The Thanksgiving Day Disaster: The Deadliest Sporting Event in American History
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On Thanksgiving Day, November 29th, 1900, the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal would play their annual rivalry game, but this year it would become known as the Thanksgiving Day Disaster, which is still to this day the deadliest event in American sports history. Hundreds of people were either killed or injured but the most disappointing news of all was that Stanford won the game. Sorry, spoilers! This is an incredibly gruesome and disturbing story with a lot of really horrible little details, so please don’t watch this while you’re eating Thanksgiving dinner. And maybe make sure the kids’ table is far enough away from whatever device you’re watching this on because they’re going to have enough nightmares as it is after Great Aunt Ethel’s teeth plop out and start chattering away in the gravy dish.
Stick around as we dive into the deadliest American Thanksgiving (picture of first thanksgiving) -- no, not the that one, the deadliest one after that one. (picture of travel death stats and/or headlines) Nope, not because of all the traffic accidents, either. Holy shit, Thanksgiving is super dangerous. Maybe the stores have it right after all and we should just skip the whole thing and get right to Christmas.
This particular deadly Thanksgiving would have devastating consequences that would echo far into the future. And by that I mean a good four days before the news cycle changed and everyone totally forgot about it. Now it’s one of those buried pieces of morbid history trivia that only the weird kids know about. Welcome to the weird kid club.
(Intro)
As someone who grew up in a massive extended family with billions of aunts and uncles, cousins, second cousins, third cousins, a couple of family members with Ancestry.com accounts, and lots of us just constantly googling what “twice removed” means, Thanksgiving is up there as maybe my favorite holiday of the year. It’s just always a lot of fun being around so many people you haven’t seen in a while, with sixteen million pies, along with the annual pumpkin cheesecake showing, and of course there was that one year my mom won a cake in the shape of a turkey from the local bakery, and there’s the sitting around catching up and hanging out and watching football all day long.
Well, there was a football game going on during Thanksgiving day in the year 1900, too. The Big Game, as it was called, happened every year between the California Golden Bears of UC Berkeley and the Stanford Cardinal. In just a handful of years, it was already a major rivalry by 1900. Neither team had a stadium big enough to hold all the fans yet, so they played the game at the former California league baseball field at the Folsom Grounds in the Mission District. Folsom Grounds in Recreation Park was inside an industrial area where factories and metalworks and workshops scattered the landscape.
Herbert Hoover--yes, that Herbert Hoover--was one of the very first students at Stanford and served as the first football manager of the team. He organized the very first Big Game in 1892 together with his counterpart at UC Berkeley. The future 31st president of the United States paid $250 to rent the baseball grounds for the first Big Game. He was so focused on securing ticket sales and getting an audience through the gates on gameday that he didn’t think about what would happen after he finally did. They sold a whole lot more tickets than they thought they would and had to grab buckets and hats to fit all the money, but there was nothing to watch after the crowd got in the gate because nobody had thought to bring a ball to the game. Both teams and the spectators alike stood around dumbfounded until the slow realization dawned. Herbert Hoover, future U.S. president, forgot to bring a football to the football game. He had to beg the uniform supplier to drive him into town, where the two of them would put together a makeshift misshapen blob of a football-type thing using a pigskin and a punching bag bladder. That does not sound like it was up to regulation standards.
The Big Game continued to be just a little bit cursed early on. In the 1897 game, a section of the stands collapsed and a ten-year-old boy had to be taken to the hospital. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured that time.
I guess they saved all the injuries for the game three years later, which would turn into the deadliest sporting event in American history. 19,000 people were in attendance at the baseball grounds for the football game. (lol) Tickets back then cost just one dollar, but there were plenty of spectators who couldn’t afford that or just didn’t want to, and a lot of them included kids who didn’t have any money in the first place. What, are they not working in the mines yet in 1900? Get a job, little Timmy, you still have all your limbs! Lazy little cretin!
