Harvard Alumni - Class of 1961

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John Reidy, Tom Blodgett, and Joan Hutchins

Invite you to join us for Harvard Yale Football “The Game”

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Our Class Tent on the Soccer Field will open at 10:30 am
Tables and chairs, ice and wine will be provided

Bring your own Refreshments.  Pot Luck Contributions are Welcome
We will walk to the Stadium at Noon for the 12:30 Kickoff,
Then back to the Tent for more Conversation after the Game

RSVP to John Reidy at 617-504-1765 or john.reidy@verizon.net

Then make out your check ($75 per ticket), payable to John Reidy

Mail your check, postmarked by July 15^th, to:
60 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, MA 02108.

(Note “HR 61” on the notation line, and
Please include your email and return address)

The Stadium History is recounted below

Nation's Oldest Stadium Has Colorful Past

By Michael S. Lottman, AB 1961, November 7, 1959

In the 56 years since its construction, the Harvard Stadium has seen more football games than any other arena in the United States. Since the Harvard-Dartmouth clash on Nov. 14, 1903, more than 360 contests have been played in the Stadium, including some of the most memorable in football history.

There are two main reasons for the Stadium's ascendency in this realm. First, the Crimson annually schedules more home games than most other teams--often as many as six or seven a season. Second, and most important is the obvious reason: Harvard Stadium is the oldest structure of its kind in America.

A gift of $100,000 from the Class of '79, along with $75,000 supplied by the H.A.A., provided the money needed for the project, which would cost at least ten times as much today. A new stadium had long been the dream of those concerned with Harvard athletics, and it took only the $100,000 to start construction immediately.

For many years before work began in the spring of 1903, demand had been growing for a new stadium. Sensitive souls were offended by what they called "a forest of columns supporting a rambling and irregular structure," and felt, with the increase of traffic in the Soldiers Field area, that the former grandstands were a poor advertisement for the University.

A more serious objection to the old seats was that they were of wood. With the great crowds that football and baseball attracted the weak wooden stands were no longer safe. And there was the ever-present danger of fire. The H.A.A. had a crew of firemen and often a fire engine at every contest. During the spring of 1903, only the quick thinking of an usher avoided disaster when a section of the grandstand caught fire during a baseball game. The heroic usher restrained a panicked spectator from spreading the alarm through the packed stands.

Further, the grandstand cost what was then an enormous amount to maintain. As the March, 1904, issue of the Harvard Graduates' Magazine indignantly pointed out, "The yearly outlay for repairs amounted to not less than $1000."

After thorough testing, "concrete with a small amount of steel" was chosen as the most durable and practical material. Thus the Stadium became the first large reinforced concrete structure built in this country. The design had been established several years earlier by Professor L. J. Johnson, following the general plan laid down by the H.A.A. Final drawings called for a stadium 573 feet by 420 feet on the outside, enclosing a field whose overall dimensions were 478 feet by 230 feet.

The Stadium consists of 4,800 concrete slabs, each weighing 1,200 lbs, placed on steel-concrete girders. In the arena, which many still consider the best for viewing a football game, seats range in altitude from seven to 50 feet, and the top of the colonnade is 72 feet above ground. With temporary seats in the open end, the open end, the Stadium's capacity can be raised well above 40,000; the report of a 1929 meeting with Dartmouth puts the crowd at 60,000. In the entire structure there are 250,000 cubic feet of concrete--a mixture of Portland cement, sand and broken stone.

As the first of the great football fields, the Stadium influenced the shape and size of every other arena, and even made its mark on rules of the game. When public indignation over football's "roughness" forced President Theodore Roosevelt to institute a new set of rules in 1906, one of the proposed changes was to make fields a full 40 yards wider. This move would have changed the whole character of football, turning it into a Rugby-type game, with more lateral passing and sideways running. Harvard protested, however, that such an innovation would outdate its six-year-old Stadium, and the rule-making body decided to institute the forward pass instead of the wider field.

On Nov. 14, 1903, Harvard met a strong Dartmouth eleven in the first game ever played in the Stadium. Seats on the curve to the south were still unfinished, and temporary stands were erected in the Stadium's north end. There was real fear among the public, despite the many years of testing, that the concrete stands would weaken and crumble as soon as they came into use. To allay these doubts, the construction superintendent prominently walked around under the stands while the spectators found their seats.

