Horseshoes And Sideshows

Sept. 18, 2003

By John Roth
Blue Devil Weekly

DURHAM, N.C. - Kickoff for the inaugural game at Duke's football stadium was scheduled for 2 o'clock on a cloudy autumn afternoon. Blue Devil All-America Bill Werber reported for duty eight hours earlier, at the crack of dawn for a new era. Werber was considered the best athlete on campus, but he did not play for the football team. The school's first great two-sport performer, he spent opening day at the stadium raising money for his baseball and basketball scholarship.

After purchasing sodas, sandwiches, snacks and cigarettes on consignment from Durham merchants, Werber hired several kids to hawk the concessions in the stands. He worked the north gate of the stadium, while basketball teammate Harry Councilor manned the east gate and fellow baseball player Lefty Jenkins the west gate.

When the afternoon was over, Werber and Councilor carted the proceeds from the long day back to their room at No. 5 Dormitory (now Brown House on East Campus), where they stacked thousands of dollars all over their beds and bureaus and counted the haul before turning it over to a local banker. "I never saw the game," Werber recalled early last month, a couple of weeks before his 95th birthday.

A landmark event

About 20,000 others did see the first game in Duke Stadium, on Oct. 5, 1929. The outcome was not as propitious for the football team as it was for Werber and his entrepreneurial cohorts, as a powerful Pittsburgh contingent coached by Jock Sutherland dismantled the host Blue Devils 52-7. But the occasion stood as one of the landmark events in the early days of a young university. Not only did opening day mark the unveiling of the largest stadium in the south. It also marked the first use of any facility on Duke's new West Campus.

Formerly known as Trinity College, the institution had just become Duke University five years before, and the now-familiar Gothic grounds were still under construction in 1929. The baptism of the stadium, a year before the first class of students took up residence on West, inspired much hype and fanfare for town and gown, even if some of the plaudits were tinged with sarcasm. The Chronicle, published every Wednesday in those days, described it as "the largest structure ever built to accommodate the circus and sideshows of a southern university."

Administrators and trustees of this southern university were intent on keeping athletics in its proper place - remember, football had been banned on campus from 1895 to 1919 - but their fast-tracking of the stadium was not as incongruous with their academic mission as it may appear in retrospect. President William Few and his governing colleagues were trying to establish the identity of their university and cement their new name in the public consciousness, and they recognized that publicity from a successful sports venture could aid their cause.

Cognizant that intercollegiate football was enjoying a nationwide boom, that 10 million fans had attended games in 1924 and that new venues were being opened all across the land, university leaders announced initial plans for a stadium early in January of 1925, only days after accepting the terms of James B. Duke's indenture of trust, which founded the new institution. Within a year Jimmy DeHart had been hired as athletics director and football coach to upgrade the program, and by 1928 the school was ready to join the Southern Conference as its 23rd member - all that before the cornerstone had been placed for Duke Chapel.

Duke had 10 varsity sports by the end of the 1920s, with football as the anchor. Its record was mediocre but its success at the gate, at cozy Hanes Field on East Campus, had enabled the Athletic Council to erase a fiscal deficit, fund the other sports and begin growing a surplus. Fans were being turned away from some of the big games, and officials recognized they could have sold thousands more tickets for the 1927 contest with N.C. State had additional seating been available. A new stadium would meet rising demand while allowing the school to bring in more prominent opponents and compete on a national stage.

But first the new facility had to be designed, funded and constructed before it was ready to welcome its first big-time team, Pittsburgh, for the 1929 dedication game.

Putting the plan together

Months before the official signing of the Duke indenture, but knowing what was about to unfold, Trinity president Few and English professor Frank Brown embarked on a tour of 20 colleges to study their layouts and architecture. Few kept a detailed journal of the trip, still on file in the Duke University Archives, in which he scribbled notes on various design points and collected numerous photographs of dorms, libraries, chapels and classroom buildings. At three of the stops - Princeton, Yale and Syracuse - he also saved pictures or postcards of the football facilities. Princeton's Palmer Memorial Stadium was a narrow horseshoe, while the structures at Yale and Syracuse were bowl-shaped. Whether intended or not, Duke's turned out to be a composite of those samples - a horseshoe with a steep enough curvature in the bowl so that every seat faced the 50-yard-line, one of its early selling points.