This year, Timmy and his friends spotted new prime real estate directly across the street from the field. The San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works was the newest factory in the area and the newly built roof was the perfect vantage point to watch the game from. The factory was so new that it wasn’t fully operational yet. Only one of the glass furnaces was fired up, and that had happened just days before. The Monday following the game was the planned date to fire up the remaining furnaces.
The San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works made bottles. These bottles would go on in their life cycle to hold bitters. Bitters are a staple of bars everywhere nowadays, but back then, much like many of our popular drinks today, bitters were very different. They were made by multiple competing companies in what we’d now term the wellness space, and touted as miracle cures for just about everything. So, much like the Goop of today, it was total snake oil. In reality, bitters were just alcohol mixed with herbs and laxatives. So you’d get buzzed drinking something that tasted gross but in a “healthy” way, and then you’d shit your brains out and come out believing you were “cleansed” of “toxins.” If anything you were probably being poisoned by unregulated and potentially dangerous ingredient combinations. Like when they used to put actual cocaine in Coca Cola and say that cured all your whatevers, too.
Two glass blowers were working on the factory floor the day of the Big Game. Ignace Jocz and Clarence Jeter toiled away at the east furnace making bottles for bitters. Flipping and pinching and blowing the bitter bottle batter. It was a bitter bottle batter battle.
This was horrible work, too, by the way. Glass blowing wasn’t the artisanal wonderland of bougie trust fund artists that it is today. It was dangerous, sweltering, hectic, and glass blowers had a higher risk of cancer than the general population from inhaling all the fun fumes and things they melted and vaporized while not wearing any protective gear.
So the factory was open and running, and it was also surrounded by an eight-foot wooden fence topped with another couple of feet of barbed wire. But that didn’t stop the crowd from finding a way to get their holiday football fix like the proud Americans that they were. They dug underneath the fence, sending kids through the gap to run inside and unlock the gates for the rest of them. Factory guards claimed that some members of the crowd even grabbed slats from the barrel factory next door and leaned them up against the barbed wire to climb over and get into the factory that way.
Up to a thousand people made it up to the roof of the glass works. The audience at the game could clearly see the crowd up there, and the San Fransisco Chronicle reported that the roof was “black with people.” The best vantage point was the 100-foot long ventilator that ran along the length of the roof like the keel of a ship, and about a hundred or so people climbed on top of that in order to secure the best view around.
So we have close to a thousand people crowded together on a roof that had the structural capacity to support somewhere around forty pounds per square inch. And a hundred of them or so were on top of an even flimsier structure that wasn’t designed to hold anything, but rather to vent the heat from the furnaces below. The crowd was laughing and jeering each other about the idea that the roof might collapse and how they’d all go down together if it did. Well, Father Thanksgiving must have been listening pretty closely that day. Or maybe he was in the crowd trying to watch the Big Game, too, and was pissed he couldn’t see out over this sea of dumbshit kids.
The east furnace, the only one that was on that day, sat forty five feet below the rooftop and the crowd, and it held fifteen tons of molten glass burning at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about a third of the temperature of the surface of the sun.
Glass works employees had repeatedly tried to get police to clear the roof. One employee, Jacob Sulling, recalls making at least four phone calls to police, who were continuously giving him the runaround. Sulling was eventually referred to a particular lieutenant, who was supposed to be in the area, and Sulling set out to find him personally, stopping six officers or more on the street before one of them told him the lieutenant he was looking for was actually inside the stadium. So Sulling tried to get in, but police wouldn’t let him through, and they also refused to pass his message along.
Twenty minutes after kickoff, the roof collapsed.
As the San Francisco Call put it “the roof gave way with its burden of humanity,” as over a hundred people fell four stories to the floor of the glass works below, hitting joists and beams as they went, all the way down to the brick floor of the factory.
Percey Fuller, among the crowd watching from the roof of the glass works, recalled that right after one particular kickoff and while everyone leaned in to watch what would happen next, that’s when “the roof sprung like a gallows trap.” He went on to describe the scene as he secured himself precariously to the rooftop. “I grabbed something and held. Those next to me fell…. I turned to the building's interior and saw a writhing, yelling mass of humanity struggling to get out of a veritable hell.”