In a dull and unequal contest, the Crimson bowed to the Indians, 11 to 0. Dartmouth's Turner, the starting right tackle, scored both of the Big Green's touchdowns out of the "tackle-back" formation. Vaughn kicked the goal after Turner's first tally, and that was all the point-making either team could manage. The unusual final score can be laid to the fact that touchdowns were then worth five points. Judged by the standards of the Crimson teams of the early 1900s, the 1903 squad was only fair. Before the Dartmouth encounter, the Crimson had dropped a 5-0 decision to Amherst.  In the last game of the season, the varsity lost to Yale, 16 to 0.

As the end of the 1913 season approached, the Stadium had yet to witness a victory over Yale, but one of the greatest individual performances in the history of football soon remedied that situation.

The once-beaten, thrice-tied Bulldog eleven that came to the Stadium in 1913 was not the team that had dominated the Harvard-Yale series for so long. Further, the Crimson was undefeated, and needed only a win over Yale to become undisputed Eastern champions.

Crimson headlines after the game proclaimed, "Harvard 15, Yale 5. Brickley's 5 Goals from Field Wins (sic) Football Championship. Stadium Looks on a Yale Defeat After Eight Years Waiting." The greatest drop-kicker the game has ever known, Charlie Brickley, scored all 15 Harvard points on field goals ranging up to 40 yards in length. Brickley earlier that season had tallied the field goal that edged Princeton, 3 to 0.

Other epic contests have followed. One of the most famous was the 1929 Army contest, in which the Crimson tied a West Point eleven led by all-time great Chris Cagle, 20 to 20. Putnam and Barry Wood, then a substitute, completed seven of 12 passes for 168 yards, including a list-ditch aerial to end V.M. Harding for the tying touchdown.

In 1959, the Stadium remains a sturdy and well-designed example of a good football arena, and the modern behemoths, most patterned in some detail after it, with all their showy extravagance, cannot eclipse the history it contains.  Shown in an aerial view, the Crimson football team meets Army in a 1929 encounter. The varsity tied the Cadets, 20 to 20, on a desperation pass play, in one of the greatest encounters in Stadium history. The great Barry Wood, then a sophomore and an alternate quarterback, teamed with starter Putnam to complete seven out of 12 passes for 168 yards. Wood also contributed two extra points. Army's immortal Chris Cagle, who was so good that Navy suspended the inter-service series during his career, ran wild against the Crimson, scoring three touchdowns. Arrow marks Academy section. 

Harvard Website Account of the Historic Harvard Stadium

When it was built, there were doubters who thought it would never withstand the weight of a large crowd, let alone the brutal cold of a New England winter.  But more than a century later it still stands proud, the “aristocrat of American sports amphitheaters” as one writer put it, and is celebrated for saving football as well as for its timeless charm and fabulous sightlines for fans.

Harvard Stadium turns 107 years old this fall, and the nation’s oldest permanent concrete structure for intercollegiate athletics has never looked better. First opened Nov. 14, 1903, for a game against Dartmouth, the Stadium has since hosted over 660 Harvard football contests as well as hundreds of other athletic and non-athletic events, including Olympic and professional soccer, lacrosse, rock concerts, benefits and political rallies. 

In March of 1903, it was announced that the Class of 1879, in honor of its 25th anniversary, would present the university with a stadium seating 40,000 spectators. The plans provided for a horseshoe-shaped structure of steel, similar to the stadium at Athens, with seats of stone and concrete for 27,000 persons. An additional 15,000 temporary seats were to be added whenever the demand made it necessary. Its total cost was $310,000. 

It would be a much-needed addition to the Harvard athletics landscape. The football and baseball teams had played for several years at Soldiers Field, where fans jammed into decaying, unsafe wooden bleachers to cheer on the Crimson. Work on the Stadium began shortly after the completion of the 1903 baseball season, and the foundations were dug in early July. Even when the Stadium opened some four-and-a-half months later, it was far from a finished product. Much of the seating on its eastern side was of a temporary wood nature and capacity stood at just 20,000.

The Stadium marked the first use of reinforced concrete on a large scale, and skeptics abounded who were certain the building would not be safe. To allay those fears, the construction superintendent walked beneath the stands while spectators took their seats on opening day.

In those days, football was a running and kicking game. But as the sport became increasingly violent, some colleges were dropping it in favor of rugby, so in 1906 U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt 1880 stepped in to save the game. He organized the Intercollegiate Football Conference — a collection of 28 colleges and universities and the forerunner of the NCAA — and demanded it adopt rules changes to make the sport safer. Some suggested widening the field, but the permanent nature of the stands at Harvard Stadium made it impractical for the school to endorse this plan.

