Right Time, Right Place : Pete Rozelle’s Career in Pro Football Started 40 Years Ago, Quite by Accident

World War II was over, and 1946 was the first year of a new era, for the world at large and Pete Rozelle in particular.

Tall, skinny, ambitious, bright and broke, Rozelle was 19 when he got out of the Navy that summer and found the job that changed his life.

It didn’t seem quite that good at the time. The opening was at a Southland two-year school, Compton Junior College, which put him on as an assistant publicist. He got 50 cents an hour, which even then was nothing to write home about.

But there was one big perk.

On the Monday morning that Rozelle went to work, he discovered that the Rams were also coming to the Compton campus within the week to spend two months in their first California training camp.

Representing Cleveland, they had won the National Football League championship in 1945 but had lost money as usual and, hoping for something better, were moving West for the 1946 season.

They landed, literally, on Rozelle’s doorstep.

“It was an incredibly good break for me,” he said the other day. “That was the only time the Rams ever trained at Compton. If they’d opened at Redlands, or Oxnard, I might be in stocks and bonds now, or ladies’ garments.”

Instead, this week, Rozelle is celebrating a milestone event. This is the 40th anniversary of his initiation into pro football.

The league’s commissioner for the last quarter century, he began in a small publicity office answering the phone and the mail, and working on Ram game programs.

To the young Rozelle of 1946, it was a beautiful job. He had two employers: the Rams, who provided board and room, and the college, which agreed to go on paying him 50 cents an hour, since it enjoyed the association with the pros.

Rozelle was always the first in line at breakfast, lunch and dinner. But he worked hard, too, putting in for 60 hours the first week.

“Nobody works 60 hours,” said a college auditor, unfamiliar with pro football. “I’m not going to give you $30 a week.”

“Then cut it to 40 hours, or whatever,” said Rozelle, who could see what a Ram connection meant. “Anything you say.”

The college said 30 hours and $15.

So for the next two months he worked 60-hour weeks and put in for 30.

It wasn’t all work, though, Rozelle recalled.

The Rams’ star quarterback, Bob Waterfield, had married movie star Jane Russell. One night, one of Rozelle’s new Ram friends invited him and the Waterfields, along with 30 or 40 others, to a little party.

Rozelle was standing around after dinner when Russell walked up to him.

“I’m tired of all this football talk, young man,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rozelle said. “I’m awful tired of it.”

“Would you like to go in the billiard room and shoot a game of pool?” she asked.

“Sure would, ma’am,” Rozelle said.

And that’s how they spent the next hour--the $15-a-week assistant publicist and the $20,000-a-week actress.

In those days, when Russell played pool, Rozelle said, she usually had something riding on the game.

“I remember that she asked me what I wanted to play for,” he said. “And I remember that I asked her: ‘How about a dime?’ ”

In the 40 years since then, Rozelle, the son of a South Gate grocer, has always been able to afford more. He hasn’t been in football all that time, but he has been in sports. And financially, he has always taken the up elevator.

In 1947, when he went into the University of San Francisco’s sports information office, Rozelle doubled his salary.

At 26 in 1952, he doubled it again, to $6,000, when he returned to the Rams as their public relations director.

At 29 in 1955, he doubled that, to $12,000, when he joined P.K. Macker’s San Francisco public relations firm, which specialized in airline, sports and recreation accounts.

At 31 in 1957, he doubled that, to $25,000, when he rejoined the Rams as general manager.

And at 33 in 1960, he doubled it once again, to $50,000, when he was named NFL commissioner.

Since then, to be sure, his income has gone through the ceiling--the $1-million ceiling.

But in real dollars, he recalls proudly, he was always ahead of the game. He was, that is, after Compton. His present contract with the league will run for another five years.

Rozelle conceded that, along the way, there have been some mistakes.

One was in a film he produced on sports and recreation in Australia the year before he returned to the Rams as general manager. Although the film drew rave reviews, Rozelle missed one significant point.

“The best segment was on some little Australian kids twisting around in big hoops,” he remembers. “Everybody said, ‘Aren’t they cute.’ I mean everybody but two guys in Pasadena.”

What did they say?

“They called it a million-dollar idea,” Rozelle said. “They went home and invented Hula Hoops.”