The "Big Game" Disaster of 1900 | Episode 46

When I say a sporting disaster, most people immediately think of that time that your favorite team crap the bed. Well, today, we're going to make a new memory that'll make your old memory feel more like a page out of your dream journal. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, onspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll explore the blood smeared history of NCAA college football. You'll learn the quickest way off of a building, and we'll discuss what to do if your brain catches on fire figuratively, not literally. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. If I say as American as baseball and apple pie, you'd probably wipe away a tear and hang your hat over your heart. But if I say turkey, pumpkin pie, and football, you'd probably flip a table, tear off your shirt, and paint your stomach. And I'm not even talking about NFL football. I'm about good old fashioned American college ball. As a non American, we missed the obsession with college sports, but we do see how much money and time and energy go into them, and it's stunning. Loyalty to these teams runs deep, and their logos are warned like badges of honor. But football wasn't an American invention. The game's roots go all the way back about two thousand years. The Greeks and Romans and Chinese used to play a very primitive version that's really closer to soccer. For a ball, they used an animal hide stuffed with hair, which I'm not even judging because before that they actually used to row football. As you'd more recognize, it really started taking shape back in England in the early eighteen sixties, and as its popularity grew in it made its way around the world. It finally reached the only country in the world that looked at it and said football with your feet, no, thank you. They're feeling was that football should be played with your hands. And sometimes broken ribs. The only thing feet do in American football or run, occasionally kick, and sometimes break, So they made their own rules. Each team had twenty five players, and they used something vaguely round as the ball. You could kick it or slap it or bump it, but it couldn't be held or carried. Early football was really more like a proto soccer, pseudo rugby, outdoor royal rumble. The first players were pulled from various varsity school teams, and the ink had barely dried on the rules for American football when the very first intercollegiate football game was held. It wouldn't take long before the game developed a bit of a following, but only a little bit. The date was Thanksgiving Day, Saturday, November sixth, eighteen sixty nine. Rutgers University faced off against neighboring Princeton, taking that first game with a gentlemanly showing of six to four a four an enthusiastic hometown crowd of one hundred. The game was a little underdeveloped, and spectators watched the game with the same kind of an involvement and interest as you might watching an oil change. So they introduced the snap. You can now hold the ball forever as long as it wasn't contested. But this led to teams playing keepaway and gaining zero ground, sometimes for more than half the game. So they introduced downs and tackles still clearly keep things moving and spice things up, and with that the sport transformed from a passive, gentleman lyaouting to something a little more asserted. Injuries are and I've always been a part of any game but football. One of the innovative new play tactics was called the flying wedge maneuver. So picture this. All the blockers would link arms together in a triangle or wedge shape to surround the ball carrier, and then the whole thing runs forward at full speed to protect the ball and destroy all defenders. I'm not joking when I say this kind of thing regularly lowered life expectancies. In the nineteen o five season, a dead player was scraped off the field nineteen times. Teddy rose Velt had been president at the time, and you probably didn't know this about the guy, but t Roast had a photographic memory, which is pretty amazing, but that meant he could not escape the image of manga players being rolled up like a toothpaste tube and vomiting blood. And he told them fix this, or I'll do it for you. And so they did, and by nineteen oh five, the National Collegiate Athletic Association was born. Happy belated birthday, NCAA college ball. But just a hair early of this great milestone, we're going to go to a game, a game that still plays by the older archaic rules. But don't be led astray. Today's action is going to take place very much off the field. We're going back to the year nineteen hundred, to sunny California, San Francisco to be exact. Our story takes place Thursday, November twenty ninth, nineteen hundred. It was a beautiful November morning with just the slightest hint of chill in the air. We'll be spending our time in the Historic Mission District. This thing was already historic even by nineteen hundred standards. They called it the Mission because that's what it was. It's where Spanish priests did what they could to try to convert the existing native population, or just make sneeze ridden thumb prints of the Cross on their faces and send them on their way. Today, it's one of the more colorful and popular neighborhoods in the city. The Southern district was a blended working class Irish German residential slash Victorian industrial neighborhood. But we're not here for that. We're here to see the Big Game between the Stanford Cardinals against long time rivals, the California Golden Bears of Berkeley. And it's a big deal. Today. I say Big Game and you say super Bowl. And the name used to belong exclusively to the annual competition between Stanford and Berkeley, one of America's longest standing sports rivalries. Since then, NFL lawyers took it and turned it into an overly simplistic, legally approved term to say super Bowl without actually saying super Bowl. The first televised game wouldn't air until nineteen thirty nine, the first radio game wasn't heard until nineteen twenty one. Up till