The Football Archaeology of An Aerial Attack at Yankee Stadium

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Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology.com reminds us of the precautions to have football games played in stadiums during World War II.

The story of how fear of the unknown led to mayhem in the skies above NY during WWII is told by Tim in this episode of our podcast.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on an Aeriel Atack Yankee Stadium

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another evening when we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com about one of his famous tidbits that comes out daily. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, thanks for having me this evening.

I feel honored now that I am in the presence of a published author. Well, thank you. Just, hey, congratulations.

I mean, you know, I know the amount of work you put into it and just encourage everybody to pick up. I'll let you do the plug yourself, but, you know, just, you know, great stuff, great stuff on an old-time team. Well, thank you.

You were a big part of that, and I appreciate it. And folks, the name of the book is The World's Greatest Pro Gridiron Team. We've talked about it before in the podcast.

We won't belabor you too much on that. But Tim was gracious enough to do some research on some of the bonus content we have in there. We did something a little bit different.

So, not only do you have links to explore some things beyond the book in the e-book, but also in the hard copy books, we have QR codes. You can use your smart device to access them. And I think we have three or four from Tim that go in there and talk about some good old-time football, just to set the mood for 1903 football.

Cause most of us sit there and read it and say, what does this mean? Well, we have a man who knows that era very well through his research. So we appreciate your help there and the advice along the way. And we appreciate you, Tim.

No problem. Good time. Now we're going to go back into one of your tidbits tonight with, you know, back in the earlier days, I guess this one's from this year that we're going to be doing, but back a few months ago and talk about something, you know, we're not that familiar with wartime and sports and being in stadiums.

Okay. We know a little bit about COVID-19; we know terrorist attacks and going through security and everything. We're familiar with that, but we're going back to an era when the country was at war and could be in danger.

You know, people didn't know at the time if they were in danger or not. And I think it's really an interesting topic that you wrote about back in May, and you titled it an aerial attack at Yankee Stadium. And we'd love to hear all about it.

So this, this is, I mean, to me, just like you said, it's an interesting thing to try to put yourself back in the time and the uncertainty they faced. All right. I mean, there are things we know now that either the Japanese or the Germans had this capability or that, but they weren't sure, you know, they weren't sure how things were going.

So just to kind of set the stage a little bit, you know, it's so December 7th, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And, you know, so one of the things, one of the consequences of that was that the folks on the West coast, the civil defense people, were concerned about trying to gather 80,000 people into the Rose Bowl on, you know, a glorious January 1st. So they said, no, you can't hold the game here in California.

The Rose Bowl was transferred to Durham, North Carolina because Duke was one of the teams that were playing. Likewise, the Shrine East-West game, which is an all-star game based in San Francisco, was transferred to New Orleans that year. So, okay, we get past football season, and then, you know, on the East Coast, you know, while the Germans didn't have aircraft carriers as the Japanese did, they had a lot of submarines.

And so there was, you know, back in the time, there were certain like planes that could launch from, from submarines, you know, just the old biplane kind of thing. But anyways, they, and, you know, the Germans were seeing a lot of shipping, you know, 630 some ships got sunk along the East coast, you know, during 42 and, you know, that period. So they did things like, you know, they, FDR green-lighted sports, but auto racing, motorcycle racing was banned to save, you know, tires and gasoline.

And in places like Yankee Stadium, one of the impacts was, you know, they just never knew what would happen if somebody attacked the place, right? If, somehow, the Germans had some capability, they would attack Yankee Stadium during a baseball game. And so they set up this process where they had signs all over the stadium that was basically, you know, evacuation boats, you know, I mean if you've been in cities like, you know, well, LA has them and, you know, other places where there's these tsunami signs, if you're near the beach, you know, the Pacific Northwest, same thing. It's like, okay, here's these signs.

Here's what happens if there's a tsunami, you know, you get out of there. Yeah. Yeah.

