BLAZE OF GLORY: The flames often shot 100 feet into the night sky. (Photo: Rod Searcey)
Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the November/December 1997 issue as part of a collection of stories celebrating Big Game’s 100th anniversary.
BONFIRE: The ritual blaze kindled Big Game spirit and helped indoctrinate freshmen.
Once the centerpiece of Big Game Week, the bonfire has burned out for good. Earlier this fall, the University bowed to the heated concerns of environmental and safety advocates and announced that the on-again, off-again spectacle can never flame again.
The tradition started in 1898, when students dragged wood into the dry bed of Lake Lagunita, creating a symbolic funeral pyre for the Golden Bear. Over the years, the lighting of the bonfire drew thousands of students and fans the night before Big Game. Circling around the flames, they’d do the Axe yell and cheer for the players and coaches.
The ritual also served a second purpose: to provide a tedious task—scrounging, hauling, piling and then guarding a mountain of wood, sometimes 100 feet high—as a sort of freshman initiation. In a normal year, the chore took weeks. But in 1925 and again in 1928, the woodpile accidentally ignited early and burned to the ground. Students from all classes joined in round-the-clock rescue operations, scavenging old railroad ties and anything else that would burn. Merchants from Palo Alto lent their trucks, and the telephone company sent men and equipment to dig new post-holes for the woodpile’s support frame.
But damages caused by the 11th-hour effort, including $400 for “wrongfully appropriated property,” raised the question in 1928: Should the bonfire be abolished? It wasn’t, but the subject came up again in 1976 over concerns about airborne cinders. A 10-year hiatus followed. In 1989, the fire was doused for lack of student funds. And since 1992, it has been banned to protect the California tiger salamander, a rare amphibian that lives in Lake Lag. Now there’s talk about replacing the blaze with a fireworks display. Whatever happens, the memory of the bonfire will always burn bright.
BLOWHARDS: The sousaphonists of “the world’s largest rock ’n’ roll band” keep the backbeat. (Photo: Courtesy Axe Committee)
THE BAND: An antic group ambles to its own drummer.
Irreverent. Wacky. Out of control. That would not describe the first Stanford Band, formed in 1891. In those days—and for another 71 years—the Band played restrained arrangements of classics and marched in crisp uniforms with military precision.
A flicker of the Band’s rebellious streak flared in 1938, when the student musicians called a strike to protest the banning of their majorette, Maxine Turner, who was still in high school. Turner was reinstated in time for that year’s Big Game.
It was another strike—this one in 1963 to protest the firing of beloved director Julius Shuchat—that led to the birth of today’s ribald anti-Band. Fueled by new director Arthur P. Barnes’s rock ’n’ roll arrangements and reconstituted as a student-run organization, the Band has been gleefully incorrigible ever since. Whether the drum major is costumed as Fidel Castro or the trumpet section rides unicycles, the Band truly is incomparable.
SPELL IT OUT: In 1908, fans dressed to spell the Block S. In later years, card-carrying students delivered a more colorful message. (Photo: Courtesy Stanford Archives)
CARD STUNTS: With elaborate precision, the fans became part of the entertainment.
Some of Stanford’s greatest football innovations happened in the stands. In 1904, a graduate student, Thomas Jewell, came up with the idea of spelling out a Block S in the stadium bleachers.
At that year’s game against Cal, strategically located spectators in the student section were given pieces of white muslin. When the yell leader gave the word, the students threw the cloth over their hats and shoulders to form a huge S.
The display stunned the spectators at Cal’s new football stadium and sparked a mania for bleacher stunts that swept the nation. Over the years, the creation of card formations became an increasingly exact science, as much a part of Big Game Week as the bonfire and Gaieties, the annual musical revue.
At the 1925 Big Game, 1,800 Stanford rooters created a locomotive with puffs of smoke billowing from its stack. In 1928, the Stanford section spelled out HOOVER, complete with a depiction of the White House in honor of the newly elected alum.
Card stunts required discipline and a certain respect for central authority. No surprise, then, that they fell out of fashion by the early 1970s. Says Jon Erickson, ’65, adviser to today’s Axe Committee: “It was a different era.”
OUCH: The annual impaling of Oski serves as a pointed reminder of Big Game hostilities. (Photo: Rod Searcey)
THE RIVALRY: Stanford and Berkeley compete fiercely—and cooperate frequently.
Big Game isn’t the whole story. Off the field, Stanford and Cal compete to outdo each other in ways absurd and sublime.
In the mine-is-bigger-than-yours category, Stanford built its 60,000-seat stadium first in 1921, but Cal came in two years later with a 73,000-seater (Stanford would add 25,000 seats by 1927). Cal has more than twice as many students, but Stanford has six times the acreage. Berkeley claims Campanile Tower and Timothy Leary; Stanford, Hoover Tower and Ken Kesey. Stanford students like to wear “Weenie” buttons saying, “We Got In,” while their Cal counterparts dismiss the country-club atmosphere of “the Farm.”
