Overview:
Frederick Forrest Peabody cut the ribbon on the $600,000 stadium before a Thanksgiving Day game that capped Santa Barbara High School’s football season of 1924
It was the Thanksgiving Day when Santa Barbara’s bowl runneth over.
A torrent of curious townsfolk overflowed the newly built Peabody Stadium, splashed all over the adjoining slopes and spilled out onto the sidewalk of East Anapamu Street.
Everybody wanted to check out the grandest new football facility north of the Rose Bowl.
It happened 100 years ago this week, on Nov. 27, 1924.
The account in the Santa Barbara Morning News painted a bustling, festive scene.
It described “smartly dressed ROTC cadets, several hundred girls dressed in white and carrying pom pons, and the rival football teams of Santa Barbara and Huntington Park high schools marching across the turf” during the pregame ceremonies.
“Gay pennants and midsummer weather greeted that portion of the citizens of Santa Barbara, 5,000 or more, who attended the presentation of Peabody Stadium to the students of Santa Barbara High School,” the article continued.
The student body president accepted the massive gift with youthful glee.
“Nowhere in California is there such a beautiful, natural bowl owned by a high school,” Gordon Monfort gushed during a pregame ceremony.
“Nowhere else in America can there be found a community of our size that has such a high school athletic field.”
The curved, concrete structure was erected inside the small canyon that descended below the western edge of the new campus.
The main school buildings, also newly constructed, had opened barely three months earlier at 700 E. Anapamu St.
The stadium’s “bowl” was actually the upper arm of “El Estero” — the estuary that constituted the 2,020-acre Laguna Creek Watershed.
In olden days, the Chumash would take advantage of a storm surge at high tide by rowing their canoes through the marshland to the bluffs that now border East Anapamu Street.
Historical accounts of the 1812 Santa Barbara-Ventura earthquake claimed that the 7.2-magnitude temblor unleashed a 50-foot tsunami, which sloshed onto the banks of the earthen bowl.
A century later, the estuary was filled in to develop housing for Santa Barbara’s Eastside.
Civic leaders also began to draw up plans for a new high school in the area — and one of the most unique stadiums in California.
Movers and Shakers
The 1924 move from the old campus at 1216 De la Vina St. — now the site of the Santa Barbara Lawn Bowls Club — couldn’t have been better timed.
The following June, another earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale destroyed the old high school building along with much of Santa Barbara’s business district.
The new football stadium served as a bivouac for the company of U.S. Marines that had been deployed to prevent the looting of the downtown ruins.
The new concrete structure had come through the earthquake with barely a scratch. Its builders, in fact, crowed that the stadium would stand for more than a century.
Their boast didn’t quite go the distance.
The original Peabody Stadium was beginning to crumble, just one more earthquake away from becoming a death trap, when it was shut down after the 2016 football season.
The track, which had been condemned two decades earlier because of its cracked asphalt, had not played host to a meet since 1996.
Its reconstruction took nearly four excruciating years — from the groundbreaking ceremony on Aug. 23, 2017, to the stadium’s dedication on July 3, 2021.
But the result was a $39 million, Mediterranean-style palace that rivals anything built in the Friday Night Lights heartland of Texas.
The concrete grandstand seats 2,300, which adds to the 1,100-seat visitor’s section that was built on the opposite side several decades earlier.
The project was financed with voter-approved 2010 Measure Q bonds, developer fees, state seismic mitigation funds and the more than $5 million that 1981 graduate Greg Tebbe raised through the Foundation for Santa Barbara High School.
Straight Arrow
The campaign to build Santa Barbara High’s original stadium, constructed at a cost of $600,000, was led by Frederick Forrest Peabody.
The Arrow Shirt mogul primed the pump with a $100,000 donation.
Peabody had vacationed on the South Coast during his frequent escapes from the brutal winters of Albany, New York, before making Montecito his permanent home in 1919.
He was a benevolent man who would give the Arrow shirt off his back to Santa Barbara.
Peabody was a major benefactor for such local institutions as Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, the Santa Barbara Public Library and the Lobero Theatre.
He was enlisted to serve as both chairman of the Santa Barbara Board of Education and as a member of the city Planning Board.
The two jobs positioned him well to push through projects to build Roosevelt Elementary School on the Upper Eastside as well as the new, majestic campus for Santa Barbara High.
Peabody laid out his ambitious plans for the high school’s athletic future while speaking at the stadium’s 1924 dedication.
