Function to toggle welcome message. Function to display a form that allows welcome message to be toggled. The parade ended with thousands of revelers amassed at Public Square for an afternoon pep rally, cheering for Browns old and new. They saw Mayor Michael White bark. Alongside White, team owner Al Lerner, President and CEO Carmen Policy, and Coach Chris Palmer sat on a stage 10 feet above a wall of police fencing and concrete barriers, as safely ensconced from the masses as the Ku Klux Klan would be some 22 hours later.
Policy is used to throngs of adoring football fans.
The undersized Youngstown native has been gridiron royalty since the early '90s, when the San Francisco 49ers he helped build continued as one of the elite franchises of professional sports. But Public Square holds other, darker memories for Policy. The stage was only a few hundred feet from the federal and county courthouses where, in his previous life as a slick and gifted criminal defense attorney, Policy spent months at a time defending some of the most notorious mobsters between New York and Chicago. Before the speeches and pep talks, fans and VIPs alike watched a brief video about the team's namesake, Paul Brown, on a temporary Jumbotron screen. Let's take a look back and see where it all started years ago.