Throwback Thursday: Enrico Fermi and Amos Alonzo Stagg

The University of Chicago has long been one of the finest academic institutions in the nation. In the early years of the twentieth century, the University of Chicago routinely fielded one of the strongest football teams in the nation. Enrico Fermi and Amos Alonzo Stagg are two of the greatest figures in their respective fields. For Fermi that would be nuclear physics. For Stagg that would be football. Surprisingly, they both did their greatest work at the same place.

Stagg, along with Walter Camp, Pop Warner and Knute Rockne, was one of the most influential figures in football's early years. The University of Chicago was a founding member of what is now the Big 10 conference. Stagg led Chicago to two national titles and seven conference championships. The schools field was named for him. None of that mattered when University President Robert Hutchins pushed academics at the expense of athletics. He got rid of Stagg and abolished football in 1939. Stagg Field was empty. So, it naturally became the site of the first nuclear reaction. On December 2, 1942 about forty people watched Enrico Fermi set off the first nuclear chain reaction under the west stands of the abandoned stadium.

About a decade later, football returned to the site of Stagg's victories and Fermi's landmark achievement. The Chicago Cardinals of the NFL thought that the abandoned Stagg Field would make for a fine site for practice much to the surprise of kicker/end Pat Summerall. Upon noticing that the stands were covered with tar paper and scattered smokestacks, he asked fullback Johnny Olszewski about the oddities.
"He gave me a look and told me that the atomic bomb had been developed in the stadium. During World War II, the University of Chicago football team had been disbanded so that chemists could work here on the production of a controlled and self-maintaining nuclear chain reaction using uranium. I was too shocked to reply or do anything but reel from the knowledge that a nuclear weapon had been developed right where we were tossing a pigskin around as casually as kids."

Perhaps that nuclear power explains the Cardinals strong years at the end of the '40s, including their '47 NFL title. Nothing else does.