HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Historic Cramton Bowl turns 100 years old on Sunday
The first-ever event held at Cramton Bowl happened on this day, May 1, 1922 when Auburn and Vanderbilt met in a baseball game. (Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History)
By TIM GAYLE
Happy birthday, Cramton Bowl!
One of America’s oldest sports venues celebrates a milestone on Sunday, 100 years after the facility opened its doors to a baseball game between Auburn University and Vanderbilt University.
Since then, the facility has been the birthplace of some of the biggest events in the South, hosting the first night football games in the South in high school and collegiate history, a college all-star football game and a college football bowl game.
When city leaders elected to build a municipal multipurpose facility that could host football and baseball games as well as track events, they were in uncharted waters. Several older professional venues existed, such as Rickwood Field (1910), Fenway Park (1912) and Wrigley Field (1914) in the baseball world, Bobby Dodd Stadium (1913), Davis Wade Stadium (1914) and Camp Randall Stadium (1917) on college campuses and Indianapolis Motor Speedway (1909) in the racing world, but the idea of building a municipal stadium for several different sports was a relatively new concept, especially in this state.
Legion Field in Birmingham (1927), Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium (1929) and Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium (1939) hadn’t been considered when Cramton Bowl opened a few months ahead of the Rose Bowl Stadium.
The idea had been debated around town in 1920-21, finally taking shape in the form of a weekly city commission meeting on Feb. 9, 1921 when Fred J. Cramton offered to donate his land to the city for a multipurpose athletic facility.
The Montgomery Advertiser reported from the meeting that the first steps were taken “for the beginning of work on the new athletic field which is to be constructed on Madison avenue to be used as a baseball diamond for Montgomery’s Cotton States league team, football games and other sports.
“A resolution thanking Mr. Cramton for this valuable gift was offered by the commissioners and at the suggestion Haygood Paterson the field was named ‘Cramton’s Bowl.’”
Mayor William A. Gunter put Paterson in charge of a seven-man committee who would survey the city both for the best plan for a stadium and the best way to finance that plan. The mayor was asked whether $25,000 could be raised among the citizens or if it was even advisable. Out of that conversation came what would prove to be the financial genius behind the construction of Cramton Bowl, the selling of bonds whose interest would be paid off by the revenue generated from sporting events. Ultimately, $30,000 was raised by selling notes to sports-loving citizens who could pay off the one, two and three year notes at the Exchange National Bank. Cramton undertook the grading and installation of sewerage at the facility, leaving the city’s citizens to fund the layout of the field and the construction of the grandstands.
At a Dec. 3 meeting, the group announced that $33,215 had been raised in voluntary contributions to the bowl campaign. At that same meeting, a board of trustees for the stadium was named that included Cramton, the chairman of the board; Haygood Paterson, the owner of Rosemont Gardens and the vice-president of the board; W.F. Black, the director of the YMCA who would serve as the secretary; and Clayton C. Tullis, an owner in Tullis-Gamble Hardware Company, who would serve as the treasurer.
While the modern-day look of Cramton Bowl focuses on football, the construction of a stadium in the 1920s would primarily feature baseball. Professional baseball was popular, while professional football was still in its infancy. And while college football was just starting to hit its stride, the idea of building a stadium to host such events was still a novel concept.
The distance from home plate to the outfield fence was determined by a home-run derby held by “Montgomery’s heaviest amateur hitters” on Jan. 9, 1922. A day earlier, famed Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack stopped in Montgomery to look at the construction work on the new facility to determine whether he would bring the A’s to the Capital City for spring training in 1923 (which he did).
“I want to tell you Montgomery has already secured a great deal of advertising out of this venture,” Mack said. “I heard of what you were doing before I reached the city and your start puts you in direct line for a Southern League franchise.”
City leaders secured a May 1 game between Auburn and Vanderbilt, originally scheduled in Auburn, for the grand opening. April turned into a frantic race to complete the work as one group worked on the drainage system underneath the field, three groups were dedicated to the completion of the concrete grandstands that would seat 5,000 and another was set to arrive to work on installing the entrance gates and the exterior work surrounding the field.
The Wednesday before the Monday afternoon contest, Auburn coach Mike Donahue arrived to watch the work. By Friday, it was announced that a special West Point train would bring several hundred Auburn students and the Auburn band to Montgomery for what could determine the Southern Conference baseball title.
Vanderbilt players arrived in Auburn on Sunday morning from Athens, Ga., and ventured to Montgomery on the same train.
While the stadium still needed a few tweaks, it opened on Monday afternoon for the big game between Auburn and Vanderbilt. Appropriately, Cramton threw out the game’s first pitch to Auburn catcher Charlie Gibson just before the start of the game at 3 p.m.
The Commodores, who had won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association championship a year earlier, were favored and featured centerfielder Jess Neely, a multi-sport star who would later become head baseball coach at Alabama and head football coach at Clemson and Rice; second baseman Andy Reese, a career .281 hitter in the Major Leagues after playing four seasons for the New York Giants beginning in 1927; and starting pitcher Slim Embrey, who also would reach the Major Leagues but would play just one game for the 1923 Chicago White Sox.
Auburn countered with all-conference catcher Charlie Gibson, a senior in 1922 who earned a spot on the Philadelphia Athletics’ roster in 1924; right fielder Ed Shirling, who made the A’s roster for four games in 1924; and starting pitcher George Grant, an East Tallassee native who made his Major League debut with the St. Louis Browns on Sept. 17, 1923. He pitched three seasons for the Browns, three with the Indians and one with the Pirates.
A crowd of approximately 4,500 turned out for the opening of the stadium, which saw Auburn take command of the game in the first three innings, surrender the lead in the fourth and rally for six runs in the eighth to grab a 10-7 victory.
A Wednesday story in the Advertiser reported that the “trustees of bowl are enthusiastic” over the grand opening and during their luncheon at the Exchange Hotel it was noted “the board received with gratitude the offer of the Capital City Ad Co. to erect an electrical score board on the field and the building committee was instructed to cooperate with the company in making arrangements for the placing of the board.”
Cramton Bowl would transition to football in early September, holding its first-ever football game on Sept. 30, 1922 between Sidney Lanier and the University of Alabama’s freshman football team. Lanier managed just one first down against the Crimson Tide, losing 21-0 on touchdowns scored by Andy Cohen, former Lanier star Ben Hudson and Johnny Mack Brown.
Lanier recorded a 10-1 record that season, allowing only the 21 points scored by Alabama over the rest of the season. Lanier recorded the first of 10 consecutive shutouts the next week with a 13-0 win over Marbury at Cramton Bowl.
The next day, on Oct. 7, Auburn defeated Spring Hill College 20-6, rallying from a 6-0 deficit at halftime with a more determined second-half performance. It was the first of three college games in Cramton Bowl that year as more than 7,500 fans showed up in November to watch Auburn defeat Tulane 19-0 and a record-breaking crowd of 10,000 watched as Alabama defeated Georgia 10-6.
It was not only the largest crowd in the brief history of Cramton Bowl, but the largest crowd to watch a game in the state of Alabama that year.
“The greatest need for Birmingham now, as far as athletics is concerned,” Central High coach L.J. Stillwell said, “is a municipal stadium with a seating capacity of 10,000 or more. Unless this is done soon, Montgomery, who has such a stadium, soon will have all of the big games.”
Legion Field would open five years later and take some of those big games away, but the emergence of Cramton Bowl 100 years ago gave the Capital City a huge advantage in hosting athletic events for years to come.