Yellow Jackets

Frankford's roster arrived at a stadium fitted with electric lights and played out a stretch of games that no other National Football League (NFL) side would attempt for years: home and away fixtures on consecutive days, sometimes twice in the same week, because the neighbourhood's factory workers could only fill the stands on a Saturday. The club finished that stretch 14–1–2, the best record in the league, and was recognised as NFL champion at a time when no title game existed to settle the matter.

Frankford itself grew out of the Frankford Athletic Association, an amateur outfit dating to 1899 that turned professional and joined the NFL in 1924 under a name borrowed from its own colours: blue, yellow and white, the same shades Philadelphia used on its civic flag. Local memory adds that actual yellow jackets had taken to nesting in the stadium walls, which did the name no harm either.

The rivalry that defined those years was with the Pottsville Maroons, a feud that boiled over in 1925 when Pottsville was stripped of a claim to the title after playing an unsanctioned exhibition on what the league considered Frankford's home territory — a decision Pottsville supporters have never fully accepted.

None of it outlasted the Depression. Falling attendance and a fire at the stadium emptied the club's finances, and it folded in 1931; its assets were sold on to start the Philadelphia Eagles two years later. Of the men who passed through Frankford, Bert Bell is the one whose name carried furthest — he took the Eagles' ownership from the wreckage and went on to serve as NFL commissioner, carrying Frankford's stadium lights, in a sense, into the league's modern age.