This is our American stories, and we love bringing you stories about history and about sports.

And today, we bring you a combination of the two.

Here's Mike Gibbons, director emeritus and historian,

at the Babe Ruth Birth Place and Museum, also located in Baltimore,

to tell us more about the legendary Baltimore football team

that helped the NFL become what it is today.

Today we're going to be talking about the Baltimore Colts,

one of the NFL's storied franchises,

a team that helped put the NFL on the map for a variety of reasons,

but also helped to give Baltimore a new identity.

During World War II, Baltimore was one of the industrial centers

of the United States, producing ships and aircraft for the war effort. But at the conclusion

of World War II in 1945, the industries really lost their market. They didn't have to produce ships and aircraft in the numbers that they did during World War II.

And so many of the plants in and around this area closed down

and Baltimore lost its manufacturing capability.

The town gradually slipped and declined and became known really as nothing more than a pit stop between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

The Baltimore cults arrived on the scene in 1953, and though in the beginning they were not very good at all, it gave Baltimoreians

and Marylanders something to look forward to on Sunday afternoons in the fall. The team in

1956 had started to get a little bit better under head coach Weeb Eubank and he started

a quarterback by the name of George Shaw.

In the fourth game of 1956, Shaw was injured.

And to replace him came a rookie quarterback by the name of Johnny Unitas.

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