio State and remained a staunch fan. He would move to a town where A&P was opening a new supermarket and help the enterprise get off the ground. When it was up and running, he would move on.

It was in Portsmouth in 1929 that he’d become enamored of the graceful schoolteacher Elizabeth “Bets” Henson. It was a whirlwind courtship; they eloped six weeks later. Even after their wedding, on May 3, 1930, he had to climb furtively into her bedroom window—teachers just didn’t get married during the schoolyear.

Marianne was born May 19, 1933, in Portsmouth, her younger brother John two years later, and the family spent much of her first eight years moving from town to town. In 1941, they were in Arcanum, living with Bill’s father, Joseph Hanes, one of the richest men in Darke County. Bets was not fond of living under her father-in-law’s shadow, nor of the humble farmhouse that lacked indoor plumbing. Before the year was out, they moved back to the outskirts of Portsmouth. Then came December 7, 1941, and Bill Hanes decided it was his duty to go into the military. He joined the Navy and was stationed in New Orleans, while Bets and the children moved back to Portsmouth.

At the end of the war, there was a position for Bill Hanes in the Navy, but he’d had his fill of military regimen. (“I can’t take any more of this bullshit,” he told Bets.) When he returned to Ohio, he was intent on making it with his own business. He purchased a landscaping business and bought a working farm.

All the while, Marianne was emerging as a teenager with a mind all her own. In her sophomore year at Portsmouth High, she started going steady with the earnest senior basketball star D. E. Newman, whom she’d known for years. He was over the moon about her. They continued dating throughout high school and when he started college at Ohio Wesleyan. His mash notes back to Portsmouth were sweetly vacant—she sure was a swell girl, and he was thinking about her a lot—and pregnant with what was unstated, implicitly pressing a question he was afraid to ask out loud. “He was a nice man,” said Marianne. “I can remember my mother sort of saying they thought I was going to marry him. I can remember thinking, Are you kidding?!”

In the fall of 1951, she broke it off with D. E. and started college at Miami University in Oxford. She came to resent much about college life; the rote learning methods contradicted her instinctive and at times mercurial intelligence. She spent long hours in science labs thinking to herself that this was exactly what she’d hated about high school. That summer of 1952, she’d worked part time in Portsmouth and steeled herself to return to college. As the date drew nearer, Marianne drew more resistant.

“I can’t do this,” she finally told her parents. “I absolutely cannot do this. I hate it.”

Her father fretted—working as a teacher seemed to him an ideal job for a young woman—and her mother struggled to understand. “I was so wired and so emotional about it,” Marianne said. “They just said okay. But I couldn’t get a job because I couldn’t do anything. I’d been a telephone operator, and I sure as hell was not gonna go back and be a telephone operator.”

She agreed to go to Miami-Jacobs Career College in Dayton to learn some office skills, to make herself more employable. In Dayton, she stayed with her aunt and uncle, who was a doctor, helping out in the office and, much of the time, making the necessary computations for his horse-handicapping system. In the winter of 1952–1953, she even went onto the Dayton campus and attended a few basketball games. She returned home to Portsmouth in May 1953, eager to set out in the world.

“I looked around and said, ‘I can’t stay here,’” she said. “Because all of my friends were still in college. So I said, ‘I think I’ll go to California.’ My father said, ‘You are not going to California.’ I said, ‘Well, then I think I’ll go to Cleveland.’ Cleveland was the only big city I knew. I had never been there, obviously. So they finally said all right. They gave me $50 and put me on the train.”

Cleveland, 1953. Marianne’s mother had insisted she get in touch with a woman who owned the Kenilworth Club, a boarding house for single ladies in the city. Victorian in both design and sensibility, the three-level building, on 97th Street, was in a dicey neighborhood.

Close by, though, Marianne was hired on at the Cleveland Clinic, the group practice begun in the 1920s by four physicians. The clinic had become nationally renowned by the ’50s, especially for its innovative treatment of heart disease.

That summer, at the Kenilworth, Marianne became friends with the teachers Marilyn Hall and Alice Bowman, both of whom taught at South Euclid Lyndhurst Elementary. There was a couple, and another elderly woman, who managed the building, meeting gentlemen callers at the door, admonishing the women to turn off the lights when they left the room, frowning at all the Jewish boys who seemed to trail after young teachers.

To the other women, Marianne was young and irrepressible. “She was a very, very interesting girl but also very . . . let’s say chic,” said Alice Bowman. “Marianne enjoyed what she was doing.”

