Ross-Ade Stadium, West Lafeyette, Indiana

Speech from Menley Quackow, transcribed from the West Lafeyette Crackpot Archives from 1922 during a municipal election:

 

Well folks, you can tell me a pig’s a pig, but I'll be checking to see if it makes bacon. Now I’m not a fancy big city Lafayette man like Mr. Ross or Mr. Ade, with their spats and their hats and their monocles and their handpicked candidate. But you know what? I think they’ve got some good ideas. That’s right. Now I know you’ve read my pamphlets showing a picture of me kicking them in their behinds until their top hats fall into the Wabash River and you’ve heard my campaign slogan “The Time For Kicking Has Begun” which I’ve also made into a song that my nephew performed on the washboard. But they are right about one thing: Our beloved Purdue University needs a new stadium.

 

Friends, Stuart Field where we gather to watch our Boilermakers play against Notre Dame, Depauw, and the hated Little Giants of Wabash whose tiny beanstalks we’ve seen Purdue cut time and time again, is no longer suitable for so-called “Big Ten Football.” And I have no problem with these fatcats shelling out for a new stadium, which they’re going to name after themselves.

 

But these men and the university are on the wrong track. In fact, they’re not on any track at all. Now, you can tell me a pig’s a pig, but I don’t need to wash the mud off if it’s mooing at me. These, well I can’t politely say what I would call these gentlemen here, but these fine folks want to build a stadium on a piece of land and make us come to it. Imagine that. Putting on your suit, your tie, and pipes you use to defend yourself in case the Rose-Hulman Tech Fighting Engineers gangs come here and menace us with their t-squares and protractors and going to a football game. I say that we in West Lafeyette deserve better. The people deserve better. We deserve a stadium that comes to us.

 

That’s why I’m proposing an easy solution to the stadium problem. Not a fancy new stadium like my opponent supports with gilded spittoons for the Rosses and Ades of the world but an honest stadium for honest hard-working people: I’m saying we put the entire stadium on a train. That’s right. The stadium that travels with the team. You want to play the Boilermarkers? Well, I say let our boys roll up on the rails with their own stadium, with stands and grass and goal posts and thousands of screaming Purdue fans and a band wailing the March of the Purduemen right in their municipal train station while the opposing teams all look at us with their mouths open in disbelief and get upset enough to lose 48-3. The first mobile, locomotive stadium. Right here at Purdue.

 

With a mobile locomotive stadium (I call it “The Train”), Purdue can take on all comers, even cowards that won’t come to play in West Lafeyette. The mobile stadium could even travel between campuses during the game with each team switching off whatever side the wind is blowing from the train's speed and with stops between quarters for fans to get on or off the train. Imagine the excitement when a player gets tackled out of the stadium completely and into a tree or a barn or even onto another passing train as the player who thought he was on the way to the end zone is now on the way to Tucumcari. The novelty will inspire other teams to build their own train stadiums and could fill the rail lines with wholesome football instead of with the swindlers and hoboes the currently clog our cars.

 

Folks, I’m sorry to say that my opponent Mr. Orville Pawpus does not support a train stadium at all. Maybe it’s because he’s attached at the hip to Mr. Ross and Mr. Ade. You can tell me a pig’s a pig when it’s suckling at a trough. No, he wants to build the same stadium that you can see all over the country that can’t transport an entire field and bleacher complex to Columbus Ohio with only 72 hours notice. Now, I’m a gentleman and I believe in a clean campaign so I would never insult my opponent. But I would make a general observation that people who cannot see the advantages of a stadium mounted entirely on rails as pretty light in the brain meat.

 

I’ll confess that I have been reading Mr. Pawpus’s pamphlets and listening to his speeches (I know, someone has to), and I don’t think that he cares much about Purdue’s stadium at all. No, when it comes to this critical part of infrastructure for our state and our country my opponent is strangely silent.Instead, what Mr. Pawpus seems interested in talking about is that Purdue football needs to be represented by a grotesque mannequin that he has invented.

 

Frankly, Mr. Pawpus’s creature is disgusting. People don’t want to look at it. He says it should look like a person but have a giant bulbous head and vacant eyes. He calls it Football Jack and wants it at the games, at the schools, and in your community. While you and I and the other great hardworking people of Tippecanoe County are wondering about putting food on the table for our families or figuring out how Purdue University can have the first operating train stadium that whisks it from Greencastle to South Bend, time and time again my opponent insists his most pressing concern is that Football Jack should be “wielding an implement.”

 

And when it comes to the stadium, my opponent wants his horrible Football Jack all over the place. He wants to have students dressed as this odious cretin wandering around the stadium and accosting children. He wants it capering around the field for amusement, to amuse him and his perverse friends in the legislature. Friends, I have been told that Mr. Pawpus has drawings of a large mechanical version of Football Jack’s head so the Boilermakers can run out of it at the beginning of games like it is vomiting them all over the field. That is an insult to me and you and the entire game of American football.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to search inside of yourselves and really think. Do you want our boilermakers, our lads playing football in a palace devoted to a balloon-headed specter? Or do you want our boys traveling in comfort in their own stadium on their way to thrash Milikin? I promise you I will fight hard for train stadiums for football, basketball, track and field, and even swimming. That is my promise to you. God bless you and the great state of Indiana.

 

Menley Quackow and Orville Pawpus received a combined 3% of the vote. Pawpus lived to see Purdue unleash Purdue Pete onto the world in 1940 and when he saw him he instantly died.