Jocz and Jeter estimated that another hundred or so people fell directly onto the furnace itself. Unfortunately, these people were not as remotely lucky as those who’d simply slammed into the ground. A brick furnace top covered the smoldering flames and molten glass, so the crowd didn’t simply hit the fiery goo and melt. That would likely have been a much better outcome for some of them. Because the furnace was three times hotter than cremation ovens. Instead of just disintegrating quickly like the T-1000 in Terminator 2, and likely pretty painlessly, these people fell atop the brick surface, breaking bones or losing consciousness and becoming immobolized due to their injuries. Some of them were trapped under the enclosure that held the brick topper, these big metal binding rods that looked like whale ribs running down the furnace. Those who could move ended up finding themselves trapped between the binding rods and the other bodies. And they all lay there, paralyzed or stuck, on a surface that reached 500 degrees Fahrenheit, a surface hotter than a frying pan, just cooking alive and screaming.
But the horror doesn’t end there. Because some of the falling spectators broke open fuel pipes on their way down, releasing boiling hot oil that soaked the victims and the furnace top, which was so hot that it ignited the oil. So the people trapped atop the furnace burst into flames.
Jocz and Jeter rushed into action, pulling people off the furnace and grabbing them with rods and other tools if they were on fire or couldn’t be reached by hand. They saved dozens of people’s lives. In their rush, they may have caused additional injuries to those with spinal and neck damage from the fall, but this was a race against time to do as much good as possible, and they certainly did that.
Probably the worst part of this story involves the fact that the victims were pretty much all kids. Boys. Young boys who didn’t have the dollar to pay for admission and were reckless enough and unbothered by sneaking into a space they shouldn’t and engaging in dangerous behavior in the industrial factory sector of a major city. Some of the victims were also adult men, because the boys were with their fathers or brothers, or the men were simply on a solo outing, but the point is, the victims were overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly young.
One of the boys, Mark Lee, miraculously had his coat catch on a protruding beam and hung there as “two companions fell on the top of the oven and were simply roasted before my eyes…. I had to hang there over them while they roasted to death.” Another boy, Thomas Curran, clung to a ceiling joist by wrapping his legs tightly around it, like he was putting it in a triangle choke. “As I clung there,” he said, “I saw the poor fellow who had been chatting with me strike the furnace. He curled up like a worm in that heat.”
A clerk at the glass works said he counted 27 boys dangling from various perches above the furnace, holding on for dear life.
The Big Game, still raging the whole time, continued right along, undeterred. Fans who had noticed the roof collapse and yelled out to call attention to it were actually shouted down by other fans who thought they were pulling some kind of trickery and trying to distract one of the teams playing on the field. Police and ushers did comb through the stands searching for doctors, so you’d assume that at least some of the crowd knew what was happening, but even still, the game played on. The band played its fight songs and they mingled with the screams of children in a wildly surreal hellscape inside the factory walls.
Before long, the word was out to the public and a massive crowd began gathering at the factory, made up of parents, mostly mothers, panicked and screaming and searching for their missing sons. The hospitals and the morgue were also overrun soon after.
Victims were so disfigured that they had to be identified by their belongings. When the coroner’s carriage was mobbed trying to make its way through the streets, grieving mothers found their children by the stockings they were wearing when they left home that morning. Some were simply ruined beyond recognition including the clothing they wore and so some lost loved ones were identified only by scattered belongings, picked up by the coroner and hauled to the morgue along with the bodies. The Examiner reported that, “In one wagon were 64 hats, a heap of neckties, and a pile of shoes.”
After the game ended five to zero with a Stanford win over California, the crowds released from the field ready to celebrate and mingled with the mourners in the street and the injured spectators. It was a mad scene, with the final people from the stands who were unaware of the accident figuring it out pretty quick in all the chaos.