“I remember her telling us that her parents really wanted her—especially her mother—to go to college,” said Marilyn Hall. “She seemed to want to just get away from home like we all do.” Because of the neighborhood, the girls would always go out in groups of three or four, often going shopping downtown to the Higbee’s department store.

One evening, in the fall of 1953, they saw How to Marry a Millionaire, with Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable, and came home captivated with the idea of getting their own place. “We came back,” said Marilyn Hall, “and we were all sitting around, going, ‘You know, why couldn’t we?’” Alice was intrigued, and soon Marianne pledged for the cause as well.

“We just decided it would be fun to live someplace else,” said Alice. Marianne and Marilyn and Alice and another teacher decided to set out. They soon found an apartment they liked, in a handsome brick building, called the Park East, just above Shaker Square, the highbrow metropolitan hub of the East Side and a magnet for shoppers and diners. Then there was the matter of placating the manager; four women renting an apartment just wasn’t done in Cleveland in 1953.

The building was filled with older Jewish residents, many of whom wanted to set up the women with their sons or grandsons or nephews. Marianne, Marilyn, and Alice lived there from the start. The other teacher moved out and eventually they were joined by Geri Shevlin, Marianne’s friend, an occupational therapist at Cleveland Clinic. There were plenty of interesting, eligible bachelors about, and the women occasionally saw Dr. Benjamin Spock, who lived in a nearby building, heading to and from work.

Marianne, young and carefree, self-possessed and attractive, had her share of suitors. She began dating a chief resident of surgery, a Mormon intent on moving to Utah, before the relationship dissipated. Another doctor, who lived on the West Side, began taking her out regularly, and one night at dinner he asked her intentions. “Because I think it’s time I got married, and if you’re not interested, then I’m not making this drive anymore.”

“I think that’s a wise choice,” she said.

Marianne’s combination of looks and poise helped her stand out. Marilyn Hall, who’d started dating the Indians’ third baseman Rudy Regalado, took Marianne with her to the airport to pick up Rudy one evening. “We are standing there and I remember Bobby Avila got off the plane and his eyes just came out of his head,” said Marilyn. “Because you know, she was 5-foot-8, very slim and looked like a model. A lot of the guys said, ‘Who is that, Rudy?’”

There were other doctors, most of them five or ten years older than her, but she wasn’t serious about any of them the night that Marilyn came home and told her about Chuck Noll. Marianne listened with interest for a moment, until Marilyn told her that he was a football player. A few moments later, Marianne peeked back out from under the pillow, looked up at her friend and asked, “How tall is he?”

Marilyn smiled.

“He’s tall enough for you.”

So Marilyn Hall called Hershchel Forester and suggested the match, and Forester called Chuck, and the men agreed to visit the women at the apartment on Moreland.

It was not love at first sight. Perhaps Chuck was being flippant, perhaps he was nervous for the blind date. For whatever reason, he showed up with Herschel and two other teammates at the appointed time, knocked on the door, and, as he waited, removed his dental bridge. So when Marilyn Hall opened the door, Marianne demurely standing a few steps behind her, there was Chuck, brandishing a huge gap where his front teeth used to be, smiling manically and lisping, “Is this the place?! I’m ready for my date!”

In the midst of the nervous laughter, he quickly returned the bridge and regained his polite manner. But the first impression had been made.

“They came up and I had worked really late because sometimes it was such a madhouse,” said Marianne. “I don’t think I had even changed my clothes, and they all came in, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, God.’ So eventually, Chuck asked me out, and I said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and I went to bed. I was not interested. And I was probably rude to him. I just got up and left, and then I was sorry that I had said no.”

Forester continued courting Marilyn Hall. A month or so later in the winter, when Chuck and a group of bachelors held a Las Vegas night at a local house, the women from the Park East were invited. It was that night, under different circumstances, with Chuck playing the part of the assured, urbane host, that Marianne got a better sense of him. She struck up a couple of conversations with him that evening. Later in the night, when Chuck left to get more drinks, Marianne looked at Marilyn, smiled, and said, “You know, you could go find something to do.” That was the first night Chuck drove Marianne home.

Two evenings later he called her on the phone and asked, “Can we try this again?”

“All right—when?”

“How about now?”

“Okay,” Marianne said. “Where are you?”

“I’m downstairs—in the lobby.”

She came downstairs. It was a short walk from there to the Wagon Wheel.

From that opening hiccup, they soon became inseparable. He was drawn to her native intelligence, alluring manner, and comfort around men. She was drawn to his obvious intellect, strong demeanor, and the formidable moral rectitude that set him apart from most men, not to mention most football players.

