DREAMS OF THE 'SHOE
Excerpt from Chic: the Extraordinary Rise of Ohio Stadium and the Tragic Schoolboy Athlete Who Made it Happen
Dreams of the 'Shoe (taken from Chapter 14)
Copyright Bob Hunter 2008/Orange Frazer Press, Publisher
If Chic Harley was the school's football Messiah, Thomas E. French was its prophet. Before Harley was even a student at East High School, the engineering drafting professor had an astonishing vision. He saw Ohio State's small-time, so-so football program playing its games in a concrete, horseshoe-shaped stadium. This was 1908.
The athletic board French served on recommended substantial improvements to little Ohio Field-substantial as in the erection of wooden bleachers on the east side to increase capacity from 4,200 to 6,100-and French was dreaming of a "magnificent concrete stadium." In those days, even major league baseball teams hadn't made the move from wood to concrete and steel; Philadelphia's Shibe Park and Pittsburgh's Forbes Field would start that trend the following year.
Nonetheless, in explaining the improvements to little Ohio Field in the
Alumni Quarterly, French risked publicly identifying himself as one of those academic eggheads without a shred of common sense by penning these words: "It is hoped that this is only the beginning of the final Ohio Field. The fence will be continued around the entire enclosure, with perhaps behind the bleachers a concrete wall paneled for bronze tablets to be left by future classes; and with the continued splendid financial management and the support of the alumni the dream of a magnificent concrete stadium in horseshoe shape may be realized sooner than anyone would expect."
The truth is, no one but French expected it. Ohio State's membership in the Western Conference was still five years away. Jack Wilce was still playing football for Wisconsin. Lynn St. John was still coaching and finishing up his bachelor's degree at Wooster College. Harley, Pete Stinchcomb, and most of the other players who would make the program famous were still a bunch of kids whose only glory had come on their local sandlots.
From a hundred years away, it isn't hard to see what French saw, crazy as it must have seemed to every man, woman and child he passed on the Columbus streets. The kind of stadium he was dreaming about did exist, just not in the Midwest. Out on the east coast, then the blinding sun in college football's expanding universe, similar stadiums had begun to sprout. Harvard built a concrete U-shaped stadium in 1903 that seated 50,000, the first of its kind for American intercollegiate athletics. Yale followed with a massive bowl-shaped structure in 1908, upping the seating capacity to more than 70,000. Palmer Stadium, a 45,000-seat horseshoe-shaped stadium at Princeton, was a realistic dream that would open six years later.
By comparison, the "substantial" improvements French and his associates had gotten approved for Ohio Field show how much of a football backwater Columbus was. For $30,000, an ugly board fence at the field's south end was replaced with an iron railing, bleachers were erected on the east side, and the south end of the structure was extended ten feet, making the area about 800 by 500 feet.
The fence--a few notches below magnificent in the architectural pecking order--caused a stir. Eight feet high, it ran 172 feet along High Street and 400 feet across the south side, up to the grandstand on the west side. "OHIO FIELD" was spelled out on top in colored tiles. Flagpoles were erected to display visiting team colors as well as those of the Buckeyes.
There were eight covered gates on the south side with turnstiles that registered the number of fans who came through. On the southeast and southwest corners of the field, there were two sixteen-foot gates. Along the south curve of the quarter-mile track surrounding the field was a four-and-a-half foot railing on which brown canvas was hung during games to cut off views from the outside.
It was an improvement, but Ohio Field wasn't the Yale Bowl. But other than French, no one could even see the day when there would be a need for it.
TO THIS POINT, THERE HAD BEEN NO REASON to believe French was a visionary. Born in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1871, he had worked as a draftsman before entering Ohio State in 1891. In school at OSU, he continued his work as a draftsman, and when he graduated in 1895, he was immediately given a teaching job. That was, incidentally, the year Harley was born.
French's wife died in 1903, five years into his marriage, leaving him to raise an infant daughter. He seemed determined to fill the void by plunging deeply into university business. He was bright and ambitious; he would later write a textbook,
The Manual of Engineering Drawing, which became an educational best-seller, and he also designed and drew the OSU seal. His brother, Edward, had been captain of the football team in 1896, and early on, Thomas devoted a great deal of time to the school's loosely-organized athletic programs. He helped recruit volunteer coaches. He helped schedule games with other Ohio schools. He was an advocate for teams in all sports, and it wasn't long before he was called to serve on the university's athletic board.
His ideas might not have mattered much if William Oxley Thompson hadn't become president of the university. Thompson, a Presbyterian minister, also had a vision but it didn't start with football. Since moving from the Miami University president's office to the same position at Ohio State in 1899, he was determined to raise the school's stature. The land grant institution he took over had 1,100 students and was derisively called the "college of the cornfield." He saw it growing into one of the great universities of the Midwest. French's vision of athletics fit the president's plans for the university as a whole because Thompson could also see into the future. When he retired in 1925, there were more than 14,000 students on campus and it was the fifth largest school in America.
