Bob Schweickert

An All-American quarterback at Virginia Tech, he played seven games at Victory Stadium from 1962-64.

The classic game at Victory Stadium was always the big Virginia Tech-VMI matchup on Thanksgiving Day. Besides the game, there was the pageantry of cadets from both schools arriving by train and marching down Jefferson Street to the stadium.

Former Tech quarterback Bob Schweickert remembers how even his mother got caught up in the excitement of what was billed as “The Military Classic of the South.”

“My mother came pretty much to every game. The last game we played there, she got out on the field. When the game ends, the Highty-Tighties used to perform. They would come marching from the end zone down the field. She went out and led the Highty-Tighties down the field.”

Margaret Morris

Along with her husband, she’s credited with conceiving the name of the Harvest Bowl game.

Besides the Thanksgiving Day games with Tech and VMI, another annual event was the Harvest Bowl, a regular-season game that was a fundraiser for the Junior League.

Margaret Morris and her husband — the late Barton Morris Jr., former publisher of The Roanoke Times — won the contest to name the game. The Harvest Bowl’s run lasted from 1958 to 1969. During those years, one of the game’s highlights was always the halftime show. Visiting celebrities included Miss America.

“One year we had precision parachute jumping into the stadium. And I don’t think any of them got into the stadium — they got hung up in trees, went into the river. I don’t think they ever hit the playing field.”

Billy Sample

A member of the 1971 Andrew Lewis High School football team, he played in what may be the most memorable game ever played at Victory Stadium.

With six minutes left in the state quarterfinals, E.C. Glass of Lynchburg was ahead of Andrew Lewis of Salem, 14-0. Many fans started filing out of the stadium, thinking the game was over.

Then Lewis got hot, and scored three touchdowns in one minute, 45 seconds. “Things just went nuts in the last six minutes,” recalled Eddie Joyce Jr., the team’s quarterback and coach’s son. “There was a traffic jam of people leaving the stadium and listening to it on the radio and trying to get back into the stadium.”

Billy Sample caught the winning pass that put Lewis ahead for good at 20-14. He went on to play major league baseball but still marvels at that game: “That is still the most amazing athletic comeback I was a part of. I can remember a lot of it like it was yesterday. … Here it is, 35 years later, and I’m still having trouble believing it.”

Art Donovan

Pro Football Hall of Famer played his last game at Victory Stadium, a 1962 matchup between the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys.

Art Donovan anchored the defensive line of the Baltimore Colts teams that dominated the NFL in the late 1950s. All that came to an end in Roanoke.

“I don’t think you ever retire; they sort of run you off. Up at training camp, [Coach] Weeb Ewbanks said, ‘I want to talk to you.’ He said, ‘You’re not getting by the second guy as fast as you used to.’ I said, ‘Uh-oh, the handwriting’s on the wall. That is it.’ I said, ‘I’d like to play one more game.’ That was the Dallas game. I thought I’d like to give it a shot and see what happens. And my time had come. I dressed alongside Alex Sandusky in the locker room. He was [No.] 68 and I was 70. I said, ‘Pull her off for the last time.’ When I put my head on the pillow that night to go to bed, I said, ‘Tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll never play football again.’ That was a little tough.”

Herman Boone

Coach of the T.C. Williams team that won the 1971 state championship. Denzel Washington played his character in the movie “Remember the Titans.”

The state championship game dramatized in the movie “Remember the Titans” was played at Victory Stadium. It pitted T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria against Andrew Lewis High School from Salem. Williams won, 27-0.

Herman Boone was coach of the Alexandria team that was formed amid racial strife by merging three schools. He remembers the difficulty of managing the racial tensions depicted in the movie. He remembers Lewis coach Eddie Joyce Sr. as “one of the best coaches I’ve ever known.” He also remembers Victory.

“That stadium was packed. That [game] was the biggest thing in town. … As we flew out [after the game], the pilot said the light on top of the mountain over there by the stadium, somebody had turned it off!”

