A Look Back at New Year’s Day in Pasadena: The Roses . . . the Thorns : Tournament’s Elder Statesman Recalls First Bowl Game; Busch Kin No Longer Sings the Blues Over St. Louis Float

The theme of the Tournament of Roses on New Year’s Day is “A Celebration of Laughter,” but the very first Rose Bowl game played inside the stadium, in 1923, wasn’t one chuckle after another. Not for all the fans, not after the game had ended.

Take it from Lathrop K. Leishman, the 81-year-old elder statesman of the Tournament of Roses.

Leishman has been involved with the annual festivities more than half a century, is a former Pasadena Tournament of Roses Assn. president, longtime chairman of the football committee, former grand marshal of the parade and the son of one of the two persons mainly responsible for the birth of the bowl.

In keeping with the upcoming theme, Leishman can look back with a smile on some of the happenings over the years.

“For that first game in 1923, just about everybody who came by car, arrived in a black Ford, and were directed to parking areas that were unpaved and unlit.

“The team that was to play USC (who eventually won, 14-3) was Penn State. The trouble was, they got delayed in traffic, and the game was nearly an hour late in starting.

“When it finally ended, about 52,000 fans poured out. Those who wanted to leave by car were going around trying to find black Fords in pitch darkness.”

Prior to that historic bowl contest, there hadn’t seemed a need for a fence around the stadium.

“We were going to take the tickets from the people as they entered through the tunnels,” Leishman said. “It was a mistake. Too many came in too fast, not everyone with a ticket. After that experience we put up a fence.

“Another thing I remember is that there were no toilets. Trenches had been built outside, and tents put over them. That, of course, was changed. In fact, the new toilets installed last year cost more than the $272,000 it took to build the Rose Bowl.”

While it was being constructed, he remembered, there was a sign at the north end that simply read: “Stadium.”

“Harlan Hall, a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News who was on loan to the tournament as a publicist, commented that we had a rose parade, so why not call this the Rose Bowl. That is what happened and that is what a new sign said.”

Six years later after that first game came the famous one in which Cal center Roy Riegels recovered a fumble and in confusion ran the wrong way, toward his own goal line, eventually being chased and grabbed by one of his own teammates.

“My folks had given me a movie camera a week earlier for Christmas,” Leishman recalled. “I had it with me at the game, and was going to use it at times. When Riegels started running, I got excited and was hollering along with everybody else. I completely forgot about the camera.”

An omen perhaps of what was to befall Cal, which lost 8-7 to Georgia Tech, had occurred earlier in that 1929 game. Cal tried a quick kick, but as the ball left the punter’s foot, it suddenly deflated and fell flat to the ground.

Sort of a prelude of what was to happen to Wall Street later that year.

Surrounded by Souvenirs

So many memories. Even though Leishman will turn 82 four days after the forthcoming game, he still shows up every working day in the office of his Leishman Management Co. (real estate developers), where he is surrounded by walls covered with souvenirs and photos attesting to his 55 years of involvement with the tournament.

At age 35, he was president of the roses association in 1939, when the grand marshal of the parade was a young actress named Shirley Temple.

“Because of her family’s concern for her safety--the Lindbergh kidnaping had happened just a few years earlier--40 mounted sheriff’s deputies surrounded her as she rode along in a car,” Leishman recalled.

“After the parade, the men in her family stayed for the game, but she and her mother headed back to the old Vista del Arroyo Hotel. Shirley Temple suddenly stood up in the back of the Cadillac and asked me if I could get the officers in the motorcycle escort to sound their sirens, for the excitement of it all. They did, and it pleased her no end.”

Named Grand Marshal

Forty years later, Leishman was honored by being named grand marshal, and he and his wife, Marie, rode the parade route in the back of a 1939 white Packard.

“It’s a strange feeling,” he said. “You can hear all these people yelling out your name, but you can’t make out any faces.”

The honor was a fitting one for the family name, inasmuch as it had come to be associated with the twin local spectacles after William L. Leishman moved from Connecticut to Terminal Island in the 1890s.

“My father was a tailor,” Lathrop Leishman said. “He came out here because his own father, who owned a millwork, was dying, and the business needed to be run.”

William eventually sold the millwork, and in 1904 took his wife and newborn son to Pasadena, to run Ye Arts and Crafts Shop. The father soon joined the tournament association.

“He became tournament president in 1920-21, when the football games were between teams from the East and West, and were played in Tournament Park, which now is part of the Caltech campus.

“There had been a wooden fence around the field. Tickets to the game were $1.65, but some people didn’t get to use them. After the parade, spectators would walk to the park, some would push down the fence and rush inside, and some ticketholders weren’t able to get to their seats.”

Once a Dump

After the crowded conditions of the 1922 game, the elder Leishman and architect Myron Hunt took tournament and city officials to the Arroyo Seco.

“It was just a dump filled with boulders and trash,” Leishman’s son said. “My father was a native of New Haven, and in a piece of plywood he had cut a hole in the shape of Yale Bowl. He held the board in the air and showed where such a stadium could be, and where the cars would park.”

“The city traded its Arroyo Seco for Tournament Park, which it later sold to Caltech. Construction of a Rose Bowl began.”

Although the cost was $272,000, only $250,000 was raised, mainly through the sale of box seats. “The tournament officials went to First Trust & Savings Bank and got a $22,000 loan, signed by them, so that the contractor could be paid in full,” the son said.

The rest is well known. Since then, the stadium has been enlarged four times, to its present seating capacity of about 104,000, which it has no problem reaching.

In two of the seats on the 50-yard line on Jan. 1 will be Leishman and his wife of 59 years, Marie. “I root for two things--that no one gets hurt and that it will be a close game,” he said.

‘Better Than Being Dead’

He skips the parade now because of the early morning chill, but wouldn’t think of missing the game. For 28 years he was chairman of the tournament’s football committee, and now has the title of chairman emeritus.

“When it was asked at a function what emeritus means, someone replied that it’s better than being dead,” Leishman joked.

“I’ve seen all the Rose Bowl games since 1916 except two,” he said. “Because of World War II, the 1942 contest was held at the home of Duke University (which lost to Oregon State, 20-16). I’ve failed to be at only that one and the 1960 game (in which Washington beat Wisconsin, 44-8). I came down with the flu on New Year’s Eve.”

His first involvement with the Tournament of Roses was in 1930, when, he said, he was in charge of street decorations and banners.

One of his major projects presently is the decor around the stadium--specifically roses.

“It came about because my hobby is cultivating roses,” he said. “I have about 60 bushes at home.

“Last year when I noticed that the ones around the Bowl were in sad shape, I brought the matter up with the stadium manager. I was appointed to remedy the problem.

New Roses Planted

“I wrote to rose wholesalers and got 2,000 contributed. After the 1985 game, the Southern California Gardeners Federation Inc. planted the new ones and helped the existing roses get back to looking like they should.

“And after the upcoming game, we will add 800 more bushes, which will bring the total around the Rose Bowl to about 3,500, of 120 varieties.”

For the football-minded Leishman, it is yet another rooting interest.