then, you had to see it in person. Recreation Park Field had capacity for ten thousand, but twice as many showed up. The whole area was completely swamped, and it was reported to be the largest crowd ever assembled west of the Mississippi to witness a sports event. Tickets have been sold for one dollar apiece. I did the math. That's about thirty one dollars today, and it was so overwhelming. Organizers couldn't even figure out how to take the ticket money fast enough. They didn't even know where to put it all. And in the confusion, no one remembered to bring an actual football. The stands were already packed by half past ten. It was fully sold out and filled four full hours before kickoff. This meant thousands of would be spectators were now pretty much just looking for backup options. Recreation Park was in an industrial area, like we said, and it was surrounded by factories, and some of those overlooked this stadium. The San Francisco and Pacific glass Works offered a uniquely unspoiled view of the field. It was the biggest plant of its kind this side of Chicago. The glassworks loomed over the park and from the roof it had an unobstructed view of the whole field oth ends and I'll tell you how good the view was. Organizers of the game gave the glass works free passes to try to get them out of work and come see the game. And you might say, oh, that's lovely, but really they were just trying to distract them from getting any funny ideas about turning their building into pirate bleachers or something. But a few things about that. You ever work at a company that gets free tickets to something, and that's the last you ever heard of it. In nineteen hundred, those tickets probably went in the furnace. The glassworks was operating on a skeleton crew that day, and no one was punching out early for a ballgame. James Davis was superintendent of the glassworks. It was already protected from intrusion by a wooden fence and barbed wire, and Davis posted two watchmen to quote unquote dissuade any trespassers, and on the morning of game day, those defenses would be tested. When people came by and the watchman threatened them with a metal pipe and told them to leave, they just deeked around him and made their way up to the roof. These people had better moves than the players on the field. People poured in like water through every weakness or any kind of opening in the fence. Some dismantled parts of the fence, others vaulted over, and children were even seen tunneling underneath. Imagine your workplace being assaulted by the little rascals and served to selah at the same time. It's like in the way that I say everything can be a weapon, these people had and everything can be a ladder mentality. On one side of the building, a line had formed on the sidewalk, and every few seconds a wood plank in the fence would lift and the line would move up. A lot of people said that once it was pretty clear that the tide was not going to be stopped, the watchmen decided to make a little scratch off it. Clarence Jeter and Charles Yachts were working to prime the furnace that day. As soon as they saw the body swarming the walls and climbing up to the roof, they were pretty sure something bad was going to happen. Working in a glass works is already a very dangerous job, and that's without hundreds of people dancing and partying over their heads. When you picture a furnace, you picture something roughly as big as like a vending machine. If you think of an industrial commercial furnace, you probably picture something about half the size of a Dodge caravan. Each building in the glass works were about one hundred feet long and fifty feet tall. And inside that building sat a furnace sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and thirty five feet tall. Try to imagine a pile of Dodge caravans stacked two across, nine deep, and six high. This thing was powerful enough to liquefy raw silica that could be molded into bottles and jars for everything from wine and pickles to patent medicines, poisons, and over the counter opiates. They could mold any type of bottle, including something called bitters, which I soon meant lemon bitters for drink mixing, but it was actually some kind of snake oil medicine made of alcohol and laxatives yum. And to do all this required tremendous heat, and we will come back to that. Depending on reports, as few as four hundred but as many as a thousand people had swarmed and spider manned their way onto the slightly slanted roof. One witness said there wasn't an inch of standing room to spare. The best view could be had from the top of a long corrugate iron vent that ran the length of the building right down the center. It was designed event heat and allow air exchange from the furnace room, and people stood on the vent, sat on it, leaned on it. But the roof had only been designed with wooden beams to support its own weight, and the majority of the structure itself was designed to hold the weight of the vent. A nineteen hundred did not bring about a lot of building and safety codes for businesses like this, and if they did, none of it would have covered what was happening on their roof. If you're wondering why people on the roof weren't choking to death on plumes of horrific smoke, get this. The heat of this furnace is so great it actually consumes the smoke as soon as it's made. Still, many of those perched on the roof looked more than a little concerned with every little creak and strain. Standing on it felt flimsy. That's a fun word. One fan said, If this thing breaks, we'll all go down together, and the crowd had a pretty good laugh about it. Still, what their viewing point lacked in feelings of safety or stability if more than made up for in creature comforts. The factory itself wasn't in full operation, like we said, but the heat from the furnace below would have made it the toastiest seat in San Francisco. The glassworks was planning to be open on Monday, just four days away, and for that to happen, workers had been stoking and heating the furnace day by day over the past week until it finally