Franchise founder Lamar Hunt remembered the Chiefs selling more than 15,000 season tickets that year and that it set an American Football League record.
An unseasonably hot day for October, Hunt came to town with his wife, Norma, and their children and sat in temporary bleachers in what would normally be left field on the north side of the stadium.
The Chiefs emerged with a 28-7 victory that day over the two-time AFL champion Houston Oilers.
Hunt found the turnout more encouraging that the first pre-season game ever held in Kansas City on August 9th against the Buffalo Bills, won by the Chiefs, 17-13, but played before just 5,721 ticket holders.
“It was a sobering moment,” Hunt recalled years later, “only to have so few people in the stands.”
Later that year, the Chiefs managed to draw a crowd of 30,107 to see San Diego defeat Kansas City 38-17.
Municipal Stadium sat 49,002 for football, and at the close of the Chiefs’ first year, the team had drawn 150,567 in home attendance.
SOURCES: “Kansas City Chiefs 1999 Chromo File, July-August, Cabinet 17, Drawer C. “Lamar Hunt looks back at 40 years of Chiefs football,” Chiefs Report, September 2000.