All in all, 23 men and boys died. It’s almost a miracle that number isn’t much higher. Though more than 100 others were injured, and many of them critically. Thirteen people died on the day of the accident. Fred Lilly died days later on December 4. His story is wild because he fractured his skull in the fall and never regained full cognitive capacity. In his limited awareness, witnesses reported that he looked as if he thought he was still having a good time at the game all the way up until the point where he died. Amazingly, the final victim died of his injuries three years after the accident.
Within four days of the roof collapse, the whole thing was just gone from the public consciousness. Yeah, it made a couple of front pages, and some of those in pretty spectacular fashion, like the San Francisco Call headline that read, “Death reaps a dread harvest of lives and plunges city into gloom.” I’ve been in content and news for fifteen years and I just feel immediately outclassed. Good lord above, those words are devastatingly effective. I want to just take those words and just do things that would make angels weep.
So what happened in the aftermath of the Thanksgiving Day Disaster? In 1900, the concept of contributory negligence was in full force in American legal precedent. This is the idea that if you were even one percent at fault for an accident, you’d be counted among the responsible parties and have no recourse whatsoever.
So even though the glass works was asked directly by the two football teams to make sure that people couldn’t access their property to watch the game from, and the teams specifically gave the glass works tickets to future games as payment for this favor, and the glass works had a limited number of security staffing game day, and the police refused to help the glass works employees when they repeatedly asked for help in getting the crowds off the roof--even though all of that would be enough in today’s world for the victims and families to sue the city into bankruptcy, in 1900, nobody got a dime. On December 7, the verdict from the coroner’s inquest came out and absolved the glass works completely, placing all the blame firmly on the victims.
Folllowing those few days of news, that was pretty much it. The student newspapers at both schools totally ignored the accident altogether and just reported on the game. The factory roof was patched up almost immediately, and even before it was, and before the bodies were cold, Jocz and Jeter went right back to work. The glass works carried on as normal, and workers were said to have been “spinning glass among the blood stains.”
Starting after the 1903 season, the Big Game would alternate between the stadiums of the two teams. The site of the disaster that was once the San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works is now actually a UCSF building.
I think it’s fun to see how young the colleges were, and how primitive and weird early football was back then. Stanford was just nine years old at the time of the disaster, which is coincidentally the average age of the victims. Oof. Too soon? Is 124 years too soon? Because you just found out about this, so it’s new to you.
We’ve come a long way from the year 1900 in terms of football, but more importantly, in the realm of public safety. I can hear the silly freedumb folks touting personal responsibility and all that nonsense now. But the thing that’s missing there is compassion, and genuine social good, like what’s actually good for public health and the longevity of humankind.
People are always going to be dumbshits. It’s in our nature. We’re going to be stupid, and greedy, and lazy, and convenience-oriented, and just super selfish and short-sighted. You get people together into a crowd and all that becomes exponentially worse. Sometimes, yes, you have to protect people from themselves. We have to be guided gently away from our own worst impulses. This is why there are signs at amusement parks and zoos and why we’re told explicitly not to try and stick our heads inside the alligator’s mouth. We are just dumb. We’re all just cave people with advanced technology and a society that doesn’t account for our limited capacity for not being dumb.
If we don’t look out for each other, there’s nobody else who will. It could have just as easily been your great grandparents up on the roof of that glass works caught up in the excitement with everyone else. What if one of those kids went on to solve world peace or poop out a kid who solved solved the discrepencies between quantum physics and classical physics and we all got to ride around on those hoverboards from Back to the Future as a result? The problem with “personal responsibility” is that it doesn’t account for the responsibility we all have to the collective, the social contract, the human family, and the f*cking possibility of riding around on a sweet hoverboard.
Let’s be good to each other. Nobody should cook alive on top of a dang glass furnace. Let’s be thankful for public safety measures, and for each other this Thanksgiving. Now go fight over a wishbone and yell at your racist uncle for being a big dangus. I’ll see you in the next one, where we’ll do try to do some effing good with something else.
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