“You see here in this stadium the beginning of facilities for open-air physical development for students,” he said. “To the south should be the boys’ gymnasium; beyond that the practice field.
“On the Nopal Street side, we expect to provide tennis, handball, squash, basketball and other out-of-door games for girls and boys.”
Peabody died just 2½ years later at the age of 68, but nearly his entire vision for Santa Barbara High School came to pass.
Shut Out Of Home
Although the 1924 newspaper reviews of the new football facility were glowing, those of the team’s play that Thanksgiving Day were not. The stadium was full but the Dons’ end zone remained empty in a 30-0 defeat.
The team couldn’t even get star kicker Stanley Richardson into range for a field goal. He had set a longstanding school record by drop-kicking a 50-yarder earlier that season.
The account in the following day’s Morning News vilified the Dons for “an amazing lack of football ability.”
“The southern team’s victory was well deserved,” the writer continued. “The Black and White played rings around Santa Barbara, and it was surprising that the visitors did not ring up a 60 to 0 score.
“Santa Barbara gave them sufficient chances.”
But in the game of football, today’s shutout often becomes tomorrow’s shout-out.
The Dons’ fortunes turned the very next season when college football All-American Clarence Schutte, newly graduated from the University of Minnesota, was hired to replace Chester R. Milham as their coach.
Schutte had beefed up his résumé just two weeks before Peabody Stadium’s dedication by opening Minnesota’s own new facility with a herculean effort against undefeated Illinois.
He outplayed Red Grange, the Illini’s fabled Galloping Ghost, by rushing for 282 yards and three touchdowns in a stunning 20-7 victory.
Newspaper headlines heralded it as the “Wonder Game of 1924.” The publicity helped Schutte win the job as Santa Barbara High’s new, 24-year-old, wunderkind coach in 1925.
His golden touch as an innovator of the game inspired sportswriters to describe his dynamic Dons as a “Golden Tornado.” It’s a nickname that the high school revives to this day whenever the team makes the playoffs.
Schutte had twirled enough magic by 1929 to lead Santa Barbara to its first California Interscholastic Federation championship game.
The Golden Tornado came close to a major upset, losing a 14-6 heartbreaker at powerhouse Long Beach Poly’s Burcham Field.
Peabody Stadium played host to its own CIF championship game in 1937 when the Tornado lost another thriller to Glendale, 15-14.
Schutte guided Santa Barbara High to the CIF finals eight times during his tenure, winning titles in 1935, 1938 and 1940.
His 171 career coaching victories stood unmatched in Santa Barbara County football history until Tom Crawford tied him with his final win with Bishop Diego this season.
Awe Inspiring
The late Gene Mangini, an end on Santa Barbara’s 1940 title team and the star pitcher of its CIF championship baseball squad of 1941, was in junior high school when first struck by the grandeur of Peabody Stadium.
“I never missed a game,” he said during a 2001 interview. “I walked over here from the Mesa … I couldn’t wait to play.”
Mangini, who would later become a popular teacher at San Marcos High School, revered the concrete stadium as if it were a shrine.
“Everybody else had wooden bleachers,” he said.
He was told that the stadium had been designed with a curved shape, with its southern end extending barely past the field’s 50-yard line, at the request of Peabody’s wife, Kathleen.
She was apparently into music, Mangini said, and wanted the stadium set up for outdoor concerts.
Peabody Stadium was also used during its early days as the Dons’ baseball field. Home plate was situated near the entrance of the current field house.
New York Yankees superstars Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig took their cuts there in October 1927 after a rainstorm forced them to move their barnstorming game from Pershing Park.
The great Bambino even accomplished what the tsunami of 1812 could not: He reportedly crested Anapamu Street with one of his prodigious blasts.
Peabody Stadium 2.0 was built nearly a century later without the signature curve but with plenty of modern conveniences.
For us aging sportswriters, an elevator serves the neighboring press box — an expansive, heated, five-room structure that remains toasty warm on a foggy autumn night.
The café down below serves all of our junk-food desires.
Decorative plazas flank the concourse — one for the students on its south side and the other for the donors on the north side.
The Doug and Ann Allred Veteran’s Memorial, which honors the alumni who gave their lives in military service, adds a solemn touch along the north wall.
The school did resurrect two of the old stadium’s most popular features: the “Walk of the Dons” path that descends from the main campus, and the tunnel from which the Dons make their grand entrance.
Maybe you can’t rewrite history — it’s already written in stone, as they say — but you can always rebuild it in concrete.
