Playing in Bowl games is important to football programs because it is a valuable recruiting tool to show young prospects that your program is successful. So when Oregon was invited to play in the second year of the Liberty Bowl against Penn State they agreed even knowing it was not really a prestige venue.
As an administrator in the Student Union I was assigned to look after Oregon's rally squad of six girls for the trip. We arrived in New York early on game day and since we did not have to be at the Philadelphia Memorial Stadium until the middle of the afternoon, I agreed to accompany the girls on a short walkabout in the Big Apple before taking the train down to Philly. When we returned to the Penn station where we had left our luggage in lockers, we discovered two of the ancient storage units wouldn't open. The locks, somehow, were jammed.
Desperate times, desperate measures. I sent the girls on the train while I stayed to get the lockers opened. I gave them money for cabs in Philadelphia, not knowing that the city had, the night before, experienced the largest snow storm in decades and everything was shut down. The stadium was a giant bowl of snow ice cream, the seats covered under enormous drifts.
Meanwhile, back in New York, I began a frustrating quest to find help getting into the jammed lockers. It was the middle of the third quarter before I got to the game to find the two non-uniformed rally girls crying. The playing field had been cleared of snow as well as a few seat benches at the top of the stadium. There were no fans. Bobby Darin, who was hired to sing at half-time was sitting with the few Oregon fans on the cleared benches. I thought I heard him humming, "Please, God, get me out of here."
Penn State 41. Oregon 12.
It was getting late by the time we arrived back in New York. "OK, girls, we're running low on money so vote on this: A couple of rooms for the night or we go to The Village Gate and see Nina Simone in which case we spend the night trying to sleep in chairs at the United Airlines boarding gate. Six to 0 for Nina.
The high point of the entire disaster for me was at the Salt Lake City airport on our way home. We were all seated next to the crew cabin in our game day clothes, when the pilots left before a new flight crew took over. As the lead pilot went by us he told his co-pilot, "Tell them to check the framis (whatever the part was) on number two. It didn't look right coming in." When the new crew came in, one of our girls caught the Captain's sleeve and said, "I think you should check the framis on number two. It didn't sound right when we were landing." The pilot jumped back and just looked at her in shock before going into the cabin.
