The Riverside Ballroom served repeatedly as an important Green Bay Packers venue. Before their final game in 1940, Coach Curly Lambeau held practice there over two days because of snow, ice, and sub-freezing temperatures, and the team worked out there again after a snowstorm in 1942. In 1959, nearly 1,000 guests gathered there for the Packers' kickoff dinner before Vince Lombardi's first season as coach, where he told the crowd, "This is your team. It belongs to the City of Green Bay. Without you, we can do nothing." Yet support for Lombardi had not been universal; nine months earlier, about 200 people attended a "We want Lambeau" rally there after the Packers' 1-10-1 finish in 1958, and former player Pete Tinsley said that if Lambeau returned there would be "less lipstick and beer" for the players. The Packers Hall of Fame also held its banquets there from 1972 to 1977, and Lombardi, who died in 1970, was among those inducted during that period, represented in the class of 1975 by his widow, Marie. The present Riverside Ballroom opened in 1936 after a fire destroyed most of the original building, which had been built in 1929.