Lincoln Hall Project
Football Saturdays
By Janice Gangwer LaDuke, BS ’61, elementary education
The fall of 1957 was special...I was a freshman on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign. All the waiting throughout high school had finally come to an end. At last I was in college!
Nothing was more special than football Saturdays when my friends and I would don our Pendleton pleated skirts, coordinated sweaters, and bobby socks and saddle shoes for the hike from Allen Hall to Memorial Stadium. We didn’t need to worry too much about crowds because there weren’t a lot of students headed west to the emporium of sport.
Our seats were in the east main stands somewhere down around the 20-yard line, but by the time the halftime show was over, we could move to prime positions on the 50-yard line. Those ticket holders had vacated their seats...and probably the stadium. Would you guess that our football team was not the most inspiring nor successful? Yes, Ray Nitschke and Bobby Mitchell were on that team coached by Ray Eliot, but they needed much more help in the other positions.
Did we have fun? We certainly did! This was Big Ten football in the grandest venue I had ever been in. This was a fitting location for watching my favorite sport without having to march in the band. And just four years later I would march proudly across the stage constructed on the east side of the Memorial Stadium field to receive my baccalaureate degree. My love affair with the University of Illinois, football, and the stadium had just begun.
I still get a thrill as I approach the red bricks and pillars on a sunny, cool Saturday afternoon. The soaring pillars are stately reminders of other lives, other stories through the years. And the bricks echo with the ghostly voices of cheering throngs through the years. And there...a shadowy form in a Pendleton skirt and matching sweater set.
The views expressed in Storyography are not necessarily those of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences or the University of Illinois.