San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
49ers fans fondly remember gritty Kezar Stadium years
It was a bit of a shock when the 49ers moved their whole operation from Santa Clara to Arizona because of the pandemic. So “Monday Night Football” will feature a Santa Clarabased team wearing San Francisco uniforms playing a home game in a huge empty stadium in Glendale, Ariz. Is this a weird year, or what?
But Martin Jacobs, a San Francisco guy who was once voted the 49ers’ No. 1 fan, has a different vision.
He stood under the goalposts on the east end of the new Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park at midweek. The new stadium is a showpiece, a carefully trimmed green grass field, surrounded by a stateoftheart running track, a beautiful little stadium in the heart of a city neighborhood.
“Can you imagine this place with 60,000 people setting up a roar?” he said. “On a beautiful day like this? I can.” And he closed his eyes against the bright sun, imagining.
He would have liked the 49ers to have played Monday night’s game against the Buffalo Bills at Kezar. The stadium has lights, and a wellkept field. It has only 10,000 seats, but that’s not important, since no fans would be allowed. But the new Kezar doesn’t have the bigtime training or locker facilities that a modern stadium has, so playing a professional game at Kezar is impossible.
But when Jacobs closes his eyes, he sees something else: He sees 25 years of 49ers football at the old Kezar Stadium. He sees Y.A. Tittle, and John Brodie, and Bob St. Clair, and Joe “the Jet” Perry and Hugh “the King” McElhenny, his particular hero. Jacobs wears McElhenny’s No. 39 jersey. He’s stayed in touch with McElhenny, who is 91 now and lives in Nevada. Jacobs calls him every week.
Most of all, Jacobs hears the sound of those thousands of fans. He’s compiled a book of stories the fans told him. It’s called “Kezar Stadium: 49ers Fans Remember.” It costs $22.50. You can’t find it in stores; it’s selfpublished and available on Amazon.
Jacobs played a little high school football himself and absorbed himself in the world of the 49ers. As a kid, he sold programs as a vendor in the stands and later had five retail stores selling 49ers gear. He’s 77 now and retired. He did a lot of research with fans and players. He’s a onefinger typist; it took him six months to write.
Normally I shy away from selfpublished books. Most of them are awful, but this one is more a social history about a neighborhood and a city than a book about football.
San Francisco was a very different city in Kezar’s glory days. It was a tougher, harddrinking kind of place. A port city with lots of bluecollar industry. It was not the cool, gray city of love the poets called it. Kezar could be a tough place.
In the book, a fan named Sean Hallinan remembers how he parked cars in his nearby backyard at $1 a head, then went to the game. “I had to leave the stadium before the game ended and the mayhem began,” he wrote. “A few minutes before the two minute warning all the police would disappear into the Kezar tunnel and reemerge wearing yellow rain slickers and helmets. Then I’d see beer bottles start flying generally aimed at the police and the visiting team. There would be fights in the stands between fans. It was like that almost every game. It was definitely not the wine and cheese set.”
But it was the milk and cookies set. Any kid who clipped a coupon from a quart of Christopher Milk could get in free. There was a special section. “When I was nine I would buy a quart of Christopher Milk, which cost about 15 cents. Then I’d pour out the milk and clip the coupon off the back to get in the game,” wrote Bill Bailey.
It was a city stadium, an urban place like Wrigley Field in Chicago. “If you were lucky enough to witness a 49ers game at Kezar Stadium you were one of the fortunate. Kezar was a home grown neighborhood stadium, a jewel in the city. You’d maybe have to jump on a streetcar or bus to get there but there was none of that corporate stuff going on back then,” John Burton wrote. “At Kezar you sat on wooden benches, you urinated in a trough and the fog and seagulls rolled in by the fourth quarter.”
There were kinder moments. You could see the players up close, and after the game they’d sometimes be available for autographs. Suzan Riddell and her best girlfriend became friends with Bruce Bosley, a big tough lineman. She had convinced her girlfriends — “starstruck teenagers,” she said — that Bosley was her uncle, which he was not. Bosley went along with the gag and often left tickets for them. When Bosley died years later, “I cried for that sweet, gentle man,” she said.
“The new and smaller stadium I call Little Kezar, but it still possess the spirit of what was once built for us crazed Niner fans,” wrote R. Pondexter.