October 24, 1914: Palmer Stadium Opens In Princeton

October 24, 1914: Palmer Stadium opens, on the southern edge of the campus of Princeton University in Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey. Princeton defeats Dartmouth College, 16-12.

Prior to Palmer Stadium, Princeton played at University Field, also known as Osborne Field, about 3 blocks to the north of the Palmer site. It seated 20,000, and they continued to play baseball at the site until 1960, when the Engineering Quadrangle began to be built on the site.

The building was named for Stephen S. Palmer, a trustee of the university, by his son, Edgar Palmer III. It was a horseshoe with the open end at the south, facing Lake Carnegie, with a full-sized track around the football field. (In 1936, Edgar Palmer III also funded the building of the centerpiece of the Borough of Princeton, Palmer Square.)

While playing at Palmer Stadium, Princeton won 5 National Championships: 1920, 1922, 1933, 1935 and 1950. The Ivy League was founded in 1954, and in 2021, Princeton won its 12th Ivy League title.

Briefly, in the early 1970s, when the New York Giants needed a temporary home between the October 1973 closing of the original Yankee Stadium and the October 1976 opening of Giants Stadium. Palmer Stadium was considered, due to its relative proximity and its 45,750-seat capacity -- larger than Michie Stadium at West Point, and twice the capacity of Rutgers Stadium.

Traffic and parking would have been a nightmare, but the real reason it was voted down was that the NFL now had a rule that games had to be played in stadiums of at least 50,000 capacity. That rule was bent for the Tennessee Oilers (1998) and the Los Angeles Chargers (2017-19), but not for the Giants in the 1970s.

On October 10, 1987, I was at Palmer Stadium to see Princeton play Columbia. Dean Cain, later to play Superman on television, intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown, and Princeton won, 38-8. It was Columbia's 35th consecutive loss, setting a new record for the longest in NCAA Division I history. Oddly, the next season, they ended that streak by beating Princeton at home, at 44 games. Prairie View A&M put that record out of reach, losing 80 straight from 1989 to 1998.

Palmer Stadium as I knew it,

with Jadwin Gym in the background

By the time of that 1987 Princeton-Columbia game Palmer Stadium was already in bad shape. It remained the Princeton Tigers' home until 1996, when, finally bowing to the reality that age had rendered it unsafe, the University agreed to tear it down and build a new home field on the site.

As with the 1st game, the last game was against Dartmouth, on November 23, 1996, and Princeton lost, 24-0. (To be fair, Dartmouth was then ranked Number 18 in the nation, and finished the season undefeated.) Only 16,461 fans came out to say goodbye. The days of Princeton football really mattering were long gone.

Princeton played all their 1997 games on the road while Powers Field at Princeton University Stadium was built on the site. Amazingly, they went 6-4. They did play 2 games in New Jersey. They beat Fordham before 4,050 fans at Lions Field in Ewing, home of the school formerly known as Trenton State College, but which, in 1996, had just taken on the name that Princeton University, itself, had until 1896: "The College of New Jersey." And they beat Yale at Giants Stadium (roughly halfway between the schools), in front of 7,731.

Don't be shocked by those low attendances: Ivy League football is no longer a big draw, and when their game against Penn at Franklin Field got 15,847, it became Princeton's only game all season with more than 8,542. (Penn didn't do much better: With a poor season, it was their only crowd above 13,000 at the 60,000-seat stadium.)

What is usually called simply "Princeton Stadium," with a capacity of 27,773 seats, opened on September 19, 1998. Princeton beat Cornell University, 6-0, before a full house. They had 4 more home games, each with at least 19,000 fans.

Jadwin Gym had opened in front of Palmer Stadium's open south end in 1969. Weaver Track & Field Stadium was built in between Princeton Stadium and Jadwin Gym, giving Princeton a top-class track facility and enabling them to build the stands at their new football stadium close to the field, without a track around it.

In 2007, in honor of a $10 million donation for a new artificial turf field the year before, by William C. Powers, managing director at Pacific Investment Management, and a former Princeton defensive back and punter, the playing surface was renamed Powers Field. The stadium retained the name Princeton Stadium.