Joel Hicks

Football coach at Pulaski County High School from 1979-2002.

Perhaps the saddest night at Victory Stadium came Oct. 17, 1999, when Pulaski County football player Lee Cook collapsed after a routine hit during a game against William Fleming and died. Cook was killed by cardiac arrest triggered by a blow to the front part of his body. It was a rare injury known as cardiac concussion.

Pulaski’s coach that night was Joel Hicks. “I run the half-marathon, and it ends in Victory Stadium. I always go there to the 35-yard line after I get through with my run and kind of pay respects to the kid.

“It was just a block, absolutely no violence. You couldn’t even see it on the film. There wasn’t hardly any contact. Lee Cook was a great kid, a wonderful player.”

Caldwell Butler

The Roanoke lawyer and future congressman helped organize the 1960 campaign rally by Vice President Richard Nixon.

The first time a presidential candidate made a major speech in Roanoke came in September 1960, when Richard Nixon held a rally at Victory Stadium during his campaign against John Kennedy. It was an event with national implications: The South was still Democratic territory, but the Republican Nixon was making a major play for Southern votes.

One of the organizers of the Roanoke rally was Caldwell Butler: “We spent a lot of money building a platform for him to satisfy the Secret Service. We had a big platform built up and it made a good show, it was impressive. We stacked him up on about the 50 yard line and ... we packed ’em in.”

Attendance that night was estimated at 15,000. Nixon was so popular, the crowd mobbed him afterward and police had to link arms to escort the candidate out of the stadium. He carried Virginia that fall, but lost the election.

Barbara McLelland

The field at Victory Stadium is named after her late husband, former Roanoke Times sports editor and legendary sandlot coach Bob McLelland.

Barbara McLelland remembers spending a lot of Friday nights at the stadium with her daughters while their father covered games.

“I hate to see it go. I went to Jefferson and we played all our games there. When Bobby coached sandlot, they played their games there. My girls, they all went to Patrick Henry, and two of them were cheerleaders. It has a lot of memories.

“We used to take the girls over there. Friday night, we’d always go to the stadium — that’s when he was covering the games, and we’d most always go to the games [too]. And then, of course, they all cheered their daddy’s sandlot team. Some of my grandsons played there; that always meant a lot to them, playing at the field that was named after their granddaddy. And we walked in the Relay for Life for years; I never thought we’d be spending the night on that field.”

Whitey Taylor

The Franklin County Speedway owner brought auto racing back to Victory Stadium in the early 1990s at what he dubbed the South Roanoke Speedway.

Auto racing sputtered on and off at Victory Stadium through the years. When Whitey Taylor tried for the last time in the early ’90s, he brought a showman’s touch to the event.

On July 5, 1991, the pre-race show included his wedding. Although he and Kim Cook had been officially married two months, they underlined their union with a more public service. Held in front of 1,953 spectators, the ceremony remains one of Roanoke’s most highly attended weddings.

“I remember we was in the infield, we had all the wedding thing set up there. As the preacher pronounced me and my wife man and wife I gave them the go-ahead to start the race.”

Taylor’s track manager, Flip Carico, faults the city for not supporting racing. “It could have been very successful if the city had wanted it to be.”

John McKenna

Coached VMI from 1953-65, which covered the “glory years” of the traditional Virginia Tech-VMI game at Victory Stadium.

John McKenna coached 16 games for VMI at Victory Stadium, 13 of which were the traditional season finale against Virginia Tech.

“It was played on Thanksgiving, and the corps of both schools paraded in and sat on opposite sides. It was the biggest football game played in the state of Virginia. … bigger than any home game Virginia or VPI had. We used to play in excess of 25, 27 thousand people. In 1956, they beat us badly [45-0], and then the next year we beat them [14-6]. That was quite a swing — a lot of satisfaction. … The other standout game was in 1959; we beat them [37-12]. Tech had a real fine running back, a guy named Alger Pugh. On the opening kickoff, Lee Badgett went down and made a tackle, knocked him backwards, knocked [Pugh’s] helmet off when he hit him so hard. And from then on, it seemed like we had the upper hand.”