Concerned that eliminating football at Harvard might mean the end of the sport on a national level, the committee instead approved the forward pass, though it did its best to minimize its effect on the sport. In 1906, the penalty for an incomplete was for the offensive team to lose possession (the rule was “softened” in 1907 to a loss of 15 yards). Other rules changes were also implemented, including giving the offense just three downs instead of five to gain a first down and shortening games from 70 to 60 minutes with a mandatory 10-minute rest between halves. In hindsight, however, it was adopting the forward pass that curtailed the sport’s violence and led to the surge in popularity that remains to this day.

The Stadium colonnade was added in 1910, and the press box was also built to accommodate growing media interest. When the press box burned down in 1981, it was rebuilt at a cost of $375,000, more than the price tag for the entire Stadium some 80 years earlier. The Stadium’s seating area was refurbished two years later.

Today, Harvard Stadium remains one of the great venues in all of organized football. Sports fans from across the nation visit the Stadium to experience the rich tradition, and Harvard’s student-athletes are quick to talk about the unique experience of playing in one of the sport’s true treasures.

Harvard Stadium from Wikipedia,

Harvard Stadium is a U-shaped football stadium in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Built in 1903, it was the first collegiate athletic stadium built in the United States, and was a pioneering use of reinforced concrete in the construction of large structures. Because of its early importance in these areas, and its influence on the design of later stadiums, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987.[5] The Stadium is owned and operated by Harvard University and is home to the Harvard Crimson football program. It was also home for the New England Patriots in their inaugural 1970 season, before the completion of Foxboro Stadium.

The stadium seats 30,323.[6] The stadium seated up to 57,166 in the past, as permanent steel stands (completing a straight-sided oval) were installed in the north end of the stadium in 1929. They were torn down after the 1951 season due to deterioration and reduced attendance. Afterwards, there were smaller temporary steel bleachers across the open end of the stadium until the building of the Murr Center (which is topped by the new scoreboard) in 1998. 

Harvard's stadium was constructed on 31 acres of land known as Soldiers Field, donated to Harvard University by Henry Lee Higginson in 1890 as a memorial to Harvard men who had died in the American Civil War.[7] The structure, similar in shape to the Panathenaic Stadium, was completed in just 4½ months costing $310,000. Much of the funds raised came from a 25th Reunion gift by Harvard's Class of 1879. It is the home of the football team of Harvard, whose all-time record (at the end of the 2010 season) at the stadium is 427-222-34 (.650). The stadium also hosted the Crimson track and field teams until 1984 and was the home of the Boston Patriots during the 1970 season, until Schaefer Stadium opened the following year.

Lewis Jerome Johnson, Prof. Civil Engineering, Harvard University, was a consultant to the design team for the Harvard Stadium. It is historically significant that this stadium represents the first vertical concrete structure to employ reinforced structural concrete. Prior to the erection of the stadium in 1902, reinforced structural concrete was used in horizontal (flooring, sidewalks, etc.), design only. Prof. Johnson was the engineer of note responsible for incorporating the concept into the vertical structure of the stadium design. There is a plaque dedicating the stadium to his honor on the east end wall outside the stadium. 

In 2006, Harvard installed both FieldTurf and lights.[8] On September 22, 2007, Harvard played its first night game at the stadium, against Brown University, winning 24–17.

Impact on American Football

In the early 20th century, American football was an extremely violent sport. 18 players died and 159 were seriously injured in 1905 alone.[9] There was a widespread movement to outlaw the game entirely but U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt intervened and demanded that the rules of the game be reformed. In 1906, Roosevelt met with representatives from 62 colleges and universities and formed the Intercollegiate Football Conference, the predecessor of the NCAA.[10] The purpose of the committee was to develop a uniform set of rules and regulations to make the game safer. A leading proposal, at the time, was widening the field to allow more running room and decrease the chances of serious collisions. While it was very popular among committee members, Harvard objected. Their recently completed stadium could not accommodate a larger field. Because of the permanent nature of Harvard Stadium, the proposal was rejected and the forward pass was legalized in April, 1906.[11] Harvard Stadium directly led to the creation of two of the most fundamental aspects of modern American football: standard field dimensions and the legal forward pass.