ED PASTILONG
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) – One of the great joys of sports today is to attend a baseball game at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, an old-style stadium situated on the Allegheny River with a backdrop of downtown Pittsburgh laid out before you, sitting in an area of bars and restaurants and hotels.
It is what you might imagine Old Mountaineer Field was to Morgantown from the time it opened a hundred years ago until it was replaced by the new Mountaineer Field in 1980.
If West Virginia is “Almost Heaven”, Old Mountaineer Field had to have been heaven for those who attended games in the stadium on the Monongahela River in downtown Morgantown. If New Mountaineer Field has become the cathedral of college football in Morgantown, it lacks the amenities and charm that the old stadium had.
“It was magical. That’s the only way I can describe it,” said Frank Fear, who earned a graduate degree at WVU, taught at the school and wrote the book “Band of Brothers, Then and Now: The Inspiring Story of the 1966-1970 WVU Football Mountaineers.
“Being on the river added to the enhancement of the experience,” Fear continued. “Where we were, the student section, you’d look off to your left and there was the Monongahela River. I think we’ve outsmarted ourselves with all the bells and whistles at the new stadium. What we’ve done is taken away the heart and soul of the game.
“The visual effects you had, even the smell of the game with the cigarette smoke wafting is gone, too. It was a full sensual experience … eyes, ears, smell. It was the whole deal. It was something you never forgot.”
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Ed Pastilong played quarterback at WVU on the Liberty Bowl team of 1964. He became a coach, an administrator, came up through the ranks and became athletic director.
He knew the old stadium well.
“The neat part about that Stadium was that it was downtown. People would park downtown, go to the restaurants, then walk to the stadium. It was almost like right in the middle of the city and that was a real plus for a stadium,” he said.
“You would sit in the stands and look out and there was the Mon River. By halftime, here comes a boat down the river. After the game, particularly if you won, look out downtown! People would walk downtown by the thousands. I can picture them. People, four or five abreast walking to and from the stadium.”
“The fraternity houses and sorority houses. They were right there,” Pastilong went on. “If you were walking down the street without a beer you were the only one who didn’t have one.”
Someone would almost surely offer you one as you went by if you didn’t have one.
“The students came out of the dorms and 100 or 200 yards and they were in the stadium. There was Woodburn Hall, Martin Hall … they were looking right down on the field,” Pastilong said.
“It gives you chills just thinking about it. As a player, the people were close to you. If you got knocked out of bounds, you’d hold your hand up and someone in the stands would grab you and help you up.”
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“There was that intimacy that grew out of the physical closeness between fans and players in Old Mountaineer Field, it was such a great place to play. When you’d come out of a series and be over sitting on the bench, the fans could almost reach over and pound you on your shoulder, you were so close to them,” former defensive tackle Charlie Fisher said.
“I remember as a freshman being in the stands and we were playing Syracuse and Floyd Little was coming down the sideline and put a fake on one of our guys and he looked like locomotion. I was thinking ‘How do you ever tackle that guy?’” former placekicker Ken Juskowich said.
“Of course, playing there was a treat because the fans were right next to the field. They’d have 35,000 people in there and they were right on top of you,” Juskowich went on. “When you went down to the closed end of the stadium all those people were so close it was like the fans were out there to tackle you. They were almost on the field.”
Pastilong recalled just coming out onto the field as a moment to remember.
“While you and I are talking I’m getting chills,” Pastilong said. “It was really neat to run out onto that field and be a part of it … and if you won it was really neat. Being a member of your home state team is a unique experience that’s exciting every time.”
The student section was in the bowl end of the stadium and it was, shall we say, rowdy.
Ed Harper, a Morgantown resident who has had season tickets since 1977 and was a student at the school before that, remembers it well.
“Obviously, it was a smaller crowd. Basically the whole bowl area was where they piled the students and you couldn’t go anywhere else in the stadium. Well, that made them like caged animals,” Harper said, as if a group of drunk 18-year-olds could be anything else, then or now.
The players got tickets for their families, but this wasn’t an NIL era and the regulations weren’t quite as strict on security.
“I’d sell my tickets and my mother and sister would come down to the player’s gate about an hour and a half before the game and I’d get them in through the player’s gate,” Fisher said. “My mother actually sat in the student section the whole time I played there.”
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Nearly everyone’s trips to Old Mountaineer Field were an experience.
Frank Fear grew up in upstate New York and attended St. John Fisher College. The school had no football team and he worked in the SID office while pursuing a degree that would lead him to a 35-year academic career at Michigan State.
“As students, we had to stand in line and it was first come and first serve,” Fear recalled. “Sometimes it got really testy. One game I remember I got there really early and thought I’d saved seats. Then a guy much larger than myself came and said, ‘Are you saving these seats?’”
Fear assured them he was.
Then came the reply. “They’re mine now.”
And the seats were gone. Fear went to an usher but got no relief.
“How could I prove the seats were mine?” he says.
Harper had a similar situation before as a freshman when he attended a game at Old Mountaineer Field.
When we were freshmen we had to wear a coat and tie and beanies to the game and we couldn’t take them off until West Virginia scored its first touchdown.
“There were a couple of guys across from us this one time, big ol’ boys from Weirton and they were both steelworkers,” Harper said. “I made the mistake of asking where their beanies were and I’m not going to tell you where they told me to stick mine.”
But once they played, it was always just rollicking fun.
“I left after my senior year and went to Florida for a year,” the defensive tackle Charlie Fisher said. “I then returned to finish up my degree. It was pretty interesting sitting in the stands watching a game.”
This was the 1972 game with Penn State, and almost before he could get settled into his seat, Kerry Marbury had taken the kickoff back 100 yards for a touchdown.
“I was sitting up in the bowl for that and everyone was thinking right then that this was the year it was going to happen. It didn’t happen,” Fisher said, referring to finally beating Penn State.
Final score, Nittany Lions 28, WVU 19.
Fear recalled a game two years earlier as his most memorable to attend. That was the 1970 victory over Syracuse, a 29-18 victory secured by a 21-yard Mike Sherwood touchdown pass in the final two minutes.
“It wasn’t so much what happened during the game but how the emotion shifted from feeling great to not being able to sleep that night,” Fear said.
That was the night the plane carrying the Marshall football crashed and burned.
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Old Mountaineer Field is gone now, all that’s left are memories and something that Harper possesses.
“When they tore down Old Mountaineer they cut up sections of the bleachers that had been the original seats in 1924 and I was given a section of those seats,” Harper said.
They were always at his tailgate and even after Harper stopped hosting the tailgate they have remained.
The original seats are important to Harper.
“Kelly, my daughter, is always reminding me, ‘Dad, remember that’s mine.’”