PSU 56 Years Ago

Several years ago, I published some photos I took of Beaver Stadium back in 1964, when I was a student at Penn State. At that time, Beaver Stadium had been in its present location for only about five years since it had been moved piece-by-piece from its prior location north of Rec Hall, where it was called “New Beaver Field.” I’ll republish the photos here this year just in case anyone missed them.

The capacity of the stadium then was around 45,000. The south end was open, with only some rickety bleachers where the parking and traffic guys and the kids who chased field goals watched the game; that end is also where the antique scoreboard was located. There was no second deck, there were no luxury boxes, and there was no Mt. Nittany Club. In fact, you could still enjoy a perfect view of Mt. Nittany itself because of that open end. Pennants representing each scheduled PSU opponent flew from flagpoles at the very top of the east and west stands which you can see it here. Rip Engle was the head coach back then, and his feisty former quarterback at Brown University, Joe Paterno, was his number one assistant. There sure as hell was no Paterno statue behind the east stands or a Penn State All-Sports Museum and Gift Shop under the nonexistent south stands!

The photos, 35 mm slides long stashed away in a shoebox, have become a little bluish over the 50 years since they were taken as you can see above, and they might have some dust spots here and there. Most were taken from the freshman/sophomore section in the stadium, which were cheap end zone seats. (Cheap, hell. They were free. This was before I learned how to borrow an upperclassman’s matric card so I could get into the senior section on the 20 yard-line over in the east stands. It was an early form of condoned identity theft. But I digress…) Nevertheless, the photos will give you an idea of what Beaver Stadium was all about back then.

As those good old days are long gone, I wanted to make those photos and descriptions available to you again. The original post is here. You’ll find another post about how things were for students at Penn State in 1964 here. Finally, an aerial photo of the pre-1959 New Beaver Field is here. This foul old fowl hopes you enjoy them!