“I think that was very early on,” Marianne said. “I think we both knew.”

Maybe it was a coincidence and maybe it wasn’t. But from that day on, Chuck Noll never suffered another epileptic seizure.

They often began and ended nights as Chuck had before, at the Wagon Wheel, enjoying the clubby atmosphere, as well as the contrast—and occasional interplay—between the workaday patrons upstairs and the elegantly dressed diners downstairs at Etienne’s. “It really was a neighborhood bar,” Marianne said. “The guys sat and played cards at the table, and if you came in there and you didn’t really belong, they would make you so uncomfortable you would leave.”

In those early months of dating, both their schedules were crowded. Chuck was getting out of his law school classes at Cleveland-Marshall at 10, racing over to Shaker Square to pick up Marianne for a drink or late dinner, usually at the Wagon Wheel or Shaker Tavern across the street. The handsome young couple caught the eye of piano player Tony Vale, and he would play “I’ve Got the World on a String” for Marianne and “Pomp and Circumstance” for Chuck when they arrived.

For the regulars at Doc Mangine’s spot, the change in Chuck was clear. He was showing up with Marianne more frequently and stopping by alone less often. And he was doing things he didn’t frequently do: They went to see chamber music performances and to the Cleveland Symphony. He’d been intrigued with these pursuits before but had never had a partner with whom he could regularly enjoy the arts. As in Dayton, he continued to be fond of jazz music, and he and Marianne would frequent music clubs in and around Cleveland.

When Marianne mentioned to her father that she was dating a Browns’ player named Chuck Noll, she was impressed that he knew the name—“Oh, the kid from Dayton!”

Earlier, Chuck brought Marianne and Marilyn Hall to meet his parents. “His mother was very German,” said Marilyn. “She was a strong woman, strong character, but also physically strong. But Chuck’s dad I think was ill and he didn’t do much. I remember Chuck saying that he won’t get up because bowling is on, and he is going to sit there and watch bowling. But then I realized that physically he wasn’t able to do too much.”

After the second time Marianne met Chuck’s parents, she asked him about his father’s tremors and what his doctors were doing about it.

“Well, I take him to the family doctor,” Chuck said.

“Please let me take him to the Clinic,” she asked. Marianne made an appointment, and the doctor at the Cleveland Clinic finally gave William Noll a definitive diagnosis of Parkinson’s, prescribing medications to lessen the tremor.

Chuck was slower introducing his rambunctious Dayton friends to Marianne, but Maloney spent part of a weekend with the couple. “Chuck had bought a kayak, it was a Saturday afternoon, and Marianne, Chuck, and this other girl [it was Marilyn Hall] show up at my parents’ house in Fairview Park. We went out to a beach on the other side of Rocky River State Park. I could see the way, the attention that Chuck was paying to her, which was . . . not typical. I do remember that, that there was something really pretty serious for Chuck.”

At the Wagon Wheel, the loose affiliation of friends figured out very quickly that Chuck was serious. “I kind of thought that when Marianne came on board, I figured, That’s it,” said Dan Ferrazza. “She is going to lock him up.”

Marianne’s friends knew it as well. “It is so nice when you are young and you are looking for prospective mates, to find somebody,” said Marilyn Hall.

When he left for Hiram and training camp in July 1956, Chuck kept up a steady correspondence with Marianne. Grousing about the schedule and the routine, he evinced some annoyance with Paul Brown’s dictatorial approach. “There is a chance that our lord and master might free us after supper Sat., this is not, however, a certainty,” wrote Chuck. “It all hinges on how we look Sat. afternoon when we knock heads.”

The Browns had lost on average less than two games per year for the first decade of the franchise’s existence. But in ’56, with Otto Graham having retired, they were an aging side bound for a letdown. The hint came in preseason, when after beating the College All-Stars, they lost five straight preseason games, then lost four of their first five games to start the season. Chuck had adapted to the left linebacker position and started all twelve games (he returned a fumble 39 yards for a touchdown early in the Browns’ 24–7 win over Green Bay). But it was the Browns’ worst season yet, ending in a 5–7 record, the first time they’d ended a season in anything short of a league championship game.

There was less social time during the season. But Chuck and Marianne still found a way to get together almost nightly. It was obvious, to her friends at least, that the couple was falling in love. Early that December, Chuck came over to help trim the tree at the Park East, and one difference became apparent: Chuck carefully hung each individual strand of tinsel on the tree, while Marianne had always delighted in tossing the shiny icicles over the branches.

