It's a funny thing, Franklin Field. It looks a bit like a castle, with its arches on the outside and two giant turrets on the inside and brick all around. It has miles of bleachers and well over a century of memories.
It's heard presidents speak. It's seen 70,000 screaming fans when Penn football was as important as any program in the nation. It's watched Army and Navy butt heads when that hallowed rivalry was in its infancy. It's seen Jesse Owens on the track, Vince Lombardi on the sidelines and Red Grange galloping across the field. When the stadium is empty, you can almost see their ghosts.
Back in 1960, when Eisenhower was president and the Cold War was heating up and the baby boomers weren't yet old enough to cause trouble, Chuck Bednarik stopped Jim Taylor at the nine-yard line of Franklin Field to win the NFL Championship.
Bednarik was the Philadelphia Eagles' hard-nosed center/linebacker and "last of the 60-minute men." Taylor was the great tailback for the Green Bay Packers. They're both in the NFL Hall of Fame.
That day, though, Bednarik played 58 minutes and nailed Taylor on the last play of the game to preserve the Eagles' 17-13 lead and give them their third NFL title.
Crowds piled into Franklin Field to watch the NFL games it hosted for 12 years. But by 1960, the big-time college football that had been the stadium's lifeblood was only a memory.
Bednarik saw as much action on Franklin Field as anyone. He played here for Penn from 1945-1948, and returned during the tail end of his 13 seasons with the Eagles, who moved to Franklin Field from Connie Mack Stadium in 1958.
"I think Franklin Field, of all the places I've played both professionally and collegiate-wise, was the best," Bednarik said. "The nice thing about when I played there was we had 78,000 people when I was at Penn, and 70,000 for Eagles games.
"When we played Army, the Cadets marched, and when we played Navy, the Midshipmen marched, and it was really a spectacle."
Spectacle, indeed. There's a photo essay in the The Philadelphia Inquirer's "Picture Parade" section from October 27, 1946. The headline is "FRANKLIN FIELD: No. 1 Football Mecca," and it opens with a shot of the stadium just minutes before kickoff at that year's Penn-Navy game.
It's a bright, full-color shot of the north stands, one snapped from the upper level in the southwest corner of the stadium. The stands are filled to capacity, except for an empty lower section on the 50-yard line, which is reserved for the ranks of Navy Midshipmen filing in.
They march from the east end zone out to midfield, where they cut a hard right and head up into the stands. Presumably, they're in lockstep with the strains of the blue-and-gold band in the west end zone. Bednarik and his Penn teammates are somewhere on the sidelines.
"I always looked forward to Army and Navy coming in," said Bednarik, now 80 and living in Coopersburg, Pa. "That was something sensational, just something different to see all those cadets marching in."
A generation earlier, Franklin Field is just an idea:
"It is a great big forward-looking progressive step. It gives Philadelphia a bigger stadium than any save the Yale Bowl, and it might be stated here that foundations of such character will be laid that if future demands warrant, an upper deck may be added to increase the capacity another thirty-thousand at least."
This little bit from the January 1922 edition of Penn's Alumni Register is an attempt to sell graduates on the idea of tearing down the brick stands from 1903 -- which replaced the original, wooden stands that went up in 1895 -- and replacing them with the lower level of the stadium that is there today.
And, further down:
"It will be of concrete and steel. There will be no seats with backs -- the seats will be boards flat on the concrete. There will be very little to get out of order; Little to paint."
The renovations cost $600,000. Four-hundred laborers put in 12-hour shifts and turned 600 tons of steel, 10,000 cubic yards of concrete, 750,000 feet of lumber and 1.75 million bricks into the horseshoe-shaped lower stands. The stands were finished by the first week of October 1922 and were used for the season's second game. On the 28th, Warren Harding came up from the White House for the official presentation of Penn football's new home during halftime of the Penn-Navy game.
Three years later, those "future demands" alluded to in the Register article became current ones, and laborers set to work adding the upper level. The addition made Franklin Field the nation's first two-tiered stadium, not to mention its largest sporting venue.
The upper stands were finished in 1925, the same year the Galloping Ghost came to Philadelphia.
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The year before, Penn had been considered the champions of the East. The Quakers were to face a great Illinois team that featured tailback Red Grange. Pro football was non-existent at this time; the college game was it, and this quick tailback from Wheaton, Ill., was the reason.
So the fans packed the stands to check out this Grange, who they'd read about but hadn't ever seen, and a bunch of big- shot, New York sportswriters -- two of the greats, Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, among them -- came to Franklin Field to see for themselves.
And Grange was every bit as good as advertised. The Galloping Ghost whipped the Quakers but good. He accounted for 363 yards and three touchdowns in a 24-2 Illini romp.
Bob Paul saw his first game at Franklin Field in 1924; he was seven. Paul, a 1939 Wharton grad, also served as Penn's sports information director from 1953-61. He's probably seen about as many games at Franklin Field as anyone. He wasn't there that day in 1925, but he has a story.
"I heard from Jack Eveland, who was in charge of the field back then, that [Quakers] coach Lou Young told him to wet down the field to try and slow Grange down," Paul said. "Well, Jack wet down the field all that night, and it still didn't do a bit of good."
There's a picture from that game, and the field is all mud. There's no grass to speak of, and maybe just one faint hint of a yard line, but not enough to tell where on the field the play is. There are even a few specks of mud on the camera lens.
