Demolition of the old press box tested man and machine.
The Old Press Box: 'Wildcat to the End'
8/23/2016 3:34:00 PM | Football, UNH Insider
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By: Allen Lessels
UNH director of athletics Marty Scarano has his up close and personal tales of the dated blue press box that stood sentry over Cowell Stadium for decades and became a memory-filled, if oft-maligned, symbol of the old place.
The crusty, tough bombshelter-like structure – with concrete walls a foot thick and reinforced with loads of steel rebar – fought the good fight and fought it hard against man and all nature of machinery before finally succumbing last month, its mid-field real estate now to be turned into ADA accessible seating.
The press box is gone as UNH readies to open the state-of-the-art Wildcat Stadium across the field. The football opener against Holy Cross is set for Saturday, Sept. 10 at 7 p.m.
A "soft opening" is scheduled for Thursday at noon when the Wildcats play a Blue-White scrimmage, a final tuneup before the regular season. Concessions on Thursday will be free to season ticket members and they will also be treated to a postgame cookout in the Service Credit Union Victory Club. The stadium's wide array of concessions will be available at half price to the public on Thursday.
More information on the stadium, season tickets and individual game tickets is available by CLICKING HERE or by calling 603-862-4000.
The old blue press box – some called it the big blueberry - may be gone: Press box memories live on.
Before he became UNH's director of athletics in the summer of 2000, Scarano was AD at Colorado College for several seasons. Before that he worked his way up in the athletics department at Colgate University during a 13-year stint there to the position of senior associate director.
While at Colgate, he was the color analyst on football radio broadcasts and became quite familiar with the infamous visiting radio broadcast booth in the Cowell Stadium press box.
In the early 1980s, a few years before Scarano did his first Colgate broadcast, a UNH crew of sports information director Bill Knight, wrestling coach Irv Hess and assistant athletic director Junie Carbonneau teamed up one summer to build an addition atop the concrete press box.
Coaches from UNH – before they moved to "the crow's nest," itself a unique structure high in the infield track – and the visiting team sat on the second floor, along with broadcasters from the visiting radio station.
The only way to the top floor was up a ladder through a round hole cut in the roof.
"It was like a little submarine hatch to get to the second level," said Mike Bruckner, a sports information director at UNH from 1979 to 1991 who now works in public relations at Muhlenberg College. "It was scary."
Up went Scarano – along with Colgate play by play broadcaster Lloyd Walsh.
"Back in the day in the '80s you're carrying all this heavy equipment and he had all this equipment strapped on him," Scarano said. "He can barely get up this ladder into this hole, which by the way, the hole was maybe two feet wide. So I'm behind him on the ladder, pushing him up by his fanny. It's like, 'Who in God's name had something like this?'"
Colorful stories – many of them approaching fable status and all of them we believe to be at least mostly true – abound.
There are stories of the major cleaning jobs required before each season began because pigeons regularly snuck through plywood used to board up the front of the press box and made it their offseason home, making a royal mess of the place.
Stories of a UNH assistant football coach tumbling back down through the hole or the time Bruckner told a sportswriter – who was a large man – that his assigned seat was on the second floor and he amiably gave getting there a shot.
Bruckner recalled another color analyst who was not particularly fond of the digs.
"Hal Kopp was the former Rhode Island football coach and he was doing radio and hated going up there," Bruckner said. "He fell down the ladder one time and was really mad at us."
There was a lower floor to the press box where the sports information staff hand-cranked copies of statistics to be handed to media members on a ditto sheet and where there was a hot dog cooker and sodas.
"Bobby Conner, the son of Ted Conner our baseball coach, helped us out and one season ate an average of 11 hot dogs a game," Bruckner said. "We didn't pay our press box people. That was his pay."
Cowell Stadium had no suites, no VIP sections. UNH presidents, including Evelyn Handler during her tenure at the school, typically sat in the top row of the stands, just in front of the press box.
"One time I knocked a Coke over the edge," Bruckner said. "President Handler was sitting there and had a beehive hairdo. I had a work study student lean over and he saw it had landed on her head. The president looked up and just saw the kid."
For many, many years the press box was open air, open to the elements, which was great in the early fall, often not so great later in the year.
"We were in there in late November one year and it felt like we were in a refrigerator," Scarano said. "At the end of the game we were both so cold we couldn't even move our lips. I wasn't pronouncing words correctly because my face was frozen."
Over the years, an outside staircase was added to the second floor and eventually the front of the press box was closed in by windows. That created its own problems.
Fog set in during a playoff game a couple of years ago and visibility became an issue.
The opening of the new Wildcat Stadium with its state-of-the-art and fully-equipped press box marks the end of an era and the old press box.
Workers set out to disassemble the old one earlier this summer. Easier said than done.
A job that was scheduled to take about three weeks took more than double that.
"It's one of the toughest cement jobs that I've ever seen," said Mike MacLeod, the site supervisor for contractor Charters Brothers which was taking the facility down. "It was built probably 10 times stronger than it had to be."
Jackhammers, saws and Ecobust, an expansive controlled demolition agent, all slowly chipped away at the project and a remote control demolition robot probably had the most success.
"It's amazing," said football coach Sean McDonnell. "It just reminds me of an old World War I gun turret. Some guy in construction seven or eight years ago when stuff was getting renovated around here was in our office and he started hitting one of our walls and said, 'Look, you guys are in the safest place for a nuclear attack. Everything you have around here. The concourse. The press box.' You wondered what he was talking about and then you watched them trying to take it down and he was right."
The toughness of the press box was only fitting, Scarano said during the demolition process: "I look at this press box fighting us tooth and nail out there. It is so Wildcat, isn't it? It is UNH Wildcat to the end. That thing ain't giving up. It's kind of like Coach Mac in bricks and mortar out there."
Scarano got a particular kick out of it when MacLeod's crew found a plastic bucket mortared into one corner of a wall, used as a shim where the project worked around a steam pipe. Remnants of the press box, complete with the bucket.
"That is awesome," he said. "That's good old New England ingenuity right there, good old frugality, New England frugality. You cannot make this stuff up."
For the countless stories, the frigid games and in the end the toughness of the press box, it all came down to the people who inhabited the place for Bruckner.
"They were the best part," he said. "We had Jock MacKenzie and Jim Jeannotte and Bob Norton doing the radio. We had Larry Favinger from the Portsmouth Herald and the people from Foster's and the Boston Globe and Union Leader."
Full disclosure: I covered games from the press box at varying times through the decades, starting during my undergraduate years here in the 1970s and through last season. In later years, I'd sit in the press box and look up at what looked like cracking concrete above and be convinced some exuberant coach was going to get overly excited, jump up and down, and come crashing through and land on us. Ha. Guess that wasn't about to happen.
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