The other man who gave credence to French's idea was Lynn St. John. St. John attended Ohio State in 1900 at the age of 23 and played football one season before being called home due to a death in his family. He coached at Fostoria High School the following year, then went to the College of Wooster, where he both coached and attended school at the same time.
St. John planned to become a doctor, and he took the athletic director's job at Ohio Wesleyan with that in mind. Delaware, Ohio, was close enough to Columbus for him to commute to Ohio Medical College, and he did that from 1909 to 1911. When Thompson decided to reorganize the school's athletic program, St. John had a chance to end all that wearisome travel. Thompson created a new athletic board and made French its chairman. The hiring of year-round coaches with faculty status was part of the reorganization, and after French brought in John Richards as athletic director and football coach, St. John was hired as football line coach, head basketball and baseball coach, and athletic business manager. St. John wouldn't have to commute from Delaware to Columbus, but he discovered he didn't have time to continue medical school.
When Richards resigned early in the winter of 1913, French and the other board members promoted St. John to athletic director without even asking if he were interested. Saddled with all this new responsibility, St. John gave up his dreams of a medical career.
ST. JOHN ALSO WASN'T AFRAID TO THINK BIG. He was just a little later to the game than French was. Once the school joined the Western Conference in 1913, St. John, too, started to see the day coming when Ohio State would need a bigger stadium. If he didn't share French's 1908 vision of a concrete horseshoe, his mind started working overtime in 1916 after Chic Harley began to perform his feats on the football field.
French was still ahead of St. John, but not for long. In a speech to the Columbus Chamber of Commerce in 1915, French, now the school's faculty representative to the Western Conference, said he could foresee the day when more than 50,000 would attend Ohio State football games. The idea still seemed far-fetched, but now it came across as more exaggeration than fantasy.
"It was in 1915 that the first preliminary notion of some kind of stadium began to develop," French wrote in the Columbus Dispatch stadium edition on Ohio Stadium dedication day in 1922. "The increasing interest in football and the demand for seats was overtaxing the capacity for Ohio Field and the temporary expedients were reaching their limit.
"We had bought circus seats, most uncomfortable things, as those who had to sit on them well remember, had rented movable stands and built standing platforms until all available space had been filled, and Director St. John said in desperation, ?We've got to tear down this field and build a larger one.'" This is where Harley and his teammates came in.
"When the 1916 season came, with seat orders totally over twice the possible number that could be crowded in, some real action was started," French wrote. "After proposing and abandoning various schemes for rebuilding on the old field, there was advanced by the director the idea of building a bowl in the adjacent woods and keeping the old field for track and baseball."
AFTER HARLEY AND HIS TEAMMATES won the Western Conference championship in 1916 in front of record crowds, the trustees met in February, 1917, and "looked with favor" on the 40,000-seat bowl-shaped stadium.They even dedicated the woods to the west of Ohio Field for that purpose. Thompson embraced the concept and the plan gained momentum, but when he saw the plans and realized that the stadium would be ten feet taller than the new library and cover ten times the area, he had second thoughts. Thompson also worried about how the growing use of automobiles would impact the campus on game day. He asked university architect Joseph Bradford to find another location; Bradford proposed the Olentangy River flood plain at the northwest corner of the campus, bottom land used by the school's college of agriculture to grow corn and other crops.
All the while, the interest generated by Harley and his teammates was making the whole idea seem less and less ludicrous. French asked architecture department colleague Howard Dwight Smith to draw up plans for a horseshoe-shaped stadium as early as 1918, and after the 1919 Illinois game, almost everyone got behind the idea. St. John was now more convinced of the need for it than French was, and when French had Smith design a 50,000-seat horseshoe-shaped stadium that could also accommodate a 220-yard running track, St. John wanted to make it 60,000. The young athletic director might have been late to the bandwagon, but now he was driving it.
It would be interesting to know why St. John thought a 50,000-seat stadium?- which would have dwarfed most of its 1919 counterparts-wouldn't be large enough. An overflow crowd of 17,000 was by the far the largest crowd in school history. There was no compelling evidence that a 60,000-seat stadium would be needed at any time in the future. St. John said after the Illinois game that "between 55,000 and 60,000 tickets could have been sold," but it sounded like the words of a man laying the public groundwork for his own grandiose dream. If demand doubled from where it was in 1919, a 35,000-seat structure would easily accommodate the crowds. He was proposing a stadium to hold a crowd more than three times larger than the largest crowd the program had ever drawn.
Perhaps St. John was simply being carried away by his own ambitions. But given his career as one of the nation's foremost athletic administrators, it seems more likely that he had a better view of the future of college football and its place in Columbus than almost any of those around him. As with Thompson and French, St. John also seemed to have a window on the future. The university didn't have just two visionaries now, but three.