On Christmas Eve, 1956, Marianne was working at the Cleveland Clinic and had a train to catch back home to Portsmouth. Chuck had arranged to pick her up and drive her to the station, but he was out drinking with some of his old Dayton friends that afternoon. He arrived late to pick her up that afternoon and found Marianne angry and in tears. (“And I don’t cry very often,” she said.) She missed her train. Chuck, hoping to set things right, told her he’d simply drive her down to Portsmouth himself. He did so and met Marianne’s parents, and another hurdle was cleared.

By early 1957, Marilyn Hall had fully rekindled her romance with the baseball player Rudy Regalado, and the four of them frequently double-dated when Rudy was in town with the Indians. When Rudy and Marilyn and Chuck and Marianne went out, the two athletes shared a natural affinity that transcended sports. “Marianne and I tried to teach the boys bridge,” Marilyn remembered. “But Chuck has the mathematical mind, and in like two minutes he was one of these people who knew exactly where the cards are.”

They made the most of weekends, spending more than one bleary Sunday at family dinner with the Nolls after they’d been out with friends well past midnight the previous night. They’d even begun talking about marriage, and Marianne had started attending Catholic conversion classes.

Then, in April 1957, the discussion became more urgent. Marianne was pregnant.

When she told him, Chuck didn’t waver. “Well,” he said, “then we’ll get married right now.”

The build-up was quick. Marianne sat down with her roommates at the Park East one evening and explained that she was going to be married at the end of the May. Hall remembered her sharing the news, the friends congratulating her, then Marianne leaving. After she was gone, Marilyn looked at Alice, and Alice looked at Geri, and Geri shook her head. “I don’t want to know,” she said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”

It was a bit of a shock to Chuck’s friends as well.

“I didn’t know Marianne too well,” said groomsman and teammate Don Colo. “So I would say I knew it was serious then—when he got her pregnant and told us he was getting married.”

But Chuck’s family understood. “He brought her over,” said Rita, “and they came in and we talked, and they said they were going to get married. Fine, great. [Our parents] just accepted it. They didn’t get upset about it or anything.”

There was little time for deliberation. “I was working and he wasn’t,” said Marianne. “So he took care of the wedding—I just showed up—including the cake.” Chuck decided his brother Bob should be the best man, since he had been Bob’s best man. He invited Colo and Mike Bordinaro, from the Wagon Wheel, to be groomsmen. (He’d originally asked Dan Ferrazza, but he would be away on his own honeymoon and couldn’t make it.) Rita was due to have her fourth child in October, and the custom was that pregnant women didn’t stand for a wedding. In lieu of Rita, and because a non-Catholic could not be a matron or maid of honor, Marianne agreed to have Bob’s somewhat high-strung wife, Stella, be her matron of honor. Stella had quarreled with Chuck’s mother earlier, and in the weeks leading up to the wedding, she expressed disapproval over Marianne’s wedding dress.

“Stella told me it wouldn’t do,” said Marianne. “I loved my dress.”

Paul Brown, friendly with several doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, made inquiries about Marianne’s character, which made her furious until she learned that some of the doctors she knew had been asking Brown about Chuck’s character. Everyone checked out.

The ceremony was held May 25 at Our Lady of Peace (where Marianne had taken Catholic conversion classes), with a reception that afternoon at the Carter Hotel. They had each purchased simple wedding bands, at $6 each. (Two years later, she had his engraved. It read, “M to C, my life.”)

For Chuck’s old Dayton teammates, the marriage was a sign that their time with Chuck would change. “A very intelligent young lady who probably had the same mind makeup that he did,” said Jim Currin. “Very strong-willed and very nice, but we didn’t know her well prior to then. She told me before they were married, ‘The only time Chuck is ever late is when you guys come to town.’”

As the wedding let out, and Chuck and Marianne walked outside into the sunlight, a few of his Browns’ teammates were jauntily showering the couple with pebbles rather than rice. Geri Shevlin and Marilyn Hall had been attendants. Chuck and Marianne stayed at the DeLuxe Motel in Mentor on their wedding night, then drove east, eventually getting to Wilmington and the coast of Delaware.

Upon their return, Marianne moved out of the Park East, and Chuck packed up the room in his parents’ house. They found a home in Maple Heights, on a street full of white frame houses. Chuck was already paying his portion of the note at the home on 141st Street, but he agreed to let Marianne borrow money from her parents so they could make the down payment on a newlywed home.

