Aztec Bowl Ends 53-Year Career With X-Fest III

The Aztec Bowl will get a rousing send-off Saturday afternoon when the B-52’s, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, the Cramps and They Might Be Giants perform at X-Fest III.

The 22,000-seat stadium on the San Diego State University campus will soon be torn down to make room for the new Student Activity Center Arena, which is expected to be built within the next six months.

“This could very well be the last major event in the bowl,” said SDSU spokesman Rick Moore. “The bowl has played a very important role in the history of the campus, and many alumni and students and employees are sad to see it go.”

Since the Aztec Bowl opened in 1936, it has been the site of football games, soccer matches and yearly commencement ceremonies. Other activities included a presidential address by John F. Kennedy in 1963, then-San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson’s birthday bash in 1971, symphony concerts and, in recent years, a handful of pop concerts.

The stadium, a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project, was planned by then-college President Dr. Edward L. Hardy. Construction began in September, 1934, with scores of workers literally hand-carving the bowl out of mesa sand and stone with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows.

The dedication ceremony took place Oct. 3, 1936, followed by a football game against the Occidental College Tigers, which SDSU Aztecs won 7-0.

Retired Superior Court Judge Byron Lindsley, who at the time was student body president, was there.

“On the field to accept the stadium on behalf of the university was President Hepner (who succeeded Hardy in 1936), President Emeritus Hardy, Armistead B. Carter of the state Board of Education, Sen. Ed Fletcher and myself,” Lindsley recalled.

“It was a big day for everyone, because the bowl was the only campus stadium south of Palo Alto. I was just out there last weekend, and it’s still a beautiful stadium. It’s too bad they can’t find some other use for it.”

For the Aztecs of the time, who had just joined the Southern California Collegiate Conference, the bowl was something of a good luck charm. They ended their first season in the stadium without a loss.

In the late 1940s, Aztec Bowl also became the site of an annual spring ritual, in which students dressed in costume and portrayed comic-strip hero Li’l Abner and his Dogpatch, U.S.A., family.

“It was just an idea somebody had that grew into a yearly ritual,” said Sue Earnest, who joined the college faculty in 1947 as a teacher of speech pathology, audiology and deaf education. She retired in 1973.

“Two people were selected to be Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, and he would chase her all over the field until he caught her,” Earnest recalled. “It started around the time I joined the school and went on through the 1950s.”

Still, Aztec football games continued to be the main event at the bowl, along with the yearly commencement ceremonies. At the June 6, 1963, ceremony, the keynote speaker was President Kennedy.

With the construction of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium in the mid-1960s, the Aztecs suddenly found themselves with a new home. Their 30-year stay at the Aztec Bowl ended as triumphantly as it had begun: In 1966, the Aztecs captured the national college division crown.

Since then, the bowl has been used primarily for soccer games and commencement. When Wilson ran for mayor of San Diego in 1971, his campaign staff sponsored a birthday bash fund-raiser. Also in the 1970s, the San Diego Symphony played several summer concerts each year as something of a precursor to their current “SummerPops” series.

In the 1980s, while most big outdoor concerts were held in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, the Aztec Bowl hosted a few pop shows as well. In September, 1983, the Police performed a sold-out show with Oingo Boingo and Madness; last June, the bowl was the site of X-Fest II, sponsored by radio station XTRA-FM (91X).

There would have been more concerts, said university spokesman Moore, but such boisterous activities were generally frowned upon.

“We felt that most of the concert needs appropriate to an outdoor facility were met in the Open Air Theatre, which has a season of 20 or more concerts each summer,” Moore said. “There’s more of a buffer around it for noise control and crowd control and limiting neighborhood impact, so it hasn’t really been necessary in most situations to move events into the Aztec Bowl.”

Still, recalled Mike Fahn, who with then-partner Bill Silva promoted the September, 1983, Police concert, “it was a great venue, a lot of fun for the audience because they didn’t need reserved seats, as they did at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.”

“At the time, we would have been interested in doing more events out there, but it was not made available to us.”