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October 24, 1914 was a Saturday. These other notable college football games were played that day:

* Army beat Holy Cross, 14-0 on The Plain in West Point, New York. Army went 9-0 that season.

* Navy beat Western Reserve, 48-0 at Worden Field in Annapolis, Maryland.

* The University of Chicago beat Purdue, 21-0 at Stagg Field in Chicago.

* Nebraska beat Michigan State, 24-0 at Nebraska Field in Lincoln. Nebraska finished 7-0-1 and won the Missouri Valley Conference title.

* Tennessee beat Alabama, 17-7 at Waite Field in Knoxville, Tennessee. They went 9-0, and won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association title.

* Illinois beat Northwestern, 33-0 at Northwestern Field in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois. At the time, Northwestern considered Illinois their arch-rivals, but Illinois considered theirs to be Chicago. Illinois went 7-0, and won the title of the Western Conference, which later became the Big Ten.

* Texas beat arch-rival Oklahoma, 32-7 at Fair Park Stadium in Dallas. Texas went 8-0 that season, and won the 1st-ever Southwest Conference title.

* In what would become a major rivalry, Minnesota beat Iowa, 7-0 at Iowa Field in Iowa City.

* Syracuse beat Michigan, 20-6 at Archbold Stadium in Syracuse, New York.

* Penn State stunned Harvard, playing them to a 13-13 tie at Harvard Stadium in Boston.

* Notre Dame, coming off its major upset of Army the season before, beat South Dakota, 33-0 at Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

* In New York City, the Polo Grounds hosted a neutral-site game in which Cornell beat Brown, 28-7; Fordham beat Rhode Island State (known since 1951 at the University of Rhode Island), 28-0 at Fordham Field in The Bronx; and New York University beat Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: NYU 17, RPI 6, at Ohio Field in The Bronx.

* And New Jersey's other school -- it would be a long time before they could turn Princeton into the Garden State's "other school" -- Rutgers beat Tufts, 16-7 at Neilson Field in New Brunswick.

The baseball season had ended the day before, with the Boston Braves completing a "miracle" 4-game sweep of the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Professional basketball barely existed. It was too early for hockey season to start.

In English soccer, North London team Arsenal went to the East Midlands, and lost to Derby County, 4-0 at The Baseball Ground. Derbyshire was one of the few places in England where baseball caught on, and it wasn't for long, yet the "Baseball Ground" name held until the stadium was replaced in 1997.

October 19, 1946: The Rutgers-Princeton "Cannon War"

"Big Cannon," with Nassau Hall behind it

October 19, 1946: Princeton beats Rutgers 14-7 at Rutgers Stadium. An attempt to steal the cannon proves even more embarrassing for RU.

Rutgers University is in New Brunswick, in Middlesex County, New Jersey. (The stadium is across the Raritan River, in Piscataway.) Princeton University is in the town of the same name, in Mercer County. They are separated by 17 miles of State Route 27. In 1869, Rutgers beat Princeton in "the first college football game," in New Brunswick, hence Rutgers calls itself "the Birthplace of College Football."

Two cannons were left on the Princeton campus after the War of the American Revolution, although neither of them were used in the Battle of Princeton of January 3, 1777, as is often claimed. "Big Cannon" is located behind Nassau Hall in the center of the quadrangle there, called "Cannon Green," and "Little Cannon" is situated between Whig and Clio Halls.

For the War of 1812, Big Cannon was transported to New Brunswick to help defend the city against potential attack by the British, remaining on the Rutgers campus, where it was used for training during and after the American Civil War of 1861-65 by Rutgers cadets, until it was taken back to Princeton in 1875 by the "Princeton Blues," a local militia.

On the night of April 25, 1875, 10 members of the Rutgers Class of 1877 set out to take Big Cannon from Princeton. However, they were unable to move it, so instead they returned to New Brunswick with Little Cannon. Princeton responded with a raid on Rutgers, stealing some muskets, and the presidents of the colleges exchanged polite but demanding correspondence. Eventually, a joint committee settled the matter, and Little Cannon was returned to Princeton, escorted by the New Brunswick Police Chief. In other words, Rutgers was forced to cave.

