History
Before the NFL, there were several football teams in Dayton. Enough, in fact, that they played for an annual city championship. In 1913, the St. Mary's Cadets emerged as by far the best of them.
Oddly enough, the team was organized by a group of basketball players who had starred at St. Mary's College (now the University of Dayton). After graduating, they continued to play together as a semi-pro team, with some other local players. They also organized a football team that won the city and Southern Ohio championships in 1913.
In 1915, the team was known as the Dayton Gym Cadets because it played under the auspices, and quite likely the sponsorship, of the Dayton Gymnastic Club. They won their third straight city championship that year.
Three industries in downtown Dayton, the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), the Domestic Engineering Company, and the Dayton Metal Products Company, were known as the industrial triangle. A patent attorney at Delco in 1916 wanted to organize a football team made up of employees from the three companies, and he enlisted Carl Storck to help. Storck had played for the Gym Cadets in 1915, and he eventually persuaded the companies that they should simply sponsor that team.
The resultant team was called the Dayton Triangles. It may have been the first team to have a logo, simple as it was: The player's number was enclosed in a white triangle on the front of a royal blue jersey.
The Triangles continued to dominate opposition from the Dayton area and beyond. Over the next four seasons, they won 27 games, with 3 losses and 3 ties, beating opponents from Detroit and Pittsburgh along the way. In 1918, Carl Storck took as over as the team's manager because the former manager was serving in World War I, and Storck represented the Triangles when the team became a charter member of the American Professional Football Association (APFA) in 1920.
Dayton won won the APFA's first game, beating the Columbus Panhandles on October 3, with Lou Partlow scoring the first touchdown in league history and Hobby Kinderdine kicking the first extra point. The Triangles finished the season at 5-2-2, with both losses coming to the Akron Pros, who won the league's championship.
In April of 1921, Joe Carr of the Columbus Panhandles was named president of the APFA and Storck became secretary-treasurer. The following year, the APFA became the National Football League.
The Triangles remained pretty much a local semi-pro team. As other teams in the NFL became better, Dayton's ability to compete kept declining, and so did attendance. In 1928, the Triangles began playing their games on the road. They won only one game that year and they didn't win any in 1929.
The franchise was bought for $2,500 in July of 1930 by Bill Dwyer, a Brooklyn businessman, and John Depler, the former coach of the Orange Tornadoes. They moved it to Brooklyn, restocked it with different players, most of them experienced professionals, and named the new team the Dodgers.
That wasn't the end of Carl Storck's involvement with the NFL, though. He continued as the league's secretary-treasurer until May of 1939, when Joe Carr died. Storck then became acting president of the NFL and held the job until April of 1941, when poor health forced him to retire, He was replaced by Elmer Layden, who had been one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in 1924. Layden was given a new title: he became the league's first commissioner.