“We borrowed $3,000 from my dad,” said Marianne. “We took a second mortgage on his parents’ house, and then a mortgage on this one, so I had three house payments a month, plus the money that he was adamant about paying back to my dad as soon as possible.” Their first dining room table was a folding card table. After a lifetime spent worrying about money, Chuck was eager to let Marianne handle all the finances and let him know what he would be able to spend each month.

“I learned to cook really cheap,” said Marianne. “And, you know, we did it. I am very obsessive about, ‘If you can’t pay for something, you can’t afford it.’ So we never did. Debt as debt was never, ever in our lives an issue.”

With only secondhand furniture and very little money, Marianne was hoping to get a new living-room set for their honeymoon, but Chuck had been pining for a boat. They purchased a small, hand-me-down metal fishing boat on a trailer. On Independence Day weekend, they took it out onto Lake Erie. That afternoon, after their fishing expedition, Chuck backed up the car and trailer, to load the boat back onto the trailer. It proved to be something of a calamity, with his uncertain docking skills leaving the boat askew, lodged partly on the trailer, much of their fishing gear sliding to the back and into the water. Chuck took off his shoes, rolled up his pants legs, and removed his Browns’ 1954 championship ring and 1955 Browns’ championship watch. “Here,” he said, handing the jewelry to Marianne. “Hold my watch and ring.” He then went in the water after it.

The phrase became a touchstone for them. In the decades ahead, more than once, when he was facing a crisis or stern test or difficult moment, he would look in his wife’s eyes and say, “Here—hold my watch and ring.”

In those early months of marriage, Marianne learned what she’d long suspected: Chuck was never idle. In the bathroom on the ground floor in Maple Heights, he improvised a darkroom. Chuck not only cared about photographic technique but also was a buff for equipment. He was inclusive about his pursuits, inviting Marianne along. “I mean, we developed our own stuff,” she said. “He read magazines. He read books constantly. He never read novels. He read for information. If he gets interested in something, he knows everything there is to know about it.”

There were adjustments. The first night she cooked at their home, he ate everything, asked for second helpings of everything and ate all that. The next night, it was the same. Finally, she realized that he was simply hard-wired to eat everything that was put in front of him.

They communicated well, but they rarely talked about feelings, and Chuck seemed allergic to discussing his emotions. A few weeks after they were married, she asked him about it.

“Chuck, is everything okay? You haven’t said you loved me since we were married.”

Chuck straightened up. “I told you I loved you once,” he said. “If that ever changes, you’ll be the first to know.”

Coming off the first losing record in his career, Paul Brown was determined to make his team tougher for the 1957 season. Lineman Frank Gatski announced early in a training camp scrimmage that he was renaming the line of scrimmage “The Gaza Strip,” and the intramurals took on a tougher tone.

On the plane for the Browns’ annual preseason trip out to California, Brown asked Chuck if the woman waving to him at the airport was his wife. When Chuck confirmed it was, and mentioned that they were expecting their first child in December, Brown seemed pleased.

A week later, at the Hotel Green in Pasadena, when the team was eating a meal, Chuck was paged over the loudspeaker. He got up to get the call when Brown rose to cut him off walking out to the lobby. “Remember, be smart,” Brown said gravely. “It’s different now—you’re married.” The words were said so quickly and with such seriousness, that Chuck had to restrain himself from laughing. (He was going to meet an old friend, the lawyer Dudley Gray.) When he mentioned it later, in a letter to Marianne, he speculated “his doctor friends at the clinic must have really sold you to him.”

On the trip, Chuck continued corresponding regularly. After he missed part of the game with an injured hand, he wrote her a note of explanation. “Some joker stomped on my hand, and made it larger and more ugly than usual. I had it X-rayed and got to look at the pictures. All they showed were a few extra calcium deposits, mostly on my crushed finger. The real sorrow in it all is that I can’t wear my ring. The third finger left hand is enlarged.”

For Marianne, the revelation of the season would be the physical toll. She had known Chuck to move slowly on the Mondays after games but now, sharing a home and a bed, she saw the aftermath of a football game in much greater detail. Chuck slept deeply and often awoke in pain, his body betraying deep cuts and vivid bruises that had been barely visible the previous night. There were times when it took an immense effort even to get out of bed.

She knew he was fit and strong. But the nature of the game, and the oversized opponents he was facing on a regular basis, meant that even when Chuck played well and didn’t suffer any serious injuries, he often felt the effects for days. Tuesdays were sometimes worse than Mondays. By Wednesdays, he would be moving toward a reasonable approximation of his morning routine. But the following Monday, the signs of the battering returned. It wasn’t even a question of specific injuries. It was the overarching physical cost, exacerbated by the fact that Chuck was smaller than most of the players he was squaring off against.