Initial plans, in early 1925, called for a 20,000-seat facility on a seven-acre tract of land purchased specifically for that purpose. The horseshoe would be situated in a natural amphitheater ringed by hardwood trees, in keeping with the beauty of the rest of the new campus under construction a few hundred yards away. The field would be positioned so that it received the sun's rays at right angles between 2 and 4 o'clock on fall afternoons.

From the beginning, planners envisioned entrance to the seating sections from a concourse surrounding the top of the stands, similar to stadiums at Pittsburgh, Washington and California. In early architectural renderings, the tunnel entrance to the field was located immediately behind the north goal post before its shift to the northeast corner.

There also was some discussion over whether track and baseball should be accommodated. The chair and vice chair of the Duke Endowment, George Allen and William Perkins, were among those who supported a football-only facility. Eventually a baseball field was plotted nearby, while an oval cinder track was incorporated within the stadium.

By the time the design process turned serious, the desired seating capacity had been boosted to a range from 35,000 to 50,000 depending on the level of funding that became available. There's no word in the historical record to determine if rival North Carolina's christening of Kenan Stadium, with an opening crowd of 28,000 in 1927, played any role in increasing the proposed size of Duke Stadium.

More critical was the funding aspect. The stadium was projected to cost around $400,000 but it was not one of the items included on the list of facilities covered by J.B. Duke's endowment funds for the new campus. So administrators organized a unique approach to finance the project. The Athletic Council issued stadium certificates that allowed alumni and other university supporters to invest in the building fund. A prospectus was prepared by vice president Robert Flowers, who headed the stadium campaign committee, and sent to all alumni encouraging them to purchase the bonds. Brochures emphasized that the school was not seeking donations but rather, investment partners who would receive 6 percent interest every year - as well as top priority for the best seats in the house.

That effort generated about $160,000 in pledges. By the time the stadium opened, about $140,000 of the total had been collected. Most of the rest was never received, probably because the opening of the stadium beat by barely three weeks the crash of the stock market, which ignited the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Buried in one of the old stadium campaign files in the archives is a letter from a Burlington businessman who had paid half of his $100 bond pledge and wanted it back because he was suddenly out work and needed the money. Presumably, he was not alone.

Even with intense promotion, the bond issue did not generate enough to meet construction costs. The Duke Endowment wound up loaning the Athletic Council $100,000 in 1929 and over $400,000 in 1930 to complete its facilities.

The final cost on Duke Stadium proper was $330,266. Adding the practice field, a parking field and a baseball field raised the total to $409,417. The adjacent gymnasium (now known as Card Gym), constructed at roughly the same time and opened a year later, cost $345,557 - meaning Duke assembled its initial athletic campus for well under $1 million.

And those who invested in stadium certificates continued to receive their checks for 6 percent interest until the bonds were called for final redemption on Dec. 1, 1944. "I remember when my friend Dr. McPherson got his notice that they were paying off the bonds. He'd been getting that interest for years," recalled Jack Persons, Duke's long-retired Hall of Fame lacrosse and swimming coach, who still has over a dozen seats along the top row of sections 5 and 6, just as he has every year since the stadium opened.

Filling the amphitheater

In building its new university, Duke formed its own corporation, the Duke Construction Company, to handle the entire project. Flowers was the president of the corporation, while A.C. Lee was the chief engineer and Horace Trumbauer from Philadelphia the architect of record. Most of West Campus was built between 1927 and 1930, with the Chapel completed in 1932. Werber, Duke's first All-America in basketball, says he and his classmates occasionally visited the construction sites to run among the girders and take pictures of the gargoyles.

The stadium took barely one year to complete, and over half of that time was spent on excavation and grading, which was handled by Nello Teer. Site work began in the fall of 1928 and the first concrete was poured at the end of April 1929. By October the place was open for business after 4,200 cubic yards of reinforced concrete had settled and 45 rows of wooden seats were installed, along with a press box, scout box and guest box. The initial capacity was listed at 35,000.

To fill those seats for the opener, the school lined up a major opponent and launched a publicity campaign similar in nature to its bond drive. DeHart, who had been a standout player at Pittsburgh under the legendary Pop Warner, contracted with his alma mater to make the trip to Durham. According to former Duke publicist Ted Mann, in his history of Duke football, this came after a preferred Ivy League foe demanded an exorbitant guarantee of $30,000 for the appearance. Before this time, Duke had hosted scant few opponents from outside the Carolinas and Virginia.

