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We Remember Early Football Disasters and the Safety Lessons Learned · Sports History Network

• 1:43
  But the worst tragedy that occurred at a football game, really in the history of the country occurred at Recreation park in San Francisco in 1900.
• 1:59
  So they had built a new factory that was a glass making operation.
• 2:04
  Typically, younger men ended up climbing onto the roof of this glass factory.
• 2:10
  Eventually I had a couple hundred people up there and the thing collapsed.
• 2:16
  So these people fell like 50ft onto concrete floor.
• 2:19
  Some of them either fell into the furnaces or atop the furnace.
• 2:24
  And in, in that particular event, they had 23 people died in, you know, in this thing.
• 2:32
  And the crazy thing is, the game continued.
• 2:36
  Tragic indeed.
• 2:37
  Timothy P.
• 2:37
  Brown of Football Archaeology joins us to tell us of the tragedies in early football, before stadiums were built the way they are today.
• 2:45
  Hello, my football friends.
• 2:46
  This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.
• 2:51
  And welcome to Tuesday as we get to talk to Timothy p.
• 2:54
  Brown of footballarchaeology.com about another period of great history of football.
• 2:59
  Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.
• 3:01
  Hey, Darren.
• 3:02
  Look forward to chatting again.
• 3:05
  I can assure you that I will not do any grandstanding in this game or in this episode.
• 3:11
  That, that's good because that might be a disaster if you did some grandstanding.
• 3:16
  And that's a very poor segue into what our topic is tonight, because we'd love to talk to you about a tidbit that you wrote a little while ago titled Bleacher Collapses about some, some real tragedies that happened at
• 3:32
  games.
• 3:32
  And what can you share with us on that?
• 3:35
  Yeah, so, you know, it's, it's one of those things, you know, we just don't think about anymore.
• 3:41
  But, you know, there's a reason that Harvard Stadium was the first.
• 3:50
  It's kind of celebrated for many reasons, but one of them is it was the first reinforced concrete large structure in the world.
• 3:59
  Right.
• 4:00
  And so it's like, okay, well, why would you build a reinforced concrete structure for a football stadium?
• 4:07
  And it's because back in the day, you know, I mean, so football started with just people playing on just whatever field they could find, you know, town squares and, or if in their more rural areas or whatever, you
• 4:20
  know, just go out and play on an old pastor.
• 4:25
  But, you know, as got organized then typically they played on, they played on polo grounds.
• 4:30
  They played it, you know, base, you know, professional baseball parks or whatever kind of stadium that was around.
• 4:38
  But you know, especially for big games, whether the end of season rather be games or just because there were two good teams playing that Sometimes led to real problems because these, even those minor league and pro, you know,
• 4:56
  major league stadiums often were built of, they were made of lumber, you know, or they would just be, you know, sets of bleachers.
• 5:04
  And if there was a big game, then they'd bring in and build temporary bleachers.
• 5:10
  You know, they'd also do stuff like where they'd, they'd bring in like the local circus.
• 5:17
  You know, like the closest circuses would come in and bring their bleachers that were under the big tent and they'd bring them in and they'd kind of ring ring the field to handle the crowd.
• 5:30
  And so it wasn't unusual for those temporary bleachers to be pretty kind of slap dash, you know.
• 5:42
  And you know, if a team was, hadn't done very well, they didn't have the money to maintain the bleachers very well.
• 5:49
  So you know, the wood would rot or dry out, whatever.
• 5:54
  So then you get enough people into it in the stands and they start bouncing around and cheering and you know, there's a big play and boom, you know, the bleachers would collapse.
• 6:04
  And so it was not an unusual thing for that to happen.
• 6:08
  So anyways, this story is about a handful of, I mean, I've got like eight or nine different examples, one in particular that we'll spend some time on.
• 6:17
  But like in 1890, the Yale Princeton game at Eastern park in Brooklyn, you know, they had temporary stand of 4,000 seats 20ft high.
• 6:29
  They collapsed during the game or before the game and like 2,000 people fell, you know, in these stands.
• 6:36
  So, so 2,000 people, that's pretty substantial set of temporary bleachers.
• 6:41
  It's not like, you know, the old 50 people sitting on, you know, five.
• 6:45
  Rows.
• 6:45
  Yeah, I mean if you think about, you know, if they had whatever 15, 20 rows of seats and you know, from the 20 yard line down or behind the end zone or wherever it was, you know, a whole
• 6:56
  section would collapse.
• 6:58
  And you know, that could be real problems.
