Note: The following appears in the North Carolina football digital gameday guide, available HERE.
Happy Birthday to Memorial Stadium!
Eighty-four years ago today, Sept. 19, 1942, Clemson opened the gates of Memorial Stadium (not known as “Death Valley" until the late 1940s) for a season-opening game against Presbyterian.
There was considerable work accomplished leading up to that first game, and most of it was supervised by Head Coach Frank Howard. Can you imagine Dabo Swinney supervising that project today?
Swinney is very involved in any stadium projects today, don’t get me wrong. But he is not on the field supervising the laying of the sod as Howard did in 1942.
“About 40 people (including Howard) laid the sod on the field,” said Howard when he was asked years later about the stadium construction. “After about three weeks on July 15, we only had gotten halfway through. I told them that it had taken three weeks to get that far and I would give them three weeks pay for however long it took them to finish.
“I also told them we would have 50 gallons of ice cream when we got through. After that, it took them just three days to do the rest of the field. Then we sat in the middle of the field and ate up that whole 50 gallons.”
Many scholarship football players were involved in the construction of the stadium. Early on in the process, one player was clearing land and got covered up with poison ivy so bad that he had to go to the hospital.
The first survey of the stadium was done by two members of the football team, A.N. Cameron and Hugh Webb. Webb returned to Clemson years later to be an architecture professor, and Cameron became a civil engineer in Louisiana.
Howard said it was a close call to get the stadium finished by the first game on Sept. 19.
“We hung the gates at 1 p.m. and kicked off at 2 p.m.,” said Howard with a chuckle.
The stadium on Sept. 19, 1942 held 20,000 fans. Just 5,500 fans showed up to see the Tigers defeat Presbyterian 32-13 behind 192 rushing yards from Butch Butler, the most by a Tiger during the 1940s. But soon the crowds grew and grew as Howard took the Tigers to eight conference championships, six top-20 seasons and six bowl games during his career.
The original stadium cost $125,000 to build, or $6.25 a seat. By comparison, when Clemson constructed the north side upper deck in 1983, the cost was $13.5 million, or $866 a seat.
As you can see by the chart below, Sept. 19 has been a great day in Clemson football history. Not only was it the date of the first game in the history of Memorial Stadium, Clemson has an 11-1 record on the date all-time, including 9-0 at home and 3-0 against top-20 teams. Clemson’s 91.7 winning percentage on this date is the highest in Clemson history, given a minimum of eight games.
Today is the just the second time Clemson has had a home game on this date since 1987 (the 2009 game versus Boston College is the other).
The list of wins on the date includes a 1959 victory at No. 12 North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a key win in Clemson’s ACC championship season, a 1981 win over No. 4 and defending national champion Georgia (the only regular-season loss of Herschel Walker’s college career) and a win over the Bulldogs at Clemson in 1987 on a last-second field goal by David Treadwell.
Clemson’s most-recent game on Sept. 19 was a home win over The Citadel during the COVID-19-impacted season of 2020 in front of just over 18,000 fans. Trevor Lawrence only played the first half and had three passing touchdowns.
When Jess Neely left Clemson after the 1939 season to become the head coach at Rice, Howard was elevated to the top spot. One of Neely’s parting conversations with Howard concerned building a new on-campus stadium. Neely told Howard to build a 10,000-seat facility behind the YMCA building.
“That’s all you will ever need,” said Neely.
Thank goodness Howard had a much bigger vision for the Clemson program. We are indebted to him for many wise decisions he made during his 30 years as athletic director and head coach. Building Memorial Stadium was perhaps his most important.