Happy 85th Birthday Memorial Stadium!

Ansel Adams photo

On November 24, Memorial Stadium will be celebrating its 85th anniversary of providing great memories to countless loyal Californians.

Here's a link to the California Monthly magazine from November 1998 describing the construction. A few excerpts:

[O]n November 24, 1923, with the smell of new concrete still fresh, the undefeated Golden Bears christened the oval by thrashing Stanford 9-0 in the 29th Big Game. Seventy-four thousand people came to that first contest, the largest crowd ever to witness a football game in the West.

[snip]
In California in the 1920s, there was a strong feeling that it would be appropriate to build a memorial to the many men from the state who had died in the Great War. An impressive stadium consecrated to the virtues of manhood was deemed a fitting memorial. At the same time, Cal was outgrowing its facilities. University architect John Galen Howard was fast replacing frame-and-brick buildings with modern structures designed to create Berkeley's Athens-like atmosphere. A classical stadium would complement Wheeler, Hilgard, and Gilman halls, the Library, Sather Gate, and the Greek Theatre.

[snip]
Memorial Stadium was dedicated to the heroic University dead of the World War by local civic and military leaders on Friday afternoon. Fifty Civil War veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic led a procession that included veterans of World War I and the Spanish-American War, and active members of all the armed services.

Robert Gordon Sproul turned the new stadium over to the UC Board of Regents with these words: "It was conceived by Californians, it was built by Californians, and is the property of Californians. And now that it is completed, I entrust it in your care. The stadium is complete. Possessed of the rare beauty of simplicity and a restfulness derived from perfection of unbroken lines, dedicated most nobly to the youth which fell in the war, the stadium is complete. It is ready for athletic contests, for academic gatherings, for conferences devoted to the highest ends of civilization."

But my favorite trivia concerning the stadium:

The main axis of the field was designed so that at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of November 20 (always within a few days of the Big Game), the sun would be exactly at right angles to the field of play.