reached a sustained three thousand fahrenheit or seventy hundred celsius. Just for reference, a cremation furnace cooks around eighteen hundred fahrenheit or a thousand celsius, and lava from the Hawaiian killaway a volcano oozes out around twenty one hundred fahrenheit or eleven hundred and fifty celsius. Anoxia setylene torch, on the other hand, reaches about fifty four hundred fahrenheit or three thousand celsius, which is probably why there are no oxy acetylene furnaces. The furnace itself was a kind of half dome shaped brick structure was covered with blocks of rock and firebrick, and the whole thing was enclosed by this caging of thick iron rods inside its white hot walls. This thing could hold fifteen tons of molten glass. One side effect was a balmy five hundred degree fahrenheit or two hundred and sixty celsius zone of radiant heat just pouring off this thing. It's the kind of place that really demands your full attention, and you don't want your attention being split between that and a pig skin themed tailgate jamboo happening over your head. They got so worried about it. One of the workers finally rang for the police, but the police gave them the old runaround and told them, why not you go bug the officers at the stadium. But when they ran to the stadium, the officers were all, why don't you take your story on the one oh one drive down south to Oyster Point and tell it to a dolphin. The police had clearly made peace with the idea of not helping, so the men ran back to the factory. By that point, the crowd and the furnace were locked in competition to be heard over each other. There was a kickoff and this led to a huge roar, followed by a groan from the building, and this was enough to set some people to try to scurry off the roof, but there was too much crowd and not enough wiggle room. The first half of the game had been very exciting, you know, because we're still playing by the murder ball rules. Or twenty minutes in, the score was still zipped to nothing, and right at that moment one of the kickers lined up to take their shot, the crowd on the roof shifted for a better view, and a crack was heard. It came from the hugely overloaded ventilator section, and you can only imagine the looks on the faces of all those standing on it as it began to free fall into the space below, probably with the same look as everyone else. As the rest of the roof was immediately pulled down with it, and at the stadium play immediately stopped. They heard the commotion coming from the direction of the factory, but to them it just kind of looked like a building that used to be covered in people just wasn't covered in people anymore. It would have felt like more of a glitch in the matrix than the hallmark of an actual disaster. And then someone in the crowd shouted it's a job, which, if you're not up on your one hundred and twenty year old slang, it basically means fake news. They figured it was an attempt to distract the players, but from which side, I have no idea, which is kind of the beauty of fake news. Still, everyone took him at his word and the game continued. At the glass works, the workers have been coaxing the furnace when bodies began raining down, and a five story fall is no joke. It's not the kind of thing you think of as easily survivable, and it wasn't, especially as others immediately landed on top of people who had already fallen, and they stacked like sandbags. Now imagine the first person to land directly on the furnace. How horrifying would it be to make full body contact? Was something that hot? Try to imagine what would happen if you took a hot dog or a sausage and threw it into a pan that had no oil whatsoever and was red hot. Now trying to imagine rolling the thing around. Yeah, not great for the hot dog. Now add the unrequested weight on top, pressing you against the excruciating surface. You would sound like an impatiently cooked grilled cheese sandwich. A lot of those who fell actually lived because their fall was cushioned by the less fortunate beneath them. But even at that, imagine trying to scramble over an ever growing pile of cooking bodies with spinal and head injuries. Some were lucky enough to grasp onto pipes and rafters as they fell, and they hung on for dear life, while others continued to fall all around them. And it was a lot like that scene from the Poside Adventure when the boat flips over and everyone still stuck to the ceiling, just clinging to tables, fingers, sweating, arms, tiring and falling one by one to their deaths. One man said, as I clung there, I saw this poor fellow who had been chatting with me earlier, and when he struck the furnace, he curled up like a worm in the heat. Some of the pipes had also been damaged when the roof collapsed, and sadly, those pipes carried oil to help feed the furnace, hot and extremely flammable oil, which now sprayed onto the victims like histories worst sprinkler system. Many who had survived the fall now found themselves on the receiving end as the oil transformed from a kind of fuel oil into a kind of cooking oil. Many got caught up in the iron caging and piping surrounding the furnace, and they couldn't even pull themselves out without taking all the skin off their hands. When this started, the workers had immediately sprung in action. Clarence Jeter ran to cut off the flow of oil to the furnace, while Charles Yachts worked tirelessly to pull people off the furnace. Remember in our very first episode where we described the retrieval of a body pancake to a ceiling using hooks on a pole. Yeah, kind of the same thing here and technique schmeechnique. This guy was just trying to move bodies as quick as he could, and he burned his hands pretty good while doing it. There's no way to conjure the unimaginable smell and all the things they're seeing and hearing. And yes, this is one of those stories where the bulk of the details even I will spare you. The best estimate was at about a hundred men and boys had struck the furnace itself, while the majority had fallen the full height onto the brick floor below which a was awful