THE TRUSTEES GAVE THEIR APPROVAL of a new stadium on university land, but they refused to pay for it. Thompson lent his support, but he wanted the public to finance it. He didn't want to ask the legislature for favors; he wanted to save them for academic projects. So privately, Thompson, St. John, and French hatched a plan that would include a public campaign to raise the money to finance construction. The campaign would begin with a Stadium Week celebration the following October.
Construction of a stadium might have happened without Harley, but it wouldn't have happened this way and certainly not this soon. In Madison, Wisconsin, Camp Randall Stadium was erected in 1917 with an initial capacity of 10,000. Michigan, the Midwest's oldest and strongest football power, was making plans to expand Ferry Field from 21,000 to 42,000, which it did in 1921.
A 60,000-seat stadium in Columbus, where Ohio State football teams had struggled to draw even 10,000 fans less than ten years before, seemed crazy to those without the vision, which included just about everybody but French, Thompson, and St. John.
So the principals tried to keep the actual capacity of the stadium a secret for as long as possible. They didn't want the growing momentum halted by some spoilsport asking why his money was going to build a pie-in-the-sky boondoggle.
In the meantime, Clyde Morris of the school's engineering department was sent east to look at other stadiums built mostly with concrete, a relatively new material. Most concrete buildings were less than twenty years old, so it was difficult to ascertain how well it would hold up beyond that. Morris looked at the stadiums at Harvard and Yale, New York's Polo Grounds, and seven-year-old Palmer Stadium at Princeton, which had some crumbling concrete. Morris dismissed the Princeton's problem as an isolated case; he determined that it was the result of a poor mix and not the material itself.
French pulled out the plans Smith had drawn up for a horseshoe-shaped stadium in 1918, and St. John again convinced French that bigger was better. Consequently, he asked Smith to build it as large as possible, which in this case, meant 63,000 permanent seats. The stadium's south stands, on the open end of the horseshoe, was years away.
ONLY THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF THE PUZZLE--the financing--had yet to fall into place. Just eleven months after people had climbed trees and telephone poles to see Chic Harley's last game against Illinois in Ohio Field, the campaign for a massive new stadium went public with a campus-wide ox-roast and carnival supposedly designed to celebrate the school's fiftieth anniversary.
Simon Lazarus, owner of the Lazarus department store, was in charge of publicity, and he intended to make sure everyone in the state knew about it. He invited representatives from every Ohio newspaper to attend the carnival-October 16, 1920-piquing their interest with the promise that something truly newsworthy was going to be announced. Those who came were glad they did. A model of the proposed stadium was unveiled and the public gasped. This would be a big event not only for Columbus, but for any city. The Colosseum in Rome seated just 45,000, and Ohio Stadium would seat 63,000. The public was being asked to donate $1,000,000 for construction, but this structure would be as impressive as any stadium ever built.
"Stadium Week" commenced two days later, with more than 3,000 Ohio State students dressed in athletic garb marching down High Street in a parade witnessed by an estimated 100,000 people. Across High near Gay, a giant transparency stretched across the street bearing the message, Boost Ohio Stadium, It's for Columbus. The parade culminated in students doing calisthenics on the north lawn of the Statehouse.
On another day that week the OSU infantry and artillery regiments marched downtown, and on yet another day campus fraternities and sororities paraded fifty-one floats with themes promoting the stadium campaign. Music, stunts and short pep talks were given at noon and 5 p.m. each day on the west side of Statehouse. Newspapers ran story after story. A huge electronic horseshoe outside the Deshler Hotel showed how much money had been raised.
On "Ohio State Day," November 26, 1920, subscriptions reached $923,775, of which alumni and citizens in Columbus had contributed $544,500. On January 20, 1921, just over three months after the campaign started, organizers announced that the goal of $1,000,000 had been met.
The board of trustees still had to approve the plan and now that the 63,000-capacity was known, one influential member of the board made it clear that he would fight it. Dr. Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, the first member of the original 1871 faculty and the sole surviving member of that group, said that the new stadium would be much too large and would never be filled. He insisted that it not exceed 35,000 seats. He was also worried about the reliability of concrete and proposed that the stadium be made of brick.
On August 3, 1921, a thousand men with shovels marched to the stadium site on the Olentangy River flood plain and broke ground with Ohio Governor Harry L. Davis before a crowd of 2,500. The new facility was targeted for completion by October 1, 1922, an amazing timetable considering the scope of the structure that was planned. Seating capacity would be 63,000. It would be built with concrete.
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Ohio State Alumni: EXCERPT FROM CHIC: THE EXTRAORDINARY RISE OF OHIO STADIUM AND THE TRAGIC SCHOOLBOY ATHLETE WHO MADE IT HAPPEN
