The Big Game Cover Project: Party Like It's 1919

by Scott Allen on Jul 14, 2025 7:30 AM PDT

Last weekend I spent a few hours with my grandfather, flipping through his Big Game program collection while listening to him reminisce about the Vow Boys, the Wow Boys, and his other incredible memories of the Stanford-Cal rivalry.

Between now and the end of October, I'll share his Big Game collection and experiences with you, posting the cover and a few choice inside pages from almost every program dating back to 1919. In the weeks leading up to this year's Big Game, I plan to create an NCAA tournament-like bracket of Big Game program covers to decide, by your votes, the greatest Big Game program of them all. I have a few other ideas for this project that I'll unveil soon, but if you have any suggestions for making it better, please drop me a note in the comments.

First up: 1919. I've posted a PDF version of the entire program here. (By a crazy coincidence, CalBear81 posted images from the 1920 Big Game program earlier this week at California Golden Blogs. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, you can do so here.) Gotta love the CGB-RoT synergy.

More images from the 1919 Big Game program after the jump...

The 1919 season was an important one in Stanford football history. With President Ray Lyman Wilbur's approval, American football returned to the Farm for the first time in 14 years. Led by head coach M.C. "Bob" Evans, Stanford lost Big Game 14-10 and finished the season with a 4-3 record. The S.ATC referenced in the page above was the Student Army Training Corps. Cal's varsity squad demolished Stanford's SATC team, 67-0, in 1918. Thankfully, none of the SATC's games are counted in the Stanford record book. The squad, which included non-Stanford students, was outscored 242-8 in four games.

1919_big_game_2_medium

Dink Templeton (second from the right, top row), who previously starred for the Stanford rugby team, converted a 35-yard drop kick field goal in the loss.

Cal's Yell Leaders included a guy who went by the nickname Red. "It must be admitted that his hair is a Stanford ad. Red is the longest, leanest, red-headedest yell leader seen in these parts for a long time, and he has a set of motions all his own. Watch him tie himself in a knot."

This is one my favorite pages in the program. I wonder if the LSJUMB would consider reviving the "Bum! Bum! Song" or "Berkeley's Tombstone."

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This is great stuff, Scott. Thanks for making it available.

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by CalBear81 on Jul 14, 2025 9:09 AM PDT reply actions

I love the ads. Palo Alto Savings Bank has assets of $2 million! Wow! And the ad on the back cover: “Give her a box of candy and you always score.” Hmmm. I assume that didn’t have the same meaning back then.

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by CalBear81 on Jul 14, 2025 9:16 AM PDT up reply actions

Score some “necking” perhaps?

by Scott Allen on Jul 14, 2025 9:32 AM PDT up reply actions

The 1920 program had ads for dinner at the Fairmont for $2 and at the Palace Hotel for $2.50! I also like how the phone numbers were like this:

Berkeley 82
Berkeley 9396
Piedmont 847

Did they still have switchboard operators back then, I’m assuming? You picked up your phone and got an operator and would say “Berkeley 82” and then they would connect you? Wow. Just wow.

So. Awesome.

by daveman on Jul 14, 2025 11:57 AM PDT up reply actions

Yes, they still had switchboard operators who would connect your calls for you until 1929. I know this because my grandmother was a telephone operator in Fresno who was sent for training in San Francisco in 1929 to learn how to use this new-fangled “direct dial” telephone equipment, and then was sent around the state for several months to train other operators.

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by CalBear81 on Jul 14, 2025 2:13 PM PDT up reply actions

I once was reading the Daily Cal from 1928. It was about the presidential election. It was insane. There was a Letter To The Editor about how the university needed to have its own housing for minorities, because they were attracting minorities (those werent the words used, btw) and it was lowering the property values to just have those minorities living willy nilly.

Also, a local bar was advertising a specific evening for people to come down and enjoy their wares. They were promoting this night using a well known racial slur for black people and the word “night”. I don’t think that would make it into the Daily Cal now.

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by TwistNHook on Jul 14, 2025 11:59 AM PDT up reply actions

Did the editorial say: “Vote for Al Smith, because Herbert Hoover went to Stanford”?

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by CalBear81 on Jul 14, 2025 2:14 PM PDT up reply actions

Thanks, Scott. Interesting stuff.

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by TwistNHook on Jul 14, 2025 9:14 AM PDT reply actions

LOL 'Furd

For whoever the victor may be, the spirit of the “Big Bame” must win.

Oops. No spell-check in 1919.

by daveman on Jul 14, 2025 9:50 AM PDT reply actions

BTW, Thanks for posting — pretty awesome stuff.

by daveman on Jul 14, 2025 9:50 AM PDT up reply actions

Frankly I wish LSJUMB would play your fight songs again, you had as many as we do, and they aren’t bad at all. There wasn’t a single reason in the world why they had to be stopped.

"Our hearts shall sing and our voices ring for the dear old Blue and Gold!"

by Joe Bandsmen on Jul 14, 2025 9:50 AM PDT reply actions

Also, got to love the chocolate add on the back cover

"Our hearts shall sing and our voices ring for the dear old Blue and Gold!"

by Joe Bandsmen on Jul 14, 2025 9:54 AM PDT up reply actions

Because they’re archaic, don’t mesh with current student or alumni priorities, and don’t really fire up supporters?