Jimmy Piersall

Former major league baseball All Star ran the Buckskins, Roanoke’s minor league football team, from 1969-71.

The growing popularity of pro football in the 1960s spawned a minor league football team, the Roanoke Buckskins. A baseball man, Jimmy Piersall, was the general manager.

“I used to get all excited during the game. They had that little announcer’s booth up top, and I’d sit up there, and every time something went wrong I’d kick that metal part and [the sound] would ricochet all over the park. We were drawing about 6, 7,000 fans. I used high school teachers for ticket-sellers. We were getting the [Redskins’] taxi squad [players] from [Vince] Lombardi in Washington. The league we had was pretty darn good. We had a quality product because I was selling Lombardi.”

Lee Suggs

The Cleveland Browns running back and ex-Virginia Tech star remembers how impressive Victory Stadium seemed in his rec league days.

Lee Suggs has played in NFL stadiums for the Cleveland Browns. But his memories go back to playing sandlot football in Roanoke at Victory Stadium — and his high school days at William Fleming.

As a senior in 1997, Suggs scored five touchdowns in a game at Victory to help Fleming beat George Washington-Danville for the first time since 1985.

“My sophomore year, they had beaten us 59-zip at Victory Stadium. To come back my senior year and finally get that win, it was great. It was always fun to play in Victory Stadium. It was so big. When I was in sandlot, we used to play our playoff games at Victory Stadium. Victory Stadium was the place to be.”

Julie Creasy

Stepdaughter of Whitey Lambert, a longtime worker at Victory Stadium.

From the 1950s until his death in 2000, Whitey Lambert was synomous with the stadium. At various points over the years, he took care of the turf, officiated at games and ran the time clock. As he worked, his frequent companion and unofficial assistant was his stepdaughter, Julie Creasy.

“We would always get there early before the high school games. If the game was at 8, we had to be there at 6 at the latest. We were there long before anybody else. He was there with the men helping them get ready. He made sure the clock was working right, putting the flags up, making sure everything was just so. ... Probably a lot of that was just the enjoyment of being out early. I’m not sure there was that much to be done, he just enjoyed being there.”

Charles Thornhill

Star player at Lucy Addison High School in the early 1960s and later an All-American at Michigan State, he broke one of the valley’s color lines.

In 1962, Charles Thornhill became the first black player chosen by the Roanoke Touchdown Club as the most outstanding back in the Roanoke Valley.

In those days, the white teams played on Fridays and the black teams on Saturdays. “I really enjoyed that stadium. We didn’t have a stadium of our own, Addison. At that time segregation was going on, but we did have a few white people come out to watch us play. Blacks had to sit on one side and the whites had to sit on the other side.

“People in Roanoke, black and white, were very supportive of me — especially [sports editor] Bob McLelland … It seems like I was The Chosen One, for some reason, to succeed in such a way, so everyone rallied behind me, even though things were different at that particular time.”

Erica Woody

The Roanoke woman has a special memory of Victory Stadium — sneaking in with her parents to visit the spot where her father proposed to her mother in 1984.

About two weeks ago, 19-year-old Erica Woody and her parents sneaked into the stadium one evening to take a picture of the fountain — and visit a spot that has special significance to Hal and Medrith Woody.

“See, the fountain is where my dad proposed to my mom, at a William Fleming and Patrick Henry game. My dad had a whole evening planned out, but my mom ended up having to take her sister to the PH game, so my dad proposed to her there. …

“During the whole entire first half of the game, my dad sat there trying to figure out the most romantic place in Victory Stadium. He saw the fountain and took her over there during halftime and my mom made sure everybody knew that they had gotten engaged just by ranting and raving and being excited.”