Athletic director Flynn and Fr. George Kerr ’41, a former All-American guard, track drive’s progress. Photograph: University Archives, John J. Burns Library, Boston College

At the close of the 1956 season, Boston College football fans were cheerless, and not just because the Eagles had dropped their last game to Holy Cross, 7–0. Most people who filed out of Fenway Park, where the contest took place, felt that “an era had come to a close,” recalled sports columnist Austen Lake of the Boston American. “A decision to drop football was imminent.”

That the University contemplated this end is a matter of oral history doubted by no one. Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey touched off deliberations when he declared he would no longer have football cleats tearing up the turf at Fenway. Since World War II, the Eagles’ big games had been played at Yawkey’s park, because Alumni Field, a facility located then along College Road on the Upper Campus, sat no more than 5,000 spectators and no self-respecting, big-time, postwar college football program would be enticed by that low gate.

Facing an either-or decision, BC’s president, Joseph R.N. Maxwell, SJ, conferred with the secretary of the alumni association, William J. Flynn, who was also the football line coach.

“We could drop football,” Maxwell is said to have told Flynn.

“Or we could build a stadium,” Flynn is said to have rejoined, according to an account in the 1982 book ‘Til the Echoes Ring Again: A Pictorial History of Boston College Sports, by sportswriter Jack Falla. Reached by phone at Boston University, where he teaches as an adjunct communications professor, Falla said his source for the exchange was Flynn, who wrote the book’s introduction and died in 1997.

Maxwell soon came around to Flynn’s view, but his green light was necessarily theoretical. The University was strapped for cash, and its future in football would have to hinge on the success of a quarter-million-dollar capital campaign earmarked for construction of a new stadium. Thomas O’Connor ’49, now professor emeritus and University historian, was present in early 1957 when the usually solemn Maxwell made an out-of-character appeal to several hundred alumni gathered for a communion breakfast in Lyons Dining Hall. A young professor in the history department at the time, O’Connor remembers Maxwell’s words: “I appeal to you to get Maxie off the hook.” The alumni were floored, O’Connor recalls. “To know the formality of the man, and then to hear him refer to himself as Maxie, was just startling.”

It was also galvanizing. The “Maxie” speech effectively launched the capital campaign, and the response among alumni and others was phenomenal. “The inmates at the Norfolk Prison Colony sent along a gift,” Boston Daily Record sports editor Sam Cohen wrote, adding, “a truck driver dropped in to Alumni Hall, made a sizable donation. Clergymen did the top job of all in raising money in the area. From all over the world, wherever Bald Eagles were stationed with the military, donations were mailed to University Heights.”

With Flynn orchestrating the effort (he became Boston College’s athletic director in the thick of the campaign) and the 1926 Eagles quarterback and captain Joe McKenney serving as chairman, the Alumni Stadium Fund overflowed. A 25,000-seat stadium on the Lower Campus was ready for occupancy by summer’s end, to be followed soon by a million-plus-dollar gymnasium (with basketball court) connected to offices for student publications as well as athletic personnel, followed by a regulation hockey rink.

Early photo of Alumni Stadium, before artificial turf, removal of the track, and expansion of the seating. Photograph: University Archives, John J. Burns Library, Boston College

During that era, other, kindred institutions abandoned or rolled back their football programs—Georgetown, for example, in 1951, Fordham in 1954. Of concern were the rising costs of delivering a high-profile college football team, which among the most competitive programs already entailed significant outlays for scholarships, travel, and so on. There was also a suspicion being aired throughout much of higher education that, as O’Connor relates, “You couldn’t have a top-rate intellectual center” while paying so much attention to sports—a view prominently expressed as early as the 1930s by the University of Chicago’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchinson, who eliminated his school’s football team in 1939.

In Boston College’s case, there weren’t those “philosophical concerns” about powerhouse football, says O’Connor, only some worries about the expense. The desire to compete with varsity powers like Georgia Tech coexisted with a contemplation of greater things academically—the school was “consciously taking on all the manifestations of a university rather than a college,” as O’Connor puts it. He notes the launching of graduate-level professional programs in business, education, and nursing around that time (as well as three new doctoral programs five years earlier) and the consolidation of Boston College’s scattered professional schools on the Chestnut Hill campus.

On opening day, September 21, 1957, some 30,000 people squeezed into the new stadium to see the Eagles battle Navy. The home team was humbled, 46–6. But in an era of big thinking at Boston College, “There was a feeling of pride and ambition—that we could be more than what we were,” says O’Connor. “We were no longer simply a small streetcar college. We were big enough to play with the big boys, and we had all the makings of a first-rate university.”

William Bole is a writer based in Andover, Massachusetts.

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