On October 19, 1946, a contingent of Rutgers men slipped onto the Princeton campus, and again tried to steal the famed Big Cannon. This attempt was even more disastrous than the first. They attached one end of a heavy chain to the cannon and the other to their car, a Ford. Surprised by Princeton students and the police, they gunned the engine of the car so hard that the car, weighted down by the cannon, was torn in half. The Rutgers students managed to escape, but with neither the car nor the cannon.

On the eve of the annual Rutgers-Princeton game of 1971, Big Cannon was apparently "stolen" again. A 5-foot-deep hole was found where the cannon sat. Campus police were baffled that the cannon had been taken, given its extreme weight. After crime photos were taken, it appears that a hole had simply been dug next to Big Cannon and the dirt from the hole used to bury it. Reports appeared in the Rutgers newspaper, the Daily Targum, as well as nearby papers such as the New Brunswick-based Daily Home News, the Princeton Packet and The Times of Trenton. (Rutgers won the game, 33-18.)

With Rutgers having committed to "big-time" (sometimes written as "bigger time") football, and Princeton having committed to the smaller-time Ivy League, the schools haven't played each other in football since 1980, a 44-13 Rutgers win in Piscataway, although they still play each other in other sports.

Big Cannon at Princeton is routinely painted red by Rutgers students, particularly in the week leading to Rutgers commencement, as well as on other notable Rutgers dates. In November 2011, a group of Rutgers students who went to paint the cannon in Princeton brought a video camera with them and made a documentary about the tradition.

The footage became part of a larger project about the history of the Cannon War and its perception in the minds of current students today. The film, Knights, Tigers, and Cannons. Oh My!, by Zack Morrison, premiered at the New Jersey Film Festival in September 2012, and won the award for Best Student Film.

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October 19, 1946 was a Saturday. In other notable college football games:

* Number 1 Army beat Number 11 Columbia, 48-14 at Michie Stadium in West Point, New York.

* Number 2 Notre Dame were idle that week. Notre Dame would play Army in a de facto National Championship game at Yankee Stadium 3 weeks later, but it ended in a 0-0 tie. Notre Dame, naturally, were awarded the National Championship.

* Number 3 Texas beat Number 14 Arkansas, 20-0 at Memorial Stadium in Austin, Texas. Arkansas won the Southwest Conference title, anyway.

* Number 4 UCLA beat the University of California, 13-6 at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California. UCLA won the Pacific Coast Conference title.

* Number 5 Michigan and Number 10 Northwestern played to a tie, 10-10 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.

* Number 6 University of Pennsylvania beat the University of Virginia, 40-0 at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.

* Number 7 Alabama were upset by Number 9 Tennessee, 12-0 at Shields-Watkins Field (later Neyland Stadium) in Knoxville, Tennessee.

* Number 8 Georgia beat Oklahoma A&M (later Oklahoma State), 33-13 at Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia.

* Number 12 Louisiana State University were upset by Georgia Tech, 26-7 at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

* Number 15 North Carolina beat Navy, 21-14 at Municipal Stadium in Baltimore.

* Number 16 Rice beat Southern Methodist University (SMU), 21-7 at Rice Field in Houston. Rice shared the SWC title with Arkansas, but lost the head-to-head tiebreaker. Nevertheless, they were invited to the Orange Bowl, where they beat Tennessee. Rice went to the Cotton Bowl, where they played LSU to a tie.

* Illinois, then unranked, beat Number 20 Wisconsin, 27-21 at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. Illinois went on to play UCLA in the Rose Bowl. That was the 1st time that the Champions of the leagues that would come to be known as the Big Ten and the Pac-12 were locked into playing each other in the Rose Bowl. Illinois won, 45-14.

* New York University beat the University of Rochester, 6-0 at River Campus Stadium in Rochester, New York.

* Fordham University lost to St. Mary's of the San Francisco Bay Area, 33-2 at the Polo Grounds.

There were 2 games in the All-America Football Conference. The New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 21-10 at Yankee Stadium. Yes, that's in football. And the Buffalo Bisons beat the San Francisco 49ers, 17-14 at Civic Stadium (later renamed War Memorial Stadium) in Buffalo.