Run like hell. Yeah. But in Yankee Stadium, it was like, if you were in the upper deck or you were in the box seats or the grandstands with bleachers, whatever, you know, it had different escape routes for you.

And so that's all baseball stuff. And now, I also should have said that because of blackout conditions, like night games, they didn't have any night games, you know, at least in 1942. And so then, you know, Yankee Stadium at the time was still a popular place for football games, both college and pro.

And so, you know, I think I've sold it since, but, you know, I had a copy of a 1942 Army versus Princeton football program and, you know, played at Yankee Stadium. And, you know, with the inside of the, you know, one of the ads or pieces of information, you know, it had in there was just, it told you, okay, like I said, if you're in this section, here's your escape route, proceed this way, run out to such and such Avenue or whatever, you know, you can get the hell out of the Bronx. So anyway, it's just one of those things; you just can't imagine it.

You know, it's just not; I mean, now we do go through security. And so maybe it's, it is more imaginable now, but, you know, it's just one of those things you just, you just don't think about that happening. And so just one other little point about that game and that season was that, you know, Princeton and Army played on, you know, one Saturday, and then the next one was the Army-Navy game.

And so again, due to work time conditions, they moved it from Philadelphia to Navy Stadium in Annapolis because they wanted to have a smaller crowd, which was going to be the case there. And they would only sell tickets to people who lived within 10 miles of the stadium because they wanted to reduce people traveling to the game, you know, and eating up gas or whatever, you know. So it's just one of those interesting things that occurred.

And I think by 43, the concerns about hacks on the, I mean, there were still concerns about espionage, and concerns about attacks from a military standpoint had dissipated. But, you know, by then, you know, a lot of guys were getting drafted, being enlisted. So, you know, the NFL had teams merge, you know, the Steelers, and were they the Pirates then or the? The Steelers with the Eagles or the Steagles.

The Steegles, yeah. And then they had the pick cards the next year, or maybe vice versa.

So, you know, like in the pro game, you know, roster limitations, they merged a team or two. And then in colleges, you know, a number of colleges dropped football, you know, during the war. So, it's just due to roster limitations and other things.

So, yeah, just one of those, one of those things a little bit hard to imagine now, but, you know, that's what happened back then. Yeah. One of the interesting things, I mean, I learned a lot from that post, but one of the things that sort of resonated with me that I sort of outside of sports is I didn't realize that the Germans didn't have aircraft carriers.

So, you know, I guess maybe that's because I always wondered, I'm like, why did they move the Rose Bowl from the West Coast to the East Coast? You know, you're still on a coastal, why not have it in Oklahoma or somewhere or the Cotton Bowl or something where it's safe, you know, there's no water around where you can, you know, worried about an aerial attack, but I didn't realize that the Germans didn't have aircraft carriers. So thank you for teaching me that. So, probably some of the same things are why Yankee Stadium and Annapolis didn't seem so scary, too, for, you know, the submarines couldn't attack them too much from there.

You're a little bit too far away from it. Yeah. So, yeah.

So yeah, again, just different time, and you just, you know, it's interesting to try to put yourself back in those, in those periods and kind of, you just, things happen that you just think about. Yeah, definitely some fun football facts, and you have some of these each and every day; as we said, you call them your tidbits, and maybe you could share with the audience for those who aren't familiar with it, how they too can participate in reading your tidbits each and every day. Yeah.

So, you know, the best thing is just to go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You'll get an email every day at seven o'clock Eastern with today's, you know, little story and, you know, read them at your leisure, delete them if that's really what you want to do. But otherwise, just, you know, I know people let them pile up over the weekend or read them over the weekend, whatever, but that's the best way to subscribe.

Okay. Well, Tim, we really appreciate you coming here and sharing some of these great football facts with us each week. We appreciate you sharing your football knowledge in the book and, you know, some of the other things that you've done to help us all understand that, as well as footballarchaeology.com. And we will talk again next Tuesday.

Very good. And congratulations again. Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.