In January 1915 -- ninety-eight years ago -- club officials of Cleveland’s major league ballclub met with the local press corps to decide on a new name for the club. With superstar Nap Lajoie now playing for the Philadelphia Athletics, the “Cleveland Naps” moniker was no longer appropriate. The groups walked away from that meeting with the club’s new name. As reported by the Associated Press in this January 17, 1915, piece in the Los Angeles Times:
When the Cleveland Indians got their name
Jason Miller
On January 6, less than two weeks before that announcement ran, an article about the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania was published in a Connecticut paper. This was the story’s lead.
The Indian has come into his own. No longer does one look upon the full-blooded American Indian as a savage, but rather as one who has been lured from his wild state to that of a useful and well-to-do citizen who has adapted himself to the radical conditions which the march of time and progress of civilization has brought about.
Man, things really were different a century ago.
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