Stanford boasts 14 living Nobel laureates to Cal’s 8, but they have about equal numbers of members in the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers at Stanford discovered quarks, while Cal scientists detected the wrinkles in the fabric of space that validated the Big Bang theory.
Sure, each has stolen the Axe from the other. But what about the gifts exchanged? Berkeley once released mice, dyed blue and gold, in a Stanford library. Stanford reciprocated with red and white ones. Then Cal put crickets in the Stanford stacks. Both sides favor paint: Cal undergrads colored Stanford chapel bells in the mid-1960s; Stanford turned Cal’s hillside C red a decade later. In 1989, 10 Berkeleyans were nabbed trying to alter the hue of Hoover Tower.
The line between high-spirited fun and reckless endangerment has been crossed more than once, but never so shockingly as in 1964. Stanford took Cal’s 600-pound cannon and Cal filched Stanford’s bleacher-stunt cards. After student leaders negotiated an exchange, Stanford freshmen intercepted the Cal truck—whose driver pulled out a loaded gun. Police intervened, and no one was hurt.
The rivals frequently cooperate. Years ago, the two faculties held joint meetings to create a sense of community. In a 1959 gentlemen’s agreement, Cal agreed not to compete with Stanford fund-raising efforts, and Stanford vowed to support UC budget requests in Sacramento. More recently, academic partnerships have yielded breakthroughs in physics and biotechnology. As UC President David Gardner said a decade ago, “Neither Stanford nor the University of California would be what each is today were it not for the other.”
Photo: David Gonzales/Stanford Athletics
THE AXE: The winner gets the trophy, but safeguarding it is a pain in the neck, the neck. . . .
The story of the Axe seems simple enough. In 1899, Stanford yell leader Billy Erb purchased the 15-inch blade to dramatize the Axe Yell at a pivotal baseball game against Cal.
Or did he? In 1930, one E.F. Weisshaar told the Palo Alto Times that he was the one who bought the Axe in 1899, for $3.50, from a store in San Francisco.
That claim sparked a swift retort from Julius Peterson, foreman of the Stanford forge at the time of the University’s construction. Peterson swore that the Axe had been found in the late 1880s by workmen digging a trench between the Inner Quad and Roble Hall. He kept it in his shop until it disappeared one night, not to be seen again until the first Axe rally on April 14, 1899.
Whatever its origins—and most historians believe the Erb version—it’s no surprise that this simple lumberman’s broadax would inspire tall tales. From its earliest days, the Axe has symbolized the athletic rivalry between Stanford and Berkeley, an object to be prized, protected and, whenever possible, stolen.
The antics began with that first baseball outing, held in San Francisco. To rally the crowd, Erb used the Axe to decapitate a stuffed bear outfitted in blue and gold. Stanford lost the game—and the Axe, when a mob of Bear fans wrested it away and passed it hand-to-hand until a Cal man dashed into a butcher shop to cut off the long handle. That made it easy for him to elude police by slipping the blade under his overcoat.
Cal kept the Axe in a bank vault for the next 31 years, taking it out just twice annually for baseball and football rallies. In 1930, after years of plotting and three foiled attempts, Stanford’s “Immortal 21” took back the Axe by posing as Cal students on a photo shoot. They used a fake camera—and tear gas.
In 1933, the two schools agreed to make the Axe the trophy of Big Game. The pact declared that any further pranks involving the Axe would result in expulsion for the perpetrators and also in the cancellation of Big Game and all other athletic competition between the two schools.
Still, there have been five heists since then—two by Cal and three by Stanford (giving Stanford the edge in thievery, 4-3). In 1946, Cal students pinched the blade and then, afraid of disciplinary action back on campus, left it in the back seat of a parked Palo Alto police squad car. In 1953, the Axe disappeared from its display case at Cal, though well-mannered Stanford bandits left a $5 bill to cover the broken glass. In 1967, the blade was filched from the Stanford case with no visible signs of entry; it was subsequently photographed atop the Tribune Building in Oakland. And in 1973, the last time the Axe was stolen, Stanford students turned back to the ruse that had worked so well in 1930: “We want to take a picture.”
Thanks to bullet-proof glass and strong-armed students, there have been no thefts for 24 years. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it in 1989: “Stealing the Axe nowadays would probably require disposal of human bodies, and neither school wants that responsibility, so lesser pranks suffice.”
THE YELL: The rally cry was, well, stolen.
Students Will Irwin and Chris Bradley wrote the Axe Yell in 1896, three years before there was an Axe to go with it. In 1930, Irwin admitted that the words, like the Axe earlier that year, had been pilfered. He and Bradley took the idea from some fans in the Midwest, whose yell in turn seemed to have been borrowed from Yale’s “Brek-aco-ex-co-ex.” But, as Irwin wrote, even Yale “lifted that from Aristophanes, and Aristophanes probably stole it from some barbarous Parthian who got it originally from the frogs.”
