Grab some cedar — bleachers being sold
Fans headed to Berkeley for the Oregon State game on Saturday afternoon can stop and pick up their seats on the way to Memorial Stadium.
The old wooden bleachers, still marked with seat numbers and faded gold paint on them, are being sold, by the linear foot and in smaller pieces on the frontage road next to Interstate 80.
TheWooden Duck, a furniture manufacturer that salvaged most of the wood from the stands when the the stadium was renovated from 2010 through ’ 12, is going out of business Nov. 15. A warehouse full of
“Cal StadiumWood,” as the company labels it, is being brought to the showroom in time for a 10 a. m. opening Saturday.
“We’ve never sold it in board lengths before,” said Eric Gellerman, co- owner of theWooden Duck. “There are a lot of people who are waiting for it.”
You can buy it by the row with its numbered seats 15 inches apart, which seemed closer on Big Game day. Or you can buy it by the chunk, from 5 inches to a foot, for $ 5.
There are also floorboards for $ 1 a foot, but these are mainly for woodworkers who want to make use of the thick- cut planks. There is no sentimentality in a foot rest. You want a seat with some splinters in it and a hole where the bolt used to go.
Planks too splintery to sell, which some people will recall as most of the seating, will be given away.
The wood is original to the stadium, which opened in 1923. It is old- growth Port Orford cedar and fir brought from Oregon with the original seat numbers. In the 1940s, the benches were flipped and students were paid to imprint the numbers into the wood with a hand- router. Some of the best pieces have seat numbers on both sides.
When Gellerman bought the wood, in 2012, some of it was made into dining tables in patterns of blue and gold. A few thousand of these were sold, but he found 40 round tabletops Wednesday while cleaning out the Richmond warehouse. These will be sold at half price.
TheWooden Duck has been in the stadium wood business since the benches from Kezar Stadium in San Francisco were removed in 1989 and ’ 90. That wood was made into tables and benches.
“Those tables are worth 10 times what we sold them for,” said Gellerman, emphasizing the investment potential in it. “I still get people emailing me looking for Kezar Stadium wood. I just want to repeat that I don’t have any left.”
Stanford Stadium was another place for historic wood, but when its seats came out, in 2005, Gellerman did not get involved.
“The Stanford wood was not great wood,” he said. “It all rotted.”
Gellerman, 50, has no allegiance to either school and neither does Erin Porterfield, who got a jump on the sale by driving from Rohnert Park this week.
She bought a table and 40 feet of board length, which she planned to turn into benches for seating under the table.
“I look for old. The quality is wonderful,” she said. Her total cost was $ 270, which she determined to be a great deal. And that is before figuring in the value of her husband being a Cal fan.
“He will be ecstatic,” she said. “He’d better be. It’s his Christmas present.”