Billy Howton, a gifted wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers and two other teams who retired after the 1963 season as the National Football League’s career leader in receptions and served as the first president of the players’ union, but who decades later was sentenced to prison for financial fraud, died on Aug. 4 in Houston. He was 95.
His son, William, confirmed the death, in a memory-care facility.
Howton never played for a winning Packers team, but he distinguished himself as the team’s leading pass catcher during his seven years in Green Bay. In 1952, when teams played a 12-game season, he led the N.F.L. with 1,231 receiving yards. It was the first time a rookie receiver had gained more than 1,000 in a season.
In 1956, Howton broke Don Hutson’s Packers record for receiving yards in a game when he caught seven passes for 257 yards — a record that still stands. The next year, he caught the first touchdown pass at City Stadium (now Lambeau Field).
“Howton was a tall Texan, quick and cocky, the sort who would return to the huddle and announce that he could get open on a deep fly pattern if only the quarterback could throw that far,” David Maraniss wrote in “When Pride Still Mattered,” his 1999 biography of Vince Lombardi, who became the Packers’ coach and general manager in 1959 and led the team to five N.F.L. championships in the 1960s, including victories in the first two Super Bowls.
In 1956, Howton again led the league in receiving yardage, with 1,188 yards on 55 receptions, and was named an All-Pro for the first time. He earned that honor again the next season and was selected to play in the Pro Bowl four times.
“For my money,” Emlen Tunnell, a defensive back for the Giants, told United Press before the 1958 season, “Howton is the toughest pass receiver to cover in the National League.”
But 1958 was not a strong season for Howton, and Lombardi, who took over the team after that season, traded him to the Cleveland Browns.
Howton was stunned by the trade; he believed he had been summoned to a lunch with Lombardi in Green Bay to “tell him what we have to do to win,” he was quoted as saying by his teammate, Gary Knafelc, in “The Greatest Story in Sports: Green Bay Packers 1919-2019” (2021), by Cliff Christl, the team’s historian. Instead, in a quick meeting, Lombardi informed him of the trade.
In an email, Christl wrote that some of Howton’s teammates viewed him as a clubhouse lawyer with a losing attitude, noting that in huddles in 1957 he second-guessed Bart Starr, the new starting quarterback, and that he would “openly criticize his limitations as a QB.”
During his time in Green Bay, Howton was involved in building the N.F.L. Players Association. As the Packers’ player representative, he brought four modest demands to the first meeting of the union’s board: clean towels, T-shirts, socks and athletic supporters for the second of two daily practices for players during training camp.
He was elected the union’s first president in 1958 and the next year threatened to file an antitrust suit in federal court against the owners unless they established a benefits plan. They did so in 1959, providing a modest pension and health and life insurance policies.
The union named Howton one of its 60 heroes when it celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2016.
Billy Harris Howton was born on July 30, 1930, in Littlefield, Texas, near Lubbock. His father, Bernie, was a building contractor, and his mother, Ella Fay (Carpenter) Howton, managed the home. He participated in football, basketball, and track and field in high school and then attended Rice Institute (now University), where he played offensive end.
In 1950, he scored the first touchdown, on a 65-yard pass, at Rice’s new stadium. He was an All-American in 1951.
After leaving Rice without graduating, Howton was drafted by the Packers in the second round of the 1952 N.F.L. draft. He caught 303 passes and gained 5,581 yards in seven seasons in Green Bay. In one season with Cleveland and four more with the Dallas Cowboys, he had 62 more receptions for 2,878 yards.
Howton’s career totals of 503 catches and 8,459 receiving yards were the most in league history for a short time. Raymond Berry of the Baltimore Colts broke the receptions record in 1964 and the yardage mark in 1966.
Berry was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but Howton has not been, although he is a member of the Packers and Rice Athletics Halls of Fame.
After retiring, he worked in real estate, construction and securities.
In 1981, he was one of three men convicted by a federal jury in Texas of mail and wire fraud for swindling several institutions, including the University of Pittsburgh and Blue Cross of Florida, out of $8 million by selling them nonexistent packages of guaranteed student loans.
At Howton’s sentencing, the prosecutor, James Powers, said that the $8 million was “squandered in the highly speculative gold market, was transmitted to foreign banks beyond the reach of the United States courts, and disappeared.”
Howton was sentenced to five years in prison and released in 1983.
In addition to his son, Howton is survived by two daughters, Karin Rawlings and Kimberly Iverson; two granddaughters; and his sister, Sylvia Baker. His marriages to Sandra Bourgoin and Sue Allen ended in divorce. His partner, Carmen Fanlo, with whom he lived in Madrid for 30 years, died in 2019.
On the day in October 1956 that Howton set the Packers’ single-game record of 257 receiving yards, he caught two touchdowns from quarterback Tobin Rote in a 42-17 victory over the Los Angeles Rams.
Art Daley of The Green Bay Press-Gazette wrote that Howton reminded him of Don Hutson, who had played for the Packers in the 1930s and ’40s.
“The Rice Rocket had Ram defensive backs just plain nuts,” he wrote. “If he wasn’t faking ’em out of their shoes, he just outran them.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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