ROUSES_SeptOct2019_Magazine

LSU Stadium, circa 1947; photo: Fonville Winans

associated himself closely with LSU and, by and large, when Long wanted something, he got it (though it often took creative financing to do so). When he couldn’t get money for campus construction, for example, he had the state buy the old Downtown LSU cam- pus and use it to build a new State Capitol. Today, that building stands atop the old State Field. An enlarged Tiger Stadium proved a greater challenge. Enter Thomas “Skipper” Heard, who was the new graduate manager of LSU athletics. Heard learned that, thanks to Long’s financial efforts, LSU had come into $250,000 to build new dormitories. Well, said Heard, couldn’t you build those dorms anywhere? Like, oh I don’t know, on the east and west sides of the football field? Couldn’t you build them right up to the edge of the field? Then you could just build seating on top of the new buildings! Well, Long heard this idea, loved it and leaned hard into President Smith of LSU to make it happen. Smith soon acceded to the governor’s request. “Long was an avid sports fan,” says Dr. Seifried. “You can see that not just in his interaction with the LSU football team and his efforts to help expand the stadium, but also in the way he would make road trips

to follow the team.” Long, he says, was a great advocate for the institution overall — not just athletically, but also academi- cally. “He thought of LSU as a vehicle for his own personal brand, if you will, and so was a great promoter of the institution and its advancements, seeing improvements through not only while he was governor, but also senator.” For Long, the idea of improving Tiger Stadium and drawing larger crowds for bigger and bigger contests meant more fuel for his political aspirations. If he could make things happen in Baton Rouge as governor of Louisiana, the thinking went, maybe he could make things happen nationally as president of the United States. It was no secret that Long wanted to run the country — and that once he ran, he expected to win. (Another of Long’s construction projects was a better Governor’s Mansion, which he wanted modeled after the White House. It was rumored he said that when he was elected president, he wanted to know where all the light switches were.) The east dorms of Tiger Stadium were built in 1932, and the west in 1935. They were five stories high and housed 1,500 students. In the process, they increased stadium seating capacity to 22,000. “The

dorms that we’re talking about weren’t anything like what you see today,” says Dr. Seifried. “I mean, they were just regular dorm rooms, you know; outlets, closets, lights and that’s pretty much it. They were pretty small as far as amenities go.” Because of the unique underlying archi- tecture of the stadium dorms, the lower bowl of Tiger Stadium has a steepness that makes seating more intimate while also facilitating some fairly intense acoustics. Yes, the dorms are the structural reason why Death Valley is so insanely loud. Just as Harvard’s idea for a sports stadium (and how to fund it) transformed college football, so too did LSU’s innovative idea for stadium expansion. “The dorms at the time were fairly revolutionary,” Seifried explains. “A lot of people followed the LSU example. College football-playing institutions frequently referenced LSU as a model for their own cities, and followed suit, building dorms in their football stadiums.” University of Tennessee is one such notable school that took LSU’s lead. Arkansas considered it, as did Texas Christian Univer- sity. Even those universities that ultimately decided against it still used LSU to drive the discussion on how to think more creatively and urgently about stadium improvements.

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