Baseball season ended 4 days earlier, with the St. Louis Cardinals beating the Boston Red Sox in Game 7 of the World Series. The league that would become the NBA played its 1st game on November 1. The NFL scheduled no games for this day, but the nascent All-America Football Conference played 2. The New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 21-10 at Yankee Stadium. Yes, there were football teams with those names. And the Buffalo Bisons beat the San Francisco 49eres, 17-14 at Civic Stadium (later War Memorial Stadium) in Buffalo.

And there were 2 NHL games on this day. The Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens played to a tie, 1-1 at the Montreal Forum. And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 6-3 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The New York Rangers and the Chicago Black Hawks were not scheduled,

Also on this day, Arsenal defeated Staffordshire team Stoke City 1-0 at Highbury. Kevin O'Flanagan scored the goal. Soccer was not his best sport: He was renowned as a rugby player for Ireland, and excelled in sprint races and the long jump. He was also a noted amateur golfer and tennis player, and played Gaelic football as a boy.

But he's not the most notable player in this game. That would be Albert Sigurður Guðmundsson. Although this is the 1st of only 2 League matches he plays for Arsenal, it makes him the 1st native of Iceland ever to play professional soccer. He later served his country as Minister of Finance.

January 22, 1938: "Our Town" Premieres

Left to right: Frank Craven, Martha Scott, John Craven

January 22, 1938: Our Town, a play by Thornton Wilder, premieres at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. It debuts on Broadway on February 4, at Henry Miller's Theatre, and later moves to the Morosco Theatre. It wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Edward Albee, one of America's greatest playwrights, called it "the greatest American play ever written."

The town in Our Town is the fictional Clinton Corners, New Hampshire. It begins on May 7, 1901, when George Gibbs, son of the town doctor, and Emily Webb, daughter of the editor of the town newspaper, are children and next-door neighbors. In Act II, it is 1904, and they get married. In Act III, it is 1913, and Emily has died, giving birth to her 2nd child.

The play is narrated by the Stage Manager, who also serves as the soda shop owner, the minister at the wedding of Emily and George, and other characters. At the end, Emily's spirit, getting depressed while walking through the town and observing the people, asks the Stage Manager -- who appears to be more an angel than God --  if anyone truly understands the value of life while they live it. He says, "No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do, some." Emily returns to her grave next to her mother, and watches impassively as George kneels weeping over her. The Stage Manager concludes the play and wishes the audience a good night.

Wilder, born in 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin, won 2 other Pulitzers: For his 1928 novel The Bridge at San Luis Rey, and for his 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth. He died in 1975. His siblings were also accomplished: Brother Amos and sisters Isabel and Charlotte were writers, and sister Janet was a zoologist.

In the original production, the Stage Manager was played by Frank Craven, who lived until 1945; George by his son John Craven, 1995; and Emily by Martha Scott, 2003. The play was filmed in 1940, with Frank Craven and Martha Scott reprising their roles, but John Craven being replaced as George by William Holden.

In 1955, a version was broadcast live on NBC. Frank Sinatra played the Stage Manager, and also introduced the song "Love and Marriage," which Jimmy van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote specifically for this production. Eva Marie Saint and Paul Newman starred in what remains the only musical version of the play. Another version was done for NBC in 1977, with Hal Holbrook, Glynnis O'Connor and Robby Benson. And in 2002, Paul Newman, by this point 77 years old, played the Stage Manager on Broadway, in a production shown the next year on PBS as part of Masterpiece Theatre.

The McCarter Theatre is still in operation. It was named for Thomas N. McCarter, a Princeton University graduate, an Attorney General of New Jersey, and the founder of the company now known as Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), which runs the electricity for most of northern New Jersey. New Jersey Route 21 is known as the McCarter Highway.

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January 22, 1938 was a Saturday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. Two NHL games were played. The New York Americans lost to the Montreal Canadiens, 4-0 at the Montreal Forum. And the Boston Bruins beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 9-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, one of the worst home losses in NHL history. And yet, only Charlie Sands scored as many as 2 goals.