Football fans in Northeast Ohio didn’t know what to do.
It was Sept. 21, 1970, a Monday night, and the Cleveland Browns were hosting the New York Jets and quarterback Joe Namath at old Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
It was the first game in ABC’s landmark Monday Night Football series and the beginning of something new and big.
But tens of thousands of Clevelanders were lost that night. They worked until 5 p.m. and didn’t know what to do until the 9 p.m. kickoff. Many wandered downstream streets. Others flooded downtown restaurants and bars on an unprecedented scale for a weeknight and imbibed for hours before kickoff.