• 7:02
  Cal, Stanford, Recreation park, they set up in 19 or 1897.
• 7:08
  They set up like a deck for standing room only behind the bleachers.
• 7:13
  And then that collapsed.
• 7:16
  But so that was like nothing because that, that one, you know, that some people got hurt, but, you know, nothing, you know, too terrible.
• 7:25
  But the, the worst tragedy that occurred at a, at a football game in really in the history of the country occurred at Recreation park in San Francisco in 1900.
• 7:40
  So Cal is playing Stanford and what happened was just beyond the end zone, kind of just beyond the corner of the end Zone at this recreation park they had built a new factory that was a glass making operation.
• 7:59
  And it was.
• 8:00
  The factory was slated to start on Monday.
• 8:05
  So in order to be prepared to make glass on Monday, they started these furnaces like whatever on Thursday or Friday to get them heated up because they needed them to get to like 3,000 degrees.
• 8:18
  So the recreation park is sold out.
• 8:23
  So typically young, younger men ended up climbing onto the roof of this glass factory.
• 8:31
  Except the roof wasn't made to.
• 8:34
  To hold a lot of weight.
• 8:35
  It was made to, you know, allow heat to escape.
• 8:39
  And so eventually I had a couple hundred people up there and the thing collapsed.
• 8:46
  So these people fell at 50ft onto concrete floor.
• 8:49
  Some of them either fell into the furnaces or atop the furnaces and they just, you know, they're burned.
• 8:56
  Burned to death.
• 8:58
  And in, in that particular event they had 23 people died in, you know, in this thing.
• 9:06
  And the crazy thing is while that collapsed, the people in the crowd really didn't know the game.
• 9:13
  The game continued, you know, because they just.
• 9:16
  Because it was outside of the stadium proper.
• 9:19
  So the game played on.
• 9:21
  And you know, really it wasn't until afterwards that they.
• 9:26
  That they knew that anything had happened, you know.
• 9:30
  So anyways, that's remains today the worst stadium disaster at a stadium in US history.
• 9:40
  Tragedy.
• 9:41
  Hopefully it never, nothing never surpasses it, you know.
• 9:43
  God forbid.
• 9:44
  Yeah, yeah.
• 9:45
  I mean, well, you think about the, you know, some of these new stadiums that are built.
• 9:51
  It's like Northwesterns.
• 9:53
  Okay.
• 9:53
  So it's not the biggest thing in the world.
• 9:55
  Holds 35, 000.
• 9:57
  But the thing is just, you know, it's gorgeous for what it is.
• 10:01
  Right.
• 10:02
  And you know, whatever the place is down in Dallas, you know, I mean, so there, there's you know, Mercedes Benz or whatever.
• 10:09
  Whatever these places at.
• 10:10
  And T stadium down Dallas.
• 10:12
  Yeah.
• 10:13
  And like the one in Atlanta, I think it's still Mercedes Benz.
• 10:15
  Maybe they.
• 10:16
  I don't pay attention to names anymore, but I mean they're palaces, you know, and they're all just made, you know, obviously structural steel and da da da, you know.
• 10:27
  So it's just amazing what they.
• 10:31
  The difference and you know, how rudimentary those places were.
• 10:36
  And nowadays, you know, you go to pretty much even the rinky dinkiest little high school and they probably have aluminum stands.
• 10:42
  Right.
• 10:42
  I mean.
• 10:43
  Right.
• 10:43
  I'm.
• 10:43
  Sure there's places out there still have, you know, wood.
• 10:45
  Wood stands in some locations.
• 10:47
  But you know, most of them probably have aluminum nowadays.
• 10:51
  They put that on the visitor side.
• 10:53
  Yeah.
• 10:54
  Wooden ones.
• 10:58
  So anyway, just terrible stuff.
• 11:00
  And then.
• 11:01
  So then one of the other ones was.
• 11:03
  So the Wisconsin Chicago game, 1902.
• 11:07
  That's one where Wisconsin brought bleachers from.
• 11:10
  I think it was Ringling Brothers because they were headquartered up in Wisconsin.
• 11:14
  They probably brought Ringling Brothers bleachers down.
• 11:16
  Those collapsed.
• 11:18
  Wisconsin at Michigan in 1905.
• 11:21
  Wisconsin had some bad luck in 1906, Colgate at Syracuse.
• 11:27
  They were building Archbald Stadium at Syracuse, which was the third reinforced concrete stadium in the country.
• 11:38
  But it wasn't ready.
• 11:40
  In 1906, bleachers collapsed.
• 11:42
  You know, somebody died at that one too.
