Jon Kendle
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jon Kendle, vice president of archives at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It's been edited for length and clarity.
I was born and raised in Canton, Ohio, the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As someone who loved sports and loved football, you'd daydream about working there. Now, I'm the vice president of archives at the Hall.
During my junior year in college at Kent State University, I realized I needed to find a job working in sports because whenever I'm doing anything related to sports, it doesn't feel like work. I'd worked on the grounds crew at Thurman Munson Stadium, a baseball field, during my summers. I got paid to watch baseball games.
I came across a summer college internship in 2005 at the Hall of Fame in the archives, but it was full-time and unpaid, and I couldn't swing that.
There was also a part-time internship available in the education department that summer, which I was able to do instead. Interning with the education team really got my foot in the door. I was really in the right place at the right time.
After about two years of running tours, I moved into a role in the Hall of Fame's research department, which was more aligned with my background. I'd studied history at college and minored in English. The role was working with the two-dimensional collection at the museum – all the paper, information, and photographs.
About two or three years into my role as a researcher, I went back to school part-time and got a master's in library and information science with an archival focus. My master's thesis focused on the NFL and NFL clubs' archiving processes.
Archiving isn't a main focus for a lot of clubs. Their historical information and artifacts either come to the Pro Football Hall of Fame or, a lot of times, end up in a closet somewhere, or an equipment manager or somebody like that might take it home.
I'm surrounded by 40 million pages of documents and 6 million photographic images that are related to the history of the game. They outline every player, coach, and contributor that made the game what it is today. Being immersed in all of that is pretty surreal.
We are the repository of information for the NFL and all 32 clubs, so a lot of what I do is helping our partners, be it broadcast partners, the league itself, or one of the 32 clubs.
There have been quite a few occasions where you hear somebody on TV telling a story that you found in the archives and told to them. We provide a lot of photographs that they use on national broadcasts.
My favorite collection is the Dutch Sternaman collection. Dutch co-owned the Chicago Bears with George Halas, and he kept meticulous records, and they give us the insight we really didn't have into early NFL history. He's got rough accounting ledgers from games, stats pages, play-by-play of games, game programs, and scouting reports from teams that don't exist anymore. This is something you won't find anywhere else in the world.
In 2019, I spent two and a half hours in the archives with Bill Belichick. I showed him a letter he wrote when he was an administrative assistant with the Detroit Lions. He didn't remember writing it, but he knew that was his first job in the league. He said all he did was write thank-you letters to people who'd done things for the team or request information for the coaches.
Belichick brought the entire Patriots team through the museum for a tour and a history lesson.
I was able to run down to the archives and find Tom Brady's draft card and show it to him. The draft card is just a piece of paper with a name written on it, but it means so much more. It represents the moment Tom Brady became an NFL player.
When you show players artifacts like that, you can see the emotion come over their faces because it takes them right back to that moment, and all of a sudden it's very real to them. Brady was very humbled by it. He asked if he could hold it and take a picture with it.