but b Let's not forget was hundreds of degrees. When police and fire crews arrived, they were completely overwhelmed by what they saw. There was this continuous and haunting course of moans and suffering, the unescapable smell of roasting flesh and burning clothes. Between all that and the overpowering heat coming off the furnace, this would have been a good day to grab some football tickets. People lay everywhere, some moving, some not. Firefighters laddered people down from the beams and rafters. Of all the people that fell, some pinwheel through the air after plunking their way through the rafters and landed with a certain unlucky gracelessness that ensnared them in the conducting pipes and metal caging around the furnace. And as a rule of thumb, the longer it took to rake you off, the worse your injuries became. So you got a new job at a glassworks and the only real experience you have is the first half of this podcast, and you really don't want to find yourself being dry roasted on your first day, So would you know what to do? The most obvious dangers working around furnaces is the constant exposure to ridiculous heat, and of course the risk of burns. If you think working near pizza oven is something, well, that's a start. Without proper ventilation, the ambient temperature will become on goodly and every object in the space becomes an opportunity to catch more burns. But a burn will heal heat related illnesses. On the other hand, people working in hot environments have to do everything they can to remain cool so they can stay off the heat stroke pyramid. That's a name I just created, trademark pending. The first symptoms of heat related illness are heat cramps, I mean, confusion, nausea, weakness, and all of those are symptoms. But the loss of salt and water from sweat can create severe muscular spasms and cramping in the hands and calves and feet, mostly but not exclusively, And this can carry on for up to forty eight hours. And if you ignore the signs, you might find yourself climbing the pyramid into heat exhaustion. Some of you hear this and you think, oh is baby wahwah, But it's no joke. Headache, fever, nausea, and general weakness. They sound like flu symptoms. But in this case they will kill you. Most people collapse because their blood pressure drops out. But if you're on team high blood pressure, like myself, I'm pretty sure your heart will just explode. And if you found yourself this afflicted and can still ask the nurse to turn up your sun lamp, Welcome to the top of the pyramid. And what have you won? Why? Heat stroke? And you've probably heard the term, but you probably just picture people turning red and needing coal compresses to lower their temperature. Well, if only it was that easy. Full on heat stroke happens when you lose all control of your body temperature. Then your sweat response fails and your body temperature spikes to one hundred and six in as little as ten minutes. I always say, you can ask me anything, but if you want to know what a cooking brain smells like, the only answer I have is not good. So how do we treat or prevent this? Remember all the things I told you about the proper way to heat a freezing body. You have to introduce he slowly to prevent cell damage. Well, for a heat stroke, you get to do the opposite. You want to get them into a cold tub, even an ice bath, and the quicker you do it, the less chance of permanent damage or death. If you have ice but no bath, wrap the ice and slap it on the groin, back, neck, and armpits. I know it sounds bad, but it's really going to draw it a lot of that heat, and if you didn't have a full ice bath handy. The next best technique is evaporation cooling, and I've used this forever, especially during heat waves. When you missed cool air onto the body, It'll draw away heat as it evaporates. Pretty simple. I've used a variation on this technique to moisten bed sheets, and I throw them in the freezer and just crack them out right before bedtime. I've also used something about I've also used this technique where you kind of create this. I've also used a technique where you kind of create a pop tent in front of your fridge door open. But this is really for renters because fair warning, this will absolutely kill your fridge motor. If you become sluggish or slow and or worried about your heat exposure, you could always take your temperature. But my favorite and the easiest thing to do is find a cold liquid. You know whatever's closest. I always say non alcoholic, non sugary sport drinks work best, because if your body's in trauma, the last thing you need to be doing is the sprite challenge. So whatever you find, drink half because you really need the hydration, and pour the rest slowly onto the back of your neck. It's fantastic and it cools the blood headed to your brain, which it will appreciate and reward you with the ability to think and act your way out of this and live long enough to tell your friends about the show. Pieces of broken roof are repurposed into makeshift stretchers and anything with wheels, from wagons to Butcher's carts. Raced victims to hospital. A lot of doctors and nurses found their Thanksgiving get togethers getting cut short that day. Most of the victims were about thirteen years old. Young people were the least likely to have enough money for it, and the most likely to climb up onto a roof without really thinking about it for too long. The youngest victim, Lawrence Meal, was only nine. The oldest was only in his forties. Back at the field, five minutes remained on the clock. A Stanford placekicker made the first successful field goal in the history of the game and the only goal of any time. During this game, the whistle blew and hundreds of Stanford fans surged onto the field. It was a landslide five to nothing. People carried the players on their shoulders and threw buckets of fruit flavored well water onto the coaches heads, while just next door people fall for their lives. Firefighters and police threw up and priests perform last rites. Throngs of fans from Stanford and Berkeley promenaded up