The start of football season, it appears, will require the benevolence of the pandemic gods, but God willing, we’ll be playing high school football by the end of August or thereabouts.
The season will mark the 82nd at the venerable Farrington Field, the grande dame of high school football fields in Dallas and Fort Worth.
Yes, the stadium lacks all of the amenities, conveniences and comforts of the modern complexes built by men and women of suburbia.
But if it’s history you’re interested in, this art deco masterpiece, built with the hands of the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s, oozes it like grass releases oxygen.
High school – the schoolboy 11s, as they were called in yesteryear — college and professional football have all been played here.
For 79 years, it has been the home to all of E.S. Farrington’s boys, as he called the athletes in the Fort Worth public schools, a cornerstone at the intersection of Lancaster and University, adjacent to the Will Rogers Center, which preceded the stadium by three years.
It has been home to the famed orphans of the Masonic Home, and NFLers such as Frank Ryan and Joe Don Looney of Paschal, Mike Renfro and Tony Franklin of Arlington Heights, Uwe Von Schamann of Eastern Hills, Yale Lary and Sherrill Headrick of North Side, and Raymond Clayborn of Trimble Tech, which also produced James Gray, father of Jonathan.
Denver Broncos star Darrent Williams, whose life ended in tragedy, also made his mark at Farrington as a player at Wyatt. Margene Adkins, the future Cowboy, got his pro football start there as a star at Kirkpatrick.
Bum Phillips, then at Amarillo High, roamed Farrington’s sidelines in a 1960 playoff game against Paschal.
The Tyler Rose, too, made an impression. Earl Campbell made Farrington his personal parade ground, racking up 183 yards and four touchdowns on 18 carries in a playoff victory over Heights in the state quarterfinals.
“He only ran over me two or three times before I quit trying to tackle him,” said Renfro, then a two-way player as a receiver and defensive back, of his future Houston Oilers teammate.
Before he was coach at TCU and before NFL stops in San Francisco, Cleveland, Houston and Dallas, Jim Shofner was a football star at North Side. Years before he stiffed Texas Tech for Texas, David McWilliams and Cleburne defeated Paschal there.
Turner Gill, now the coach at Liberty University, made memories for himself and college recruiters at Farrington.
Jeff Atkins, maybe the best running back ever to come out of Fort Worth, matched the city’s single-game rushing record there in 1982, matching Heights’ Harry the Hare Moreland’s 310 yards set in 1956. Atkins, the future SMU runner, eventually broke it at Clark Stadium.
The Dallas Texans/Kansas City Chiefs played exhibition games in the early 1960s in Fort Worth. In fact, the AFL’s first sudden-death game was decided at Farrington Field. Gene Mingo kicked a 17-yard field goal to send the Texans to a loss to the Frank Tripucka-led Denver Broncos.
TCU’s football team has also played at Farrington. So, too, has Texas Wesleyan’s. The Rams played their last game just before the U.S. entrance into WWII in 1941. Wesleyan returned to Farrington 75 years later last season.
Amon Carter Sr., who along with Elliott Roosevelt, the son of FDR, helped secure the WPA financing, wanted to expand the stadium. His ambition was a college bowl game to compete with Dallas’ Cotton Bowl.
Sideshows to international and domestic disputes have also taken the field at Farrington.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur spoke there months after being relieved of his duty in Korea by President Harry Truman in 1951.
He was pleased to be in Texas, the general said, “Where nowhere are men found more devoted to the concepts of freedom and the preservation of the American system based upon truth and justice.”
Fort Worth North Side and Weatherford suited up only a couple of months later, advancing the state’s ideal of football while learning of all those shared responsibilities necessary for success on a football field, as well as citizens of a republic, as MacArthur preached that day.
It all happened because of the gentleman named Farrington, the athletic director for the Fort Worth school district in the 1930s who envisioned a brand-new, state-of-the art stadium to share with the other high schools in town.
Evan Stanley Farrington was a young man of 30 when he arrived in Fort Worth. Born in Lewisville, he had lettered at Baylor in football, was a regular on the theater stage and the senior class president of 1913. After graduation, he moved to Grapevine where he was principal and then superintendent of schools for the 1914-15 school year.
