During spring break in
April 1970 an arson fire destroyed the wood stands of
Washington State University's football stadium. The Cougars
were forced to play off campus for two years while the
University built a new stadium. To this day, the mystery of who
started the fire and how they did it remains.
April 1970. Around 10 p.m. seven-year-old Joanna Law, asleep in
her bed, is awakened by sounds in the living room. In her pajamas,
she pads out of her bedroom to join her older brother and sister at
a large picture window. Looking south over the Washington State
University campus, they witness an appalling sight: a raging fire
devouring the stands around Rogers Field.
For the next two hours the Law children and their mother watched
one of WSU’s biggest mysteries unfold, as flames fed on the dry
timbers of the old bleachers on the east side of the stadium,
sending plumes of smoke over Pullman. Spitting giant embers into
the sky, that fire destroyed nearly all the south stands at the
football arena, the press box, and the end zone of what had been
the home field to both the WSU Cougars and the University of Idaho
Vandals.
Joanna’s father, David Law, was assistant director of the
general extension service and had left home that night to pick
something up from his office near Cleveland Hall. It was spring
break, so campus was empty. He remembers traveling up Stadium Way
and glancing over at Rogers Field. “It was fine,” he says. “But
when I came out from behind Regents Hill a minute later, it was on
fire. It happened that fast.”
He ran to the fire department and beat on the door. In just a
few seconds, the stands closest to him were engulfed. Before the
firefighters could arrive, people had scrambled over the fence to
rescue equipment inside. Law saw Cal Watson, a communication
professor, risk his life to drive the new KWSU-TV bus away from the
stadium.
Today, David Law (’59 Speech, '71 M.A. Speech & Hearing
Sci.), a retiree living in Metaline Falls, and Joanna (Law) Steward
(’86 Comm.), a magazine editor at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pennsylvania, are still haunted by the event. “Did they ever find
out what happened?” asked Joanna last spring, echoing what students
asked at the time and what the Pullman community still wonders.
The answer is no. The mystery of what, or who, caused the fire
that changed the face of WSU football has never been solved.
But there was no question it was arson. According to newspaper
stories printed in the days following the fire, investigators
believed someone intentionally set the stadium ablaze. Several
students near the scene said they heard three explosions before the
fire broke out.
“There was too much fire in too short a time for it to be
anything but arson,” J.E. Sykes, the state fire marshal, told the
newspapers. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But the incident caused
$700,000 in damage to the stands and equipment.
This wasn’t the first time the stadium had been targeted. A year
earlier, someone had called in a bomb threat at Rogers Field.
According to Richard Fry’s history of sports at WSU, The Crimson
and the Gray, a groundskeeper and his boss who went to
investigate found not a bomb, but an entire toilet that had been
buried upright beneath the 50-yard line.
The late 1960s and early ’70s were times of racial tension and
political unrest on campus and around the country. Just a few weeks
before the fire, a WSU student protest had turned into a march on
Pullman to draw attention to a variety of issues, including the
lack of an ethnic studies program on campus, the Vietnam War, and
unionizing farm workers.
Given what was happening on campus and nationwide, “I was under
the impression the whole country was coming unraveled,” says David
Law. “We even had watches stationed around campus, especially in
the labs.”
Some townspeople started blaming the students for the fire. But
others, like track coach Jack Mooberry, stood up for them, pointing
out they were the first to fight the blaze. “A lot of students beat
even the firemen to the scene,” Mooberry wrote to a local
newspaper. “They had to scale a high fence to help. They went as
far up in the south stands as possible, saved two television
cameras left by KWSU . . . They used garden hoses to keep water on
our rubberized asphalt track and kept that and the lower stands
hosed down for most of the night.”
There were other rumors. A firebug in Lewiston was torching
public buildings. A Seattle-based dissident group had threatened to
come over to Pullman and wreak havoc. Maybe a student activist did
it in protest against the Vietnam War.
And some students suggested in a letter circulated on campus
that WSU’s own athletics department orchestrated the fire because
it wanted a new, updated stadium.
Investigators focused on one person in particular, a student who
was already known to the police because of his involvement in prior
student protests and who was seen on campus by an officer before
the fire. The previous year, in a march to local grocery stores on
behalf of field workers, the student was arrested, charged, and
convicted of inciting a riot. The University administration
believed he was a leader and hero to some of his fellow students.
But classmates who attended the protests said he wasn’t a key
organizer. One underground student newspaper suggested he had been
targeted by the police because he was African American.
The student, who graduated in 1973, couldn’t be reached for this
story. His attorney from that time, Wallis Friel’53, said he was
charged but eventually released. “There was never any evidence that
he started that fire,” says Friel.
Meanwhile, there was football to be played. A new stadium, named
for Governor Clarence D. Martin, whose family donated $250,000 to
the project, was completed in 1972, offering 30,000 seats, and an
Astroturf field. It was further updated and expanded in 1979.
Three decades later, the Martin Stadium is changing again.
Financed by a $24.65 million bond issue and student support via a
$25-per-semester fee, WSU officials started the first phases of the
Martin Stadium renovation in December 2006. The project is expected
to provide better access, improved concessions and restrooms, and
ultimately 7,700 more seats. The first two phases will include
changes to the south, east, and north parts of the stadium, adding
restrooms, widening the south concourse, and improving the overall
look. The bond money will be repaid through athletic department
revenues, specifically a facility fee placed on football tickets,
and the student fees.
Two more phases, which have yet to be funded, will include the
building of luxury suites, loge and club seats atop the north
stands, and more seating on the east. The final phases, scheduled
to start in 2008, will be funded through donations, sponsorships,
and revenue from the leasing of premium seating. Construction will
proceed in such a way as not to interfere with the 2007 and 2008
football seasons.
It’s a long way from the wooden structure build in 1936. But at
the heart of this stadium project lies the mystery that brought
Martin Stadium into being in the first place.
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