They still play “Hail, Stanford, Hail” after every game and “Come Join the Band” at every halftime of basketball and football games, though.

by RedOscar on Jul 14, 2025 10:11 AM PDT up reply actions

Obviously it’s up to you guys to decide what traditions you want to keep and what you want to give up. But I’ve always thought that is very important for us that the Cal Band keeps and treasures our history and traditions. The Cal fight songs, as archaic as they may be, do fire up the fans. Their very archaicness (if that is a word) gives them a tremendous charm and causes people to feel great affection for them. And they really link us to our past. There are Cal songs played at every game that were played when my grandfather was at Cal in the 1910s, when my father was at Cal in the 1940s, and when I was at Cal in the 1970s. My dad taught me the words when I was a kid. And my nephew sings the words now when I take him to Cal games. They are a unique and irreplaceable treasure.

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by CalBear81 on Jul 14, 2025 10:39 AM PDT up reply actions

True confession. Every time I’m at Big Game, I look across at the Cal section and I wish that more Stanford cheers and songs from decades ago were still around today. The coolest Cal, for my money, is “Roll on you Bears…” and I’m guessing it’s been around forever. I get jealous every time I hear it.

I remember when Denny Green arrived in 1989 and insisted on bringing back cheerleaders. I’m not sure how they’re perceived now, but they were universally mocked back then, just as the Cal band was — and is — universally mocked. People aren’t interested in starting new cheers, but if you get to campus as a freshman and everyone else is doing a cheer, you just do it.

by Go Mighty Card on Jul 14, 2025 11:35 AM PDT up reply actions 1 recs

The cheerleaders are still mocked and play second fiddle to the Dollies. The alternative, though, I guess, was the Yell Leaders, and you really couldn’t get lower than that, which leaves Axe Comm to lead any student section cheering. In all, it’s all looked as pretty pathetic by lots of students today to have be led by someone for cheering, resulting in most of the time the Axe Comm guy at the microphone just talking to an audience that’s not even listening, or more likely, mocking him. That’s also why the TERRIBLE rap that the team introduced last year at the WSU game was laughed at as opposed to being seen as a boost (it also didn’t help that it referred to the sunny side of the stadium on a dreary rainy day).

The only people I’ve seen do it enthusiastically over the years are the freshmen, but they get just as jaded by mid-October as the upperclassmen and grad students. Otherwise, no one cheers “songs” or “lines” or whatever.

by RedOscar on Jul 14, 2025 12:42 PM PDT up reply actions

Funny, somehow I have seen Cardinal alums in Stanfurd Stadium, both old and new, applaud the excellence of the Cal Band. Must be a figment of my imagination (wait….no!)

Its not like the songs aren’t dead on your campus: If the Fleet Street Singers still keep them all in their repitoire, there is no reason the band cannot do it as well. And as for claiming “they are still played”….your university alma mater is pretty much a mandatory event, and playing “A” fight song once a game does not constitute anything: if people do not identify it as your fight song, then it does not act as one. Case in point: bring back the Cardinal is Waving and Sons of SR. They’re beautiful songs, there is no reason to let them not be heard instrumentally.

I say this knowing I’m talking to someone who has no control over LSJUMB, and even if they were told to, I doubt they would.

"Our hearts shall sing and our voices ring for the dear old Blue and Gold!"

by Joe Bandsmen on Jul 15, 2025 8:10 AM PDT up reply actions

if people do not identify it as your fight song, then it does not act as one.

Exactly. No one treats “Come Join the Band” as our official fight song any more, even though technically it is.

As for Fleet Street and the other songs you referred to, there’s a difference between getting an auditorium of people to applaud and a student section at a football game to cheer. When you have an alumni section at the football stadium that constitutes only four sections of an eighty section stadium, there’s no reason to continue songs that only a very small portion of the crowd is going to enjoy. Being beautiful does not constitute being a good football song. And heck, the alma mater wasn’t played with any regularity until perhaps the past five years or so, so I wouldn’t call it a mandatory event.

Stanford is a much different place than other schools. I won’t say that traditional fight songs or school songs or cheers are unwelcome, but they certainly aren’t looked at as essential to enjoying an athletic event, much less integral to the support of our teams.

by RedOscar on Jul 15, 2025 10:24 AM PDT up reply actions

I think you are right, R.O., that it is probably impossible for Stanford to revive its traditions, even if it wanted to, because it has just been so long since they have been used. “Big C” and “Fight for California” and many of our other songs have an emotional resonance for me, because I have heard them played and sung them so many times over the past 40 years. But for Stanford, it has been decades since its songs have been played, and generations of students have gone through the school without hearing them or having any attachment to them. So really, they aren’t even traditions anymore. They are just historical relics. It would be very difficult for them to be turned back into something meaningful for Stanford students and alums. But I also think that you don’t realize how much you have lost. I’m not sure how Cal, of all places, managed to get through the 60s without losing our traditions too, but I will always be very grateful that we did.

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by CalBear81 on Jul 15, 2025 6:33 PM PDT up reply actions

Dude, I love “All Right Now.” I think this might get me banned from CGB, but its a catchy rock tune. And I know Im not alone.

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by TwistNHook on Jul 14, 2025 11:54 AM PDT up reply actions

See? This is why everyone at CGB always wants to punch you in the face.

by daveman on Jul 14, 2025 11:57 AM PDT up reply actions

IM NOT THE ONLY ONE, DAMMIT!

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by TwistNHook on Jul 14, 2025 12:00 PM PDT up reply actions

That’s true. There are other people we would like to punch in the face.

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by CalBear81 on Jul 14, 2025 2:23 PM PDT up reply actions

This one is cool too, although not quite as cool as the football-shaped 1920 one. Thanks for posting!

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by Cugel on Jul 14, 2025 9:53 AM PDT reply actions

I agree.

Of the Big Game programs I looked through, the 1920 program is the most unique. I really like the X and O diagrams of American football plays in that one, too.

by Scott Allen on Jul 14, 2025 9:59 AM PDT up reply actions