Circling the Stadium

Back in the days when the rubber truncheon was standard equipment on a muddy gridiron, football was the sport of gentlemen-mastodons with handlebar mops hanging over their snarling lips. Slipping out of their four-button sack coats, doffing their celluloid collars, and carefully folding their string-ties, an aggregation would roar out of a gaslit locker-room to pull every play in the book, and some still in manuscript. Grabbing moustaches was worth a slight penalty, but the pile-on, the straight-arm, and an occasional sapping with a clenched fist were all "part of the game." For eleven such people--and for the age that was waiting before--the Harvard Stadium was constructed.

Just in case you don't happen to have a copy of the Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies (June, 1904, Vol. 32, No. 2) lying handy, you might be interested to learn that in 1902, after sweating over a hot slide-rule for some weeks, the architect team of McKim, Mead and White rushed up from New York laden with rolls of blue paper. The Aberthaw Construction Company of Boston wasted no time: saziche sandwiches were prepared, red wine was distributed, and the cement started pouring. After a year-and-a-half of carefully directed work, the building was completed, and the University's treasurer neatly penned a check for $295,000. It was good, and six years later the colonnade was added, bring the seating capacity to 30,000.

When the Yale Bowl was built, in 1914, slightly envious eyes turned southward, and for almost a decade following, agitation stirred around the Varsity club for the construction of a new stadium to out-class the monstrous New Haven teacup. Finally, in 1929, after holding his thumbs down for two years, President Lowell agreed to allow the addition of steel stands for the Oxford-Cambridge-Yale-Harvard Track Meet. This was the last large work performed on the stadium, and increased its seating capacity to something close to the present 57,426. Nobody much remembers what happened in the English-American track and field events--except that it touched off a number of nice, old ladies serving tea in the afternoon--but the seats behind the north goal posts still remain, as you probably know.

The Dartmouth and Army football games have drawn capacity crowds more than once, and the Yale contest generally manages to fill up every seat in view. Currently, the student attendance remains fairly constant, with local customers and travelling fans swallowing the rest of the stalls in proportion to the Crimson squad's seasonal success and consequent importance of the match. Nobody has gone on record with a prediction of this fall's future, but tickets to the remaining tussles are going fast.