in down Market Street, and by the evening the party continued, but it wasn't as rowdy as previous years, and some people blamed a simple newsboy who looked just like Debbie Downer from SNL, who walked around the celebration calling out the latest death and injury counts. And here is a quote directly following. From nine o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon, there was no time at which the funeral procession of one of the young victims of the catastrophe might not be seen making its way towards the cemetery. The coroner called for an immediate inquest. In total, twenty three people had lost their lives that we know of. The entire ordeal was over in less than thirty minutes. An investigators questioned and interviewed about two hundred and fifty victims and witnesses. Every one of them wanted to point blame. A California law contained this old archaic clause modeled after Wonder Woman's bracelets, called contributory negligence. Basically, contributory negligence means if you even held the smallest scrap of responsibility for something, you know, like something bad happens, but you were there as an example, you brought the whole thing on yourself. In this case, the glassworks had offense to prevent entry, so anyone on the property was trespassing. Thus they held one hundred percent responsibility for their own injuries. And it didn't stop there. Quote, the deceased had no business being there. No one can be held responsible for their deaths other than themselves. But then they went on to try to characterize the victims as quote the indigent, the impulsive, the reckless, and the devious. All this just to make people feel better about not feeling bad for them. We've talked about people belittling or minimizing tragedies before, but we've never had the victims characterized as too dumb to live before. And to top it all off, this law also meant that victims and relatives were not entitled to compensation of any kind. A grand jury was convened to investigate the causes behind the disaster, which turned into more of a he said, she said. The workers testified that they had asked the cops for help only to get brushed off, and the police were all, what's a phone? So yeah, both were pretty heavily criticized. Just seven days after the disaster, the jury placed full blame on the dead and the whole matter was dropped. And I mean literally. Both the Stanford and Berkeley student newspapers covered the game in great detail, but they didn't mention the disaster. Other newspapers barely touched it either. Local history books don't even cover it. There isn't even a memorial anywhere. And this could have been a willful cover up, but it also could have been at tension burnout. You gotta remember, the late nineteenth century was shipwreck after mine fire, after mill explosion, and at some point they kind of have to start to blur together. Now the cause also could have been because the victims had been found legally responsible, so it felt like sympathy or recognition was in bad taste. From a historian's point of view, every moment is worth preserving. But just six years after our story, on April eighteenth, nineteen o six, San Francisco woke to a bit of a shake. Just after five in the morning, a massive eight point zero earthquake struck top the buildings, killing about three thousand people and starting fires that destroyed five hundred square blocks. It ravaged San Francisco Recreation Park dawn. The city was changed forever, and his attention grabbing events go that one really took a lot of the steam out of all those shipwrecks and mine fires and mill explosions. But all is not lost. In section g row twenty, at the Holy Cross Cemetery in San Francisco, there's a small, weather beaten little stone cross that faintly reads Cornelius McMahon. He was just twelve years old when he died at the San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works, and his grave marker is the only physical evidence that anything ever happened. The Big Game disaster was and remains to this day by a considerable margin, the deadliest sporting disaster in American history, and no one's even heard of it. Football is a hell of a sport, and everyone reacts to injury differently. In nineteen ninety four, I watched Napoleon McCallum get his leg reorganized. He tore up his ligaments and tore his calf and the hamstring came off the bone, and the guy was watching with he used to play and got a trick shoulder out of the deal for himself, but he did not much care for what he saw. He ran from the table, turned his hat backwards, pulled a woman out of the washroom, and threw up. That's my favorite football injury story. My least favorite was Joe Eisman. It was his last professional football game and he didn't know that at the time. Of course, he got sacked by multiple defenders and quote snapped his leg like a breadstick, And of course ABC went into automatic replays, clearly and slowly showing in slow motion Joe go down, get twisted weirdly in his leg, bone clearly waving for attention outside of his body. They only stop the replays when people started throwing up, which is why I say Janet Jackson s nipple deserves an apology and I'm already regretting this. But here's today's question, what's the worst sports injury you've ever witnessed? You can reach out to us at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomday Podcast, or fire us an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. We're also on TikTok as doomsday dot dot podcast. Other episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and even better, tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo or buy meacoffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, we always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteer years offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Global medic Dota. On the next episode, if you know what a coal slurry impoundment damn is, I'm betting you wish I hadn't just brought it up. It's the Buffalo Creek disaster of nineteen seventy two. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.