There he told parents he aspired to “build up the schools to the highest standard, to place them second to none in the country… . Encourage your children in their school work and watch their growth and development with careful interest. See that they observe proper hours for study and then see that they do study.”
He left education to pursue work in private industry. He could not deny his calling, however.
He found work in Fort Worth at North Side. His quarterback was Herman Clark, who would one day work for him and succeed him as athletic director. In the biggest game of the season — the biggest game of every season in those days — the Steers edged Central High School (now Paschal) 10-7.
Coincidentally, on Thanksgiving night in 1946, Clark, then AD, estimated that 25,000 packed the stadium to watch Lary and North Side edge Paschal 14-13. Lary scored from the 2 and Bob Vann kicked the go-ahead extra point as the game’s final moments ticked away.
It is considered one of the best games ever played there.
Farrington was named the school district’s first AD, and in no time gained a reputation for running an efficient operation, one that financially was on sound footing.
By 1932, except for coaches’ salaries, athletic activities weren’t costing the taxpayer a dime.
The city population was 165,000, including 33,000 boys and girls — black and white — who competed in athletics.
High school sporting events were an economic boon for Fort Worth athletics. Yet they weren’t maximizing revenue potential, Farrington believed.
“In 1934, Paschal and Poly stacked 16,034 paid fans into LaGrave Field for their game,” Farrington said in 1936, captured through resources the family presented to this writer. “This park does not have adequate seating capacity for our big games. I am hoping that before long we will have our own plant.”
Paid attendance since 1931 at LaGrave and Wortham Field was 51,745 in 1932; 54,940 in 1933; 78,476 in 1934, and 72,994 in 1935.
“We set up a price of 25 cents for grandstand seats and 50 cents for the reserved section,” he explained, “and in this way popularized the game. Now a real attraction taxes capacity.”
The city owed the 38 acres he had in mind, east of what was then known as the “Centennial Grounds.” The Will Rogers Center was the site of Fort Worth’s Texas Centennial Celebration in 1936.
The school district bought the property for $7,600 under one stipulation. The site had to be used for school district athletic activities because the land had been donated to the city with the caveat that it could only be used for the public good.
If not, the land would revert back to the city.
That was an issue when developers’ eyes bloomed at the possibilities of that location in the 1980s. The school district, too, was all set to sign the documents of sale until Ronnie White, then the AD, whipped out the deed.
“Think of this,” Farrington said. “West Lancaster will run right by the stadium when the new bridge is built over the Trinity. TCU and south side traffic can move over Burleson Street [now University Drive], through Forest and Trinity Parks, directly to the stadium. North Side people can drive straight to the stadium from the north on Burleson Street. Arlington Heights folks have a straight shot down El Campo. Poly comes in over Lancaster, and Riversiders use Belknap and West Seventh.”
Ten thousand seats would be on each side of the field, which would run north and south, Farrington effused. The north and south ends of the oval would be left open. In order to have more seats between the 20-yard lines, the center sections of the stands extend 54 rows up.
If you’ve ever walked to the press box, you can count them. A multimillion renovation in 2010 did not include an elevator to the press box. You get a workout.
The seats were cast in semicircular rows, facing the center of the gridiron. There would be lights for night games.
“This stadium would make Fort Worth athletic facilities second to none. It would be the crowning achievement,” Farrington predicted.
The final bill to build Farrington came to about $400,000 in 1939. The WPA was responsible for $160,000 of that.
There is a very sad part of this story.
Farrington would not live to see his stadium.
Only shortly after the land acquisition, Farrington had a heart attack while watching I.M. Terrell play football. He later died that evening at home at age 46. He left behind a wife and three children, one a son, Stanley, who made the ceremonial “first kick” at the first game in 1939.
“It won’t be of bronze and there won’t be a gold, engraved plate, bearing his name on it,” one eulogist said at the time, “but [the stadium] will be his monument, and posterity will see concrete evidence of the good he’s done in Fort Worth.”
The good of Evan S. Farrington does live on … for all of his boys.