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Early today, someone shot me an interesting link from the /49ers sub-Reddit page. If you've never been to Reddit, most every random thing you stumble across the Internet would seem to have first shown up on Reddit.
A user named Lazy_Stegosaurus was going through his grandfather's old stuff and came across this interesting letter the 49ers sent out to what must have been a college prospect. It was posted at imgur, but you can scroll through thanks to their embed code.
There are a lot of interesting things in this letter. Right off the bat, at the top we see a San Francisco address. The 49ers spent time at 760 Market Street, in the Phelan Building, which is a pretty historic site in the City. You can read more about the building here.
If you don't know the building, or at least what it looks like, I did a Google Earth search. This doesn't seem to work on Chrome, but does seem to work with Firefox. Give it a second to load. If it isn't working, you can always go to Google Earth and look up 760 Market Street, San Francisco, CA. It's the triangular building. You can also check out a quick look at where it lies on Market Street.
The phone number is pretty funky as well, set as YUkon 2-4572. That was before we switched to the current seven number set-up. Again, the random things about this letter are pretty cool.
The letter is signed by GM Louis Spadia. According to one obituary of Spadia, he was promoted to general manager in 1951. According to this book, the 49ers moved into the Jack Tar Hotel at Geary and Van Ness in 1960. That would seem to indicate this letter came in the '50s, after the 49ers had left the AAFC for the NFL.
The questions in the article are pretty amusing to consider in light of how things are these days. On the second page of the questionnaire, it asks what positions a player plays and then asks for 100-yard dash time, and then "Are you a passer?" and "Do you punt?" My favorite question might be "How were you employed during your summer vacations?"
The final question is another fun one: "Please list names and college addresses of any football players whom you feel would make good professional football prospects". That is some intense scouting!