As with the bond drive, Duke's alumni office played a pivotal role in promoting the event. Richard Thigpen, the secretary of alumni affairs, filled the monthly Alumni Register with glowing praise for the new stadium and the future of Duke football. A 1922 alumnus, he also served on the stadium campaign committee and was secretary of the Athletic Council. The summer before the dedication, Thigpen went on a barnstorming tour of nearly 40 towns and cities in North Carolina and Virginia to hype the dedication. At each stop he lined up a merchant to sell tickets to the opener (face value: $2.50 per seat), then published the list of shops and drug stores from every locale in the Register so alumni knew where they could buy their tickets at home, in advance.

Finally, opening day

Even with all the buzz, the first game in Duke Stadium drew only about 20,000 fans. That was larger than the audience of 6,000 that witnessed the final Duke-Carolina game at Hanes Field in 1927 and the 15,000 that attended the first Duke-Carolina game at Kenan Stadium in 1928, but it was not the 35,000 that Duke officials had envisioned. Weather could have played a factor, with cloudy skies and some rain showers in the area. As has often been the case in modern times, both sides of the horseshoe were crowded but the end zone bowl was nearly barren.

There was, however, a festive air to the occasion. Fans came in from all over the state, including a few trains filled withsupporters from Charlotte and coeds from Greensboro colleges, to augment Duke's 2,000-member student body (tuition, by the way, was $150 a year then). A university holiday was declared and city leaders made it Duke-Durham Day in town. A parade was scheduled through downtown the morning of the game. The Duke band, in new uniforms, started the stadium show by running out through the tunnel an hour before kickoff, led by strutting drum major Chip Lehrbach, somewhat of a campus celebrity. The Duke team followed 10 minutes later. Governor Max Gardner was part of a procession of notables that entered the stadium with a motorcycle escort at 1:35.

The dedication itself took just three minutes. Both teams lined up, the national anthem was played and the flag was raised - that was it. To start the game, 12-year-old Tony Duke, the son of Angier B. Duke, donned a Blue Devil uniform with No. 7 across the chest and took the field with the team to bring out the game ball.

Bands from both schools put on quite a show at halftime, when another first occurred. During Duke's performance, an individual dressed as a Blue Devil - complete with horns, tail, pitchfork and blue makeup - emerged from the band and began to cavort with Pitt's panther. According to The Chronicle, which had suggested the Blue Devil nickname just a few years earlier, it was the first-ever appearance of a Blue Devil mascot.

"The crowd was good humored and on the whole sober," a campus journalist reported in summarizing the day.

The game itself, though, was a huge disappointment for the home team, decked out in sharp new white jerseys, blue pants and white headgear. Two of Duke's top players, halfback Bill Murray (the future coach) and quarterback Kid Brewer, were slowed by injuries, and the 35-man team was no match for one of the best squads in the country.

The first score in the stadium was produced by Pitt's halfback, Harold Williams, on a six-yard run around left end five minutes into the game. The Panthers didn't stop scoring, piling up a 52-0 lead before Duke tallied late on a 55-yard pass from Sam Buie to Flop Beaver. Buie then added the extra point for the 52-7 final.

The press, though, was mostly glowing in its coverage of the day. Many of the reporters enjoyed the hospitality of the university from Friday through Sunday at the downtown Washington Duke Hotel. Several commented favorably, in print, on the spacious press box with seats for 64, the free smokes and drinks, and the halftime spread featuring fried chicken and sandwiches. Duke publicity man Fred Turbeville was described as an "A1" host.

The loss started a four-game losing streak for DeHart's team. Its first victory in the new stadium came in its second home contest, on Nov. 9, when three scores by O.C. Godfrey paced a 32-6 upset of once-beaten LSU in Duke's first Southern Conference game. The Devils also defeated N.C. State and Wake Forest at home that year and finished with a 4-6 record, sealing the fate of DeHart as football coach. Even though his 1930 team went 8-1-2, his employment was terminated; dean William Wannamaker had made overtures to Wallace Wade at Alabama a full year earlier.

Decades later, by decree of the Board of Trustees in 1967, Wade's name was forever affixed to the stadium where he guided the Blue Devils to national prominence, the stadium that this year celebrates its 75th season. DeHart, with only one winning season in his five as head coach, has been forgotten by many. But some of his contemporaries, such as legendary surgeon Dr. Lenox Baker, always insisted DeHart should never be forgotten for setting Duke athletics on solid footing and getting the stadium built.

"He didn't get the credit for it," says Jack Persons. "Some people resented the fact that it was named for Mr. Wade and not Jimmy DeHart."

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