Green Bay Packers’ First Water Boy
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Palmiro “Paul” Mazzoleni, a water boy for the fledgling Green Bay Packers in 1919, died Tuesday in a Green Bay nursing home. He was 91.
He began following the Packers in 1919, the team’s inaugural season, when players who lived in his neighborhood asked him to be a water boy at practices at the old Bellevue Park. After another season of hauling water, he had to give up the job when the Packers switched their practices to mornings at a different park.
“I lost my job because my mother wouldn’t let me skip school to be water boy,” Mazzoleni told the Green Bay Press-Gazette in 1998.
Mazzoleni ran a Green Bay service station in the 1950s and 1960s and worked on many cars of the Packers, team historian Lee Remmel said.