• 11:46
  And one of the interesting things that.
• 11:49
  So that was in the stadium.
• 11:50
  So they actually knew that things had.
• 11:53
  That there had been this, you know, tragedy.
• 11:56
  So they stopped play for 10 minutes.
• 11:58
  The substitutes left the field to help with the recovery and the starters got back on the field and continued playing.
• 12:08
  So, yeah, just craziness.
• 12:14
  Anyways, there are, you know, a couple other games at 1915, Minnesota at Wisconsin, at Camp Randall.
• 12:21
  You know, a section collapsed.
• 12:23
  There's a bunch of photos of that one that are included on my tidbit.
• 12:28
  But.
• 12:28
  So that was the third, third time in 14 years that the stands had given way at a Wisconsin game.
• 12:34
  Now two of them were away games.
• 12:36
  But still.
• 12:38
  Might be something you want to check before game time.
• 12:41
  Yeah.
• 12:41
  Without that many occurrences, huh?
• 12:43
  Yeah.
• 12:44
  You know, you, you wanna.
• 12:47
  You know, people complain about obstructed view seats nowadays, but.
• 12:52
  I'm sure the.
• 12:53
  They have an engineering course of study at Wisconsin.
• 12:56
  Maybe that didn't go so well after that for the.
• 12:59
  Yeah, it was.
• 13:00
  It's not the engineering guys.
• 13:01
  It was the construction management people.
• 13:03
  Oh, okay.
• 13:04
  Yeah, that's what all the engineers say.
• 13:07
  And the maintenance department.
• 13:09
  Right, right.
• 13:10
  You know, I guess we don't have anything though, luckily, like you said that, you know, our stad built a wall.
• 13:15
  I guess maybe some close calls are.
• 13:17
  I think with Seattle's Kingdome.
• 13:19
  I think it was during a baseball season though.
• 13:21
  Had parts of the roof fall down before a game.
• 13:23
  Nobody was in the stadium at that time.
• 13:25
  I, I think about that World Series game when the earthquakes hit California.
• 13:30
  It's that candlestick and everything was shaken.
• 13:32
  You can see the bridges collapsing outside the stadium and just some scary stuff.
• 13:37
  So I can't even imagine bleachers and be sitting on bleachers when they collapse.
• 13:42
  Gosh, give being a couple stories up.
• 13:44
  That's really some scary stuff.
• 13:46
  Yeah, there.
• 13:48
  Here and there.
• 13:49
  There's something happens where there's like a crush sort of thing.
• 13:52
  You know, fan behavior, you know, you know, Wisconsin, Michigan had that in like about 81.
• 14:00
  But we just had somebody, I think last couple years, it might have been an NFL game, fall out of the stands like they were leaning over and they ended up perishing from it.
• 14:09
  Yeah,.
• 14:09
  Yeah, yeah,.
• 14:10
  Yeah.
• 14:11
  So anyways, I mean, it's just one of those things.
• 14:12
  It's just, it's so far removed from our thinking nowadays.
• 14:17
  But, you know, this happened time and time and time again.
• 14:23
  Well, I mean, it's something that really should be remembered because, you know, that's part of football.
• 14:30
  It's something that maybe the safety regulations and people got smarter and prevented it, so it doesn't still occur.
• 14:37
  But, you know, there's loss of life.
• 14:39
  So something definitely significant in time.
• 14:42
  But you, you go back and you look at these significant items, you look at these things that maybe we don't always think about or hear about or read about and, you know, tell the story of football in your
• 14:53
  tidbits and maybe you could share with people where they can catch some of your writing.
• 14:58
  Sure, just go to footballarchaeology.com it's a sub stack, so sign up.
• 15:04
  You'll get an email every time that I publish a new story.
• 15:06
  I've also got, you know, five books available out on Amazon.
• 15:09
  So that's another way if you're looking for something more, more thorough because, you know, tidbits are all just think, think, think, think, think, little, you know, single, isolated stories.
• 15:20
  Whereas the, you know, the books are more.
• 15:23
  Get into one topic and kind of pursue them all the way through.
• 15:28
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 15:29
  Well, we, we appreciate that you follow things through and you tell the short little stories too, to, to keep our appetites wedded.
• 15:37
  And we await next week if you could come on again and share some more.
• 15:42
  I'll be sure to do more wedding next week.
• 15:46
  Okay,.
• 15:51
  That's all the football history we have today, folks.
• 15:53
  Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.
• 15:58
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• 16:10
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• 16:12
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• 16:24
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• 16:32
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• 16:37
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