One day, as they were laying in bed the morning after a game, Chuck mentioned a veteran teammate whose body had deteriorated noticeably over a long career, and said, “I’m not going to do it that long. I don’t want to be that way when I walk away from this.”

On October 27, the Browns were playing the Chicago Cardinals at Comiskey Park when Chuck moved in to make a stop on the fleet, long-striding Ollie Matson, whose blend of speed and power made him notoriously hard to tackle. Chuck dove into the runner, his right arm caught flush by Matson’s driving thigh. Chuck crumpled on the field instantly and knew his arm was broken.

When he arrived back in Cleveland and went to have the break set, the doctor explained that it was too swollen to X-ray. They told him to return the next day. The following morning, Chuck took Marianne to her regular appointment with her obstetrician, and it wasn’t until later in the day that he was able to get the break X-rayed. Chuck would miss the remainder of the season. The arm was set in a cast that Monday, and he returned to League Park a day later, offering to help in any way he could. He soon learned the feeling of helplessness that engulfed injured football players.

Unable to practice or play, Chuck spent more time preparing for their child’s arrival. He had to relearn the basics of daily life (getting dressed, bathing, driving a car) without the use of his right arm. One night, they had a laughing fit after straining—Marianne eight months pregnant, Chuck in a full arm cast—to move a box spring and mattress up a narrow stairway to the attic, which was being converted to a guest room (the next year, Marianne’s brother John came to live with them for a while).

After Chuck drove them through the slick, snow-filled streets to Marymount Hospital, Marianne gave birth to their baby boy, Christopher, on December 22, 1957. As Marianne delivered, Chuck paced in the waiting room. After he met their child, he didn’t even try to find the words. “He just smiled a lot,” said Marianne. (They had agreed, if it was a boy, to call him Christopher William Noll, the middle name an homage to their respective fathers. But on the birth certificate, Marianne gave the name Christopher Charles Noll.)

In 1957 Cleveland, everyone did the math—they’d only been married for six months when Chris was born—and nobody said a word.

“Nobody knew I was pregnant when we got married,” said Marianne. “We didn’t tell anybody, and I think when Chris was born, I think my parents were more shocked than his parents. But I think they knew how much we loved each other, so . . .”

On Christmas Day, Chuck went back to the house on 141st Street, and introduced Kate and William to their new grandchild. Chuck also spent some time with his growing brood of nieces and nephews. Rita had been in the hospital, giving birth to her fourth child, Ken, on the same weekend that Chuck had broken his arm. She and Clare were harried but happy, with plenty of advice and supplies for the new parents.

During the week before New Year’s, back at the home in Maple Heights, a procession of regulars visited from the Wagon Wheel, led by Dan Ferrazza, whom Chuck had asked to be Chris’s godfather. On the day his son came home, Chuck managed to give him a bath with his one free arm; he’d read books on infants and soon mastered diaper changing and burping, a frequent necessity as young Chris often spit up his formula.

Against the backdrop of his lost season and his new baby, Chuck was still struggling to find what Paul Brown frequently referred to as “his life’s work.” He had decided to give up law school when they got married. The evening classes often left him peeved at the entire thrust of legal logic. “I can remember him saying that he was disappointed,” said Marianne, “because he thought their sole game was to go around the law, and he was offended morally, I think.”

Dissatisfied with selling insurance, he tried his hand working as a salesman for a trucking firm. Early in 1958, Chuck left for a week in Dayton, where he began training as a salesman with the Trojan Trucking Co., a short-line hauler with routes predominantly between Dayton and Cleveland. The work was mostly drudgery, but Chuck found it marginally less stifling than selling insurance. Like insurance, Chuck worked on commission. He and Marianne assiduously saved from the twelve checks he received during the football season, and he continued to let her manage the money.

“We just had to be careful how we lived,” said Marianne. “We did not live like a lot of the other players did because we had responsibilities. Milk cost like 10 cents a quart then. Chris’s formula cost $1. And the constant medication. I learned to handle money.”