Everybody's in leather helmets, and no one seems to be wearing much in the way of padding. The ballcarrier has broken left around end and is being pursued by no fewer than four defenders. There's no way to know whether the runner is Grange, but it seems a good bet -- everyone is chasing him, and the nearest defender is struggling to change directions.
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On Dec. 2, 1899, the Army and Navy football teams had their fifth meeting. It was the first game following a five-year hiatus, and the first one in Philadelphia, which has since hosted more than 75 Army-Navy showdowns.
The Cadets upset the heavily-favored Midshipmen at Franklin Field, 17-5, and The Philadelphia Inquirer captured the pageantry the next day:
"As the bands played the Star-Spangled Banner and all the good patriots rose up reverentially, many an eye glistened as they gazed down upon the gallant boys. They are deadly rivals, now, but oh so different with a common enemy."
Franklin Field hosted the contest 18 times, the last coming in 1935, but it witnessed some of the best games of the young series.
In 1901, Teddy Roosevelt was in the Franklin Field stands as the guest of Provost Charles Custis Harrison. The president watched Army quarterback Charles Daly, who had previously been a two-time All-American at Harvard, lead the Cadets to an 11-5 victory.
In 1910, Midshipman Jack Dalton missed six straight field goals before he hit his seventh to give Navy the 3-0 win.
Navy won another 3-0 game in 1934, when a future war hero named Slade Cutter broke the scoreless deadlock with a field goal in the midst of a torrential downpour, giving the Midshipmen the win. Cutter went on to sink 19 Japanese boats in World War II.
The Army-Navy game moved to Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium (later renamed JFK Stadium) after 1935, but the service academies still came back to play against Penn. That meant that Franklin Field fans had a chance to see some of the great Army and Navy players from the middle of the last century, like Army's backfield tandem of Felix "Doc" Blanchard and Glenn Davis, who won the Heisman Trophy in consecutive years.
"They walloped us," Bednarik said, remembering the Penn-Army game from his freshman year, 1945.
World War II had just ended, and the Cadets had a full squad again.
"As a freshman out of the service, I'd just survived 30 combat missions," Bednarik said. "I was 21 years old, but all I saw around me was 17- and 18-year-old kids."
Though Franklin Field has been used for football since its inception, it was conceived to host the Penn Relay Carnival, first held in 1895. For over a century, the Penn Relays have brought the best of track and field to the stadium.
Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe ran here. So did Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses and Marion Jones and Maurice Greene.
Back in 1971, Jim Ryun was king of the milers. Six years prior, he'd become the first high schooler to break four minutes in the mile. He was a huge star, the way most track athletes aren't today.
But a new kid named Marty Liquori had come on the scene. He and Ryun were to square off on May 16 at Franklin Field.
"Liquori was out of New Jersey. He was tremendously popular on the indoor circuit, which was a big deal at the time." recalled William Gildea, a Washington Post sportswriter who covered the race. "It was a huge event, a great race."
This mile was held not during Penn Relays but during something called the "Martin Luther King Jr. International Freedom Games." There were 11 competitors slated for this race, but everyone knew that there were really only two.
The race had all the fanfare reserved for heavyweight title fights. It was billed as "'THE DREAM MILE' with RYUN and LIQUORI -- See the world's fastest runners on the world's fastest track."
Marty Liquori wrote about the race in his autobiography On the Run. He said that he and Ryun both fell back with the pack on the first lap, but by the last lap, it was just the two. We join Liquori on the backstretch:
"The crowd was now on its feet and noise was rushing down on us from the deepest caverns of this stadium, and we rounded the penultimate turn and headed up the long backstretch for the last time. I peeked once, twice, then again, I didn't want to kick too soon.... We hit the final turn, we were enveloped by shrieks and squeals, and we headed off of it, and suddenly Jim Ryun was right there on my right shoulder. 'Aw, shit, here he comes,' I thought. 'Hold him off, hold him off.'"
Liquori did hold Ryun off, and it's a race that people who were there and people who know still talk about today.
"I could go down to Franklin Field next week and say, 'Right there, right there's where we stopped 'em,'" Bednarik said, referring to his flattening of Jim Taylor back in '60.
But Chuck Bednarik hasn't been to Franklin Field in years, not to a Penn game anyway.
And besides, ol' Concrete Charley probably wouldn't recognize a Penn game today. They play on AstroTurf now, and it's been a half-century since the place was packed for college football. On a good day, the Quakers now draw 15,000.
Walk out onto Franklin Field sometime during the middle of the week, and try to see it. Try to see rows upon rows of Midshipmen or Cadets marching toward you at midfield. Try to imagine the hubbub of a crowd filing in under the arcade just before a big game in the '20s. See 'em? They're all men, and they're all in overcoats and fedoras.
Sit way up in one of the last couple rows of the stands and forget the AstroTurf, and the helicopters and the modern skyline rising in the east. Look down, and try to see mud and leather helmets and Red Grange.
But then come back in late April and see that Franklin Field isn't dead, and that it's heroes aren't all ghosts. See that the spirit of grand spectacle and athletic competition lives on for at least three days every year, during the Penn Relays.
For those three days, Franklin Field means something to people across the country, and it seems like everyone's watching.
On that weekend, the old castle is viable again. It's filled up to the turrets, and everyone's cheering.
