Harvard Stadium--the house that built big-time football--celebrates its golden jubilee when the Crimson eleven meets Dartmouth today.

On an autumn afternoon back in 1903, it was Dartmouth that helped dedicate the Stadium--North America's first great college sports arena, and the nation's first reinforced concrete structure. Always the gracious host, the Crimson gave the Big Green an 11-0 victory that afternoon.

A now trend in football got underway the day these teams met in the giant Allston horseshoe. For until 1903, college football games had been, for the most part, informal get-togethers between the sons of well-to-do Eastern families.

But, long-plagued by the seating shortage for games with big opponents like Yale, the College decided to construct the country's first football stadium. As the huge structure, capable of seating nearly 40,000 persons, arose tier by tier across the Charles River, the rest of the football world began to take keen note.

Yale followed her Ivy sister's lead by building the Bowl in 1914, an even vaster, more capacious structure than the Stadium. And then every major college in the lend joined the act. Professionalism in football was on its way: mammoth stadiums rose everywhere, the game itself became a giant.

The Stadium that gave the first push to big-time college football--a game that de-emphasis-minded officials now regard as something of a Frankenstein creation--was opened for the first time on November 14, 1903.

The 20,000-odd spectators who were in the stands for that first game were awestruck. Said the Boston Evening Transcript, it a structure "the like of which is not to be found in this country, and in the Old World, only in a few of the ancient cities of Greece and Italy."

And the Stadium was indeed an engineering masterpiece. The nation's first example of wide-scale reinforced concrete construction, it contained 250,000 cubic feet of concrete and took four-and-one-half months to build. Concrete-steel girders supported some 4,800 concrete slabs, each weighing 1,200 pounds, to form the seats.

One Boston newspaper thought the Stadium looked "sturdy enough to last till Harvard beat Yale in football." It did take the Crimson quite some time to defeat Yale: not until 1913 was the trick accomplished at the Stadium.

Dedication day proved a dismal affair. The heavily-favored Crimson eleven sported a 9-1 record and 18 straight victories over Dartmouth when it trotted onto the Stadium grass for the first time. But the Indians made their debut as a football power by scoring a major 11-0 upset.

It was a convincing Dartmouth victory. The Indians had rushed for 238 yards, the Crimson for only 50. Just once did the Crimson eleven penetrate Indian territorly, and that drive stopped at the 27-yard line.

Overjoyed at the Green's first victory over "fair Harvard," Professor Edwin J. Bartlett, head of the Dartmouth Chemistry Department, celebrated the event in verse:

The Harvard Stadium (1903)

(To be sung to the tune of the Lorelei.)

O here's to fair Harvard's new Stadium,