Over the summer, the added responsibility of Chris had caused Chuck to again reconsider his future career path. In August 1958, on the Browns’ annual West Coast preseason swing, he wrote to Marianne, who had offered to check with Case Western Reserve about getting him into medical school. “If you’ll call W.R.U. and scope me in, I would appreciate it,” he wrote. “The more I think about it, the more I’m sure. I’ve always wanted that, but didn’t think I could make it financially, and then I became fascinated by this football stuff—a fascination which is slowly waning. I like to think of it or rationalize that it’s a growth and change thing—what was important last year isn’t important this year. What I’m trying to say is football is a goal reached about which I can’t get too excited about. Medicine is for now.” He signed it “Love, Chuck,” and added a postscript for Marianne to give Chris a smooch. He’d come a long way in expressing his feelings, though it remained easier for him to do so in print. A day or two later, he wrote Marianne again—recommending the book Auntie Mame and updating her on his progress.

He was a man who seemed caught between a life in football—the urgency, the camaraderie, the gravity of the game—and the commitment to his wife. Writing from Los Angeles, he noted, “I haven’t set my watch for this time. I look at it and get a picture of what you usually are doing at about that time. I feel much closer that way.”

Their biggest challenge continued to be Chris’s health. The first year of his life would be marked by allergies and eczema all over his body. Then trying to find a formula that he could keep down. He’d weighed 8 pounds and 8 ounces when he was born, and at nine months, weighed just 16 pounds. No matter what medications used, what variations on formulas were attempted, he remained sickly. While Chuck was in California on the Browns’ preseason swing, Marianne brought Chris to the doctor for what was originally diagnosed as a throat infection, giving him a shot.

“Marilyn came out to the house that night,” said Marianne. “So we were sitting in the living room talking for a really long time, having a couple of drinks, and I would just go in and check him. So the next morning, at 6 o’clock, I went in, and the soft spot looked like he had a golf ball on top of his head. So I took him to the emergency room and they kept insisting I had dropped him. I said, ‘I did NOT drop him!’ So they did spinal taps and then they had to do subdurals and then it finally dissipated, but they really were on me about, ‘How did you drop him?’”

The allergies became life threatening. The only four foods he could eat as a toddler were summer squash, mashed potatoes, beef heart, and beef liver. After trying dozens of different formulas, they settled on liquified beef hearts. “That’s the only thing they could give him that he could drink,” said Marianne. “He loved it. It looked like chocolate milk, see. So a kid would come to the house, and they would say, ‘I want what he has!’ I would say, ‘No, you don’t.’ So I would let them taste it, and they would all go, ‘Yuk!’”

In the second game of the ’58 season, Brown moved Chuck back over to the offense, to fill in for injured Gene Hickerson, who’d had his leg gashed in a win over the Cardinals, leaving him in the hospital. “He’s a fellow who could do a competent job at almost any spot on the team,” Paul Brown said. But if Chuck was adaptable to any position, it was also true that he was essential to none.

The ’58 season emphasized something that had been festering for years. The Browns had grown increasingly alienated from their coach. There was a sharper edge to Paul Brown by now. His critiques in film sessions were more pointed.

“Stop the film,” Paul Brown would say, then he would have an assistant rewind the tape, and play back, in slow motion, a player missing an assignment.

“Whose man was that?,” he’d ask.

“Mine,” said Jim Brown.

“Well if you can’t block, you can’t play for me.”

There may have been a time when this was true, but the players knew it patently wasn’t for Jim Brown, the most talented football player of his generation.

And the arbitrariness of Brown’s treatment of Jim Brown showed the fissures that were developing in the Paul Brown mystique.

When Ratterman, fading in the pocket to pass, lost his footing and fell on his butt on a third down, it was embarrassing. When the quarterback got to the sidelines, he could hear his coach asking the trainer to “check him for a concussion.”

The team’s strong record covered up many of the internal fissures. The Browns jumped out to a 9–2 record and needed a win or tie to qualify for the NFL title game going into their season finale at the Giants. Leading by a touchdown, they were on the verge of kicking a field goal to go up 13–3, when Brown called for a fake field goal, which the Giants stopped. New York won the game, 13–10. “From that point on, Paul never had quite the same respect from the players,” said Cleveland Press beat writer Bob August.

A week later, in the Eastern Conference playoff game, the Giants beat the Browns again, for the third time that season. Teammates and fans were furious that Jim Brown carried just seven times (for eight yards) in the game. The Giants’ defensive coach Tom Landry had clearly found a key to stopping the Browns, and Paul Brown’s play calling had become predictable.

During the 1959 off-season, Chuck continued to consider a career as a doctor. “I knew a lot of doctors on a social basis, and so did he,” said Marianne. “They talked to him about going to med school.” He applied to Case Western Reserve and was provisionally accepted, pending taking another year of classes in biological sciences. “They didn’t formally accept him, but it was pretty much understood,” said Marianne. “I could see he wasn’t really enjoying those classes, and he was working [at the trucking company] and playing ball.”

