Feature - Autumn 1995 |
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The crowd was funneled along two wooden walkways that led from Melrose Avenue to the stadium. Eager to claim their 17-inch seat among the 12.5 miles of bleachers installed in the grandstand, some fans arrived at the stadium without their shoes. Longtime UI sports information director Eric Wilson recalled many years ago that “Either side of that board sidewalk was a sea of mud. Occasionally when a lady would be accidentally bumped off the boardwalk, she would be pulled back to safety, but minus her slippers, which were irretrievably engulfed deep down in the mud. Ladies’ slippers were surfacing from their burial ground for the next several years.”
No fair-weather friends, these stalwart fans were prepared to enjoy the day. “The bleachers were a mosaic of color, yellow, green and red slickers, oil cloths of purple and orange patterns, hundreds of colors, bizarre and outlandish,” a writer for the Daily Iowan reported the next day. The game, the second to be held in the grand new home of Hawkeye football, was a sellout.
Built
30 feet down into the rolling hills that had been part of the old
Finkbine Golf Course, Iowa Stadium had few neighbors on the west side
of the river, although the Children’s Hospital, Field House,
and original portion of University Hospital had been built there earlier.
The fact that the stadium was constructed at all, given the times, seems remarkable. Paul Belting, director of the Division of Physical Education, had managed to anger and alienate a sizable portion of the alumni and student bodies since he was appointed to his post in 1924. Not a collaborative man, he announced on the eve of the 1928 Homecoming game that a new stadium would rise before the next such celebration occurred. The news caught everyone—even Wilson—by surprise.
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But things moved quickly once ground was broken on March 6, 1929. “Nine mechanical animals . . . furnished tractor power for excavating the . . . grid amphitheater. Their elephantine dimensions made them equal to the task of scooping out which preceded other construction work. Three were ‘wheelers,’ five were ‘mules’—the tread species developed in World war tanks—and one big ‘cat’ crawled ahead of them all,” Roland White wrote for the dedication program.
“A giant among giants, the huge caterpillar, able to do 60 horse power of work, weighed 20,600 pounds. Unlike its jungle cousin, the elephant, the crawling iron beast is short lived, lasting only 10 years under the grueling hard labor its human masters force it to do.”
Some
of the 50 teams of horses and mules that worked to excavate the stadium
lasted even less time. According to Iowa City historian Irving Weber,
earth removal was complicated by numerous springs in the area. With
water seeping up from below and spring rains falling down, the site
became a quagmire. Teams mired in the mud would have to be pulled
out by horses on firmer ground. When animals collapsed from exhaustion
or were destroyed after breaking a leg in the muck, they were buried
in the north bank of the stadium, just beyond where the goalposts
would be placed.
With
time of the essence, crews worked around the clock. “By day,
mindful of snow flurries, and by night under the glare of arc lights,
the crew was whipped along at top pace,” an article in the dedication
program explained. “Carpenters erected forms; concrete, made
from some 64,000 sacks of cement, was poured into them. The twin stands
took form. At the peak of the job, a force of about 250 men drew pay
checks, and it was not until the first of July that good progress
enabled contractors to abandon night work.”
By then, Iowa’s football program was in a fine mess. As early as 1927, over-enthusiastic alumni in several Iowa cities had submitted petitions calling for Belting’s removal, as well as that of football coach Burt Ingwersen. Although he was never as successful as his predecessor Howard Jones, Ingwersen was almost an accidental target of alumni ire. The man everyone was after was Paul Belting.
Still, when they gathered at the Hotel Fort Des Moines on January 14, 1928, to organize the Federation of University of Iowa Alumni Associations, alumni requested Ingwersen’s resignation. Unbeknownst to them, Major John L. Griffith, commissioner of the Western Conference (now the Big Ten), believed the alumni were as big a part of Iowa’s problem as Belting, a man his contemporaries said had “a singular flair for antagonizing people.”
Pressured by growing criticism and the resignation of another head coach, Belting resigned on April 26, 1929. A month later, faculty representatives of the conference voted to suspend Iowa from league competition, effective January 1, 1930. The major charge was simple: the conference feared Iowa was losing faculty control of its athletic department. On hearing the news, students responded with quick anger and marched on Belting’s home, pelting it with eggs and bricks.
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Meanwhile, construction on the new football stadium continued at breakneck speed, and, if faculty had lost control of athletics, they had certainly not lost control of the building project. Letters preserved in University Archives record that William G. Raymond, dean of the College of Engineering, was very much involved in the construction specifications for Iowa Stadium.
“Professors Nagler and Mavis will take care of the testing of concrete specimens for the contractor on the stadium,” he wrote. “Certainly no additional cost should be incurred to obtain celite rather than hydrated lime. . . . I would agree to increasing the quality of the concrete in the deck and in the columns by adding sufficient cement to obtain about 2750 pounds concrete at the specified consistency.” Regarding the design of a longitudinal expansion joint Raymond believed to be unsatisfactory, he noted that “Mr. Borg of the architects agreed to redesign the bracket to insure its adequacy with reasonable working stresses.”
Looking back to the building of Iowa Stadium (renamed for Nile Kinnick in 1972), the stresses surrounding the project seem anything but reasonable. But over-zealous as they might have been in trying to run the show, alumni were proud of Iowa football. On dedication day, they paid $3 each to sit in a rainstorm and cheer Coach Ingwersen’s team to a 7-7 tie with Illinois.
Five days later, the stock market crashed on a day that’s become known as Black Thursday. Within two months, the Board in Control of Athletics capitulated to the conference’s insistence that some Hawkeye players must be guilty of wrongdoing. On December 11, they declared 12 Iowa athletes ineligible for borrowing money (an average of $45 each, the cost of tuition) from the “Belting fund.” On February 1, 1930, Iowa was reinstated in the Western Conference, while Ingwersen survived to coach the Hawkeyes through the 1931 season.
And fans today continue to flock to Kinnick Stadium, with few—if any—losing their shoes en route.
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