Hawkeye alumnus buys rare 1937 hand-drawn memorial stadium blueprints

WRIGHT TWP — To combat free onlookers who failed to pay the $.10 cents to watch football games at Hanover Township Memorial Field in the first half of the 1930s, Professor Frank A. Finnegan lobbied for a wall.

Efforts to stop those free onlookers by installing tarps, wood planks or simply a policemen to guard the fence failed.

The Hanover Township School District was losing, according to Finnegan’s estimates, $5 to $7 per home game by those who did not want to pay the entrance fee. Finnegan was the high school principal and member of the school’s athletic council in the 1930s.

All that changed when the Hanover Township football program was admitted to the larger Wyoming Valley Scholastic Football Conference in 1937 and the passage by Congress of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, known as the Works Progress Administration.

With the WPA program in full swing during the Great Depression, the township school board directed district architect George McLane to begin plans to renovate and enclose Memorial Field.

McLane’s hand-drawn blueprints were used in the total renovation and expansion of Memorial Field into Memorial Stadium and mirrored after stadiums of the era after Bucknell University in Lewisburg and Beaver Stadium on the campus of Penn State University in State College.

Those hand-drawn blueprints are now framed and hanging in the garage of Hawkeye alumni Tom Stavitzski.

Stavitzski said he noticed the blueprints were posted online on a local history page.

“I reached out to him and he said he tried to donate the blue prints to the school district. No one seemed interested. I sent him a private message and I told him my background of being a Hanover coach and player and I ended up buying them off him,” Stavitzski said.

Stavitzski had the blueprints framed near Harrisburg and picked them up in July.

“Something like this, it’s not only Hanover history, it’s local history, because you got the WPA that built the stadium during the Great Depression and gave employment to many people who needed jobs. You don’t see blueprints like this anymore. This is all hand-drawn. Today, machines do all that,” the Hawkeye alumni said.

McLane’s plans expanded Memorial Field 45 feet on the north side, and involved the construction of steel bleachers for spectators on both sides of the field. McLane incorporated the bleachers to be elevated higher than the field to allow spectators a better view of games.

John Bender, a contractor from Lee Park in the 1930s, was awarded the contract to build the wall 14 feet high to enclose the field and the stadium’s entrance with a rolling overhead door.

Following construction, Memorial Field became Hanover Township Memorial Stadium.

Stavitzski was a member of the 1990 Hanover Area team that won the 1990 Class AA State Championship. Stavitzski coached at Hanover in 1997 and 2015, and three high schools in Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey from 1998 to 2007.

Stavitzski has one secret about Hanover Area Memorial Stadium.

“After one disappointing season, an offensive playbook was buried on the field,” Stavitzski disclosed.