Given a free day off on the annual preseason jaunt to California in 1959, Chuck and a group of other Browns went to visit Republic Studios and take a tour. But he didn’t stop there, urging a group of teammates to Venice Beach, where they wanted to witness firsthand the counterculture. He saw a pair of women walking hand in hand and, out of genuine curiosity, followed them to the door of a gay club, then moved farther down the boardwalk to see a beatnik coffee shop. Chuck was not impressed with the quality of the art—“Poetry to the Beat is anything he sees fit to call poetry,” he wrote to Marianne. “It need not (and never does) have meter, rhyme, or any form of restrictions whatsoever. It is any expression period. We were shown one poem that has been preserved, written by a beat who thought Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker was the most.” But his intellectual curiosity continued to be piqued. “I don’t think I’d make a very good beatnik,” he wrote in conclusion. “The only poetry I know—‘I love Marianne!’ This however is not acceptable to them.”

By the time the ’59 season began, Chuck was growing more perturbed with his head coach. He came home furious one day, after Cleveland cut its fifth-round draft choice, Dick LeBeau (who would go on to a thirteen-year Hall of Fame career with the Lions).

By the end of the preseason Chuck was back to the guard position. “Chuck is our handyman,” Brown told the Press. “He can play six positions and is very quick at adapting himself.”

Clare always came to his brother-in-law’s games, often bringing along Chuck’s parents, when they were up to attending. Rita had her fifth child, Joanne, in January of 1959, and by the time the ’59 season started, she was pregnant again (her sixth, Jerry, would be born in March 1960).

At the end of that season, Chuck engaged in one of a relative few unabashedly romantic moments.

He told Marianne that now, in a better financial state, he wanted her to have a proper wedding ring. Marianne insisted that it wasn’t important, but Chuck was adamant about wanting to give her the gift. Dante Lavelli referred them to a jeweler who specialized in opals, which Marianne wanted—and he made the purchase. “It’s a beautiful ring,” she said. “But he’s funny. He came home one day and he brought in golf clubs. He said, ‘Here. I want you to learn how to play golf.’ That is about as romantic as he usually got.”

Through it all, Chuck seemed intent on his various tasks but oddly untethered about his future. He was fighting for time as a starter and losing his thirst for the physical grind of the game. He wanted to get on with his life’s work, but he didn’t know what that was. In football, the end seemed, if not imminent, then inevitable. And his off-season work simply didn’t compel.

“I had a horrible, horrible fear of him ending up selling time on a truck line forever,” Marianne said. “And I wanted him to have a passion.”

Chuck’s old roommate Jim Currin called near the end of the 1959 season, to pass on a message. Dayton was about to hire a new football coach, and the former assistant coach Joe Quinn was among those in the alumni club who thought that Chuck would be a good candidate. He hadn’t spoken about that as a profession, but he wasn’t closing any doors, and he agreed to drive down and talk with the athletic director. He explained to Marianne, “I could hang on for a couple more years, but I really don’t want to. I need to make a decision.”

He called Paul Brown and explained Dayton’s interest. Brown was complimentary and supportive and told him that if he didn’t take the job, there would still be a place for him with the Browns in 1960. If he did get the job, Brown hinted, he’d likely be willing to extend his greatest compliment—giving Chuck a copy of his playbook.

Chuck drove down through the slush of a snow-filled winter to two days of meetings at Dayton. After an in-depth interview the second day, he returned home, pulling into the driveway in pure darkness.

Marianne was waiting, with dinner and a bottle of wine. “Do you think you’ll get it?,” she asked.

“No,” he said. “If they were going to give me the job, they would’ve asked me today.”

There was something else.

“But I do know one thing now: This is what I want to do. I really want to coach.”

He said it with the sort of authority that Marianne knew that he had finally decided. But he added a note of caution.

“He just said, ‘You have to understand about insecurity, about moving around, that that is what it would be,’” said Marianne. “I was like, ‘So—whatever.’ I wanted him to be happy.”

Chuck Noll was twenty-seven years old. He’d spent time in myriad jobs: delivering newspapers, digging cemetery plots, setting up bowling pins, substitute teaching, selling insurance, selling trucking services, playing football. He’d studied law and had considered going to medical school. Now, after all of that, he’d come back to where he started, to his first love. He wanted to be a football coach.

He’d found his life’s work.