Next door, the stands started to fill around 10:30 a.m., four hours before kickoff. Rain had given way to a glorious fall day, and fans streamed in via train, boat and carriage. In the standing room only section, fans crammed together, filling every nook and gap.

Many of the Cal fans bore hats inscribed with the score of the previous year’s shellacking: 30 to 0. Stanford rooters wore Cardinal tam-o’-shanters: “the rich red color of life gleamed from top to bottom of the high bleachers,” according to an account in the Call. The bands tried to drown each other out. “Leather-lunged” fans screamed chants.

But for those unwilling or unable to pay $1 for a ticket, the rush was on to find another way to see the spectacle. Herman Guehring, an 11-year-old student at Mission Grammar School, tried scrambling under a fence into the grounds but was chased away. Then he climbed a water tower at 14th and Folsom, but the view was obstructed. And so finally he joined the swarm pushing into the most obvious vantage point, the glassworks building.

The plant’s superintendent, James Davis, had been warned of the risk. Henry Taylor, the treasurer of the Associated Students of Stanford University, told reporters that organizers had provided Davis six complimentary tickets to the game in exchange for keeping people

off the roof.

But Davis was a star-crossed man. He’d been in the papers earlier in the year after getting thrashed by a glassblower whose work he had criticized. And he either badly misjudged the size of the challenge or the probity of his employees. Some would later claim his specially hired watchmen had offered admission to the roof for a fee. Either way, the surge into the factory grounds was soon out of anyone’s control.

“There was a watchman there,” Guehring recalled seven decades later in an article written by William Briggs, ’68, his great-nephew. “But it was like trying to turn back the waves at the beach. The kids kept pouring through the fence anxious to see the kickoff.”

In no time, the roof was black with spectators, some 400 by one count, a good number of them on the glassworks’ ventilator, a section of corrugated iron roofing about 72 feet long and 8 feet wide that let the furnace heat escape. The view went from one end of the field to the other.

The flimsy structure had been built to bear no weight but its own. A few were quick to recognize the danger and descend, while others tried to escape but were trapped by the crowd. “All of us were laughing and jesting and some of the fellows said if this thing breaks, we’ll all go down together,” one of the men on the roof recalled.

As the game began, frustrated factory officials struggled to get help. Davis and his employees claimed they called police headquarters but were transferred to the Mission substation, where an officer told them to speak to the lieutenant at the game. But when they tried to reach him, policemen at the gate denied them entrance. With only 60 officers assigned to the game — 40 inside the stadium, 20 outside — it’s not clear how much they could have done anyway.

Twenty minutes after kickoff, the crowd was tense as Cal made its first foray deep into Stanford territory. Then a crash from the field’s north side brought play to a halt. The roof of the glassworks had collapsed like a gallows’ trap. Necks craned. Players stood out. No one could see exactly what had happened. Then, by one account, a Berkeley fan, fearing a Stanford diversion, yelled, “It’s a job,” and all eyes returned to the ball. The game continued as if nothing had happened, the bands and cheers overwhelming the screams next door.

The first men to realize the full scope of the horror had nearly been victims themselves. Charles Yotz, an oven man at the factory, had been raking

the fire when bodies began raining down, narrowly missing him. He tried

to remove those who had fallen on top of the furnace with a giant poker while his partner, Clarence Jeter, ran to turn off the oil feeding the blaze inside. Officials later estimated the surface temperature of the furnace at 500 degrees.

“It was a horrible experience standing there beside a hellpot and seeing human beings roast to death,” Jeter told the Examiner. “We did the best we could.”

Some were lucky to grasp rafters, holding on for life as death massed below. “Bodies were falling like hail,” one man said. “As I clung there I saw the poor fellow who had been chatting with me strike the furnace. He curled up like a worm in that heat.”

A small blessing, the furnace was on the far side of the building away from the field, and most of the spectators had been crowded to the other side. But a 50-foot drop to the floor could kill just the same, especially for those pummeled by others falling on them.

Rescuers were staggered by what they found. Bodies scattered about, the desperate moans of the injured, an inescapable smell of burning clothing and roasted flesh. It first seemed as if hundreds must be dead. “The sight was awful,” said a fireman who’d been on the roof but escaped the fall. “We knew not which way to turn or what to do.”

Practically every phone in the neighborhood was calling for help, and anything with wheels, from wagons to butcher carts, was commandeered to rush the wounded and dying to city hospitals, which were frantically trying to summon doctors back from Thanksgiving dinner.

None of this made much of a difference to the game. Those in the high bleachers could see the flurry of ambulances outside and some could hear police and ushers appeal to the stands for doctors. But with no real way to communicate through the noise, hard information was apparently slow to spread through the crowd and never reached the field.

The game was settled in the final minutes by a single score — the first successful field goal in the history of the Big Game. At the final whistle, hundreds of Stanford fans surged onto the field, carrying the star players

on their shoulders and beginning a parade down Market Street to the

Palace Hotel.

Elsewhere, as if in another world, panicked crowds were besieging the city’s hospitals. Police blockaded doors to the Southern Pacific Hospital at nearby 14th and Mission streets to keep out the crush. The scenes within looked like something from a battlefield. “Little boys in knee breeches were laid on the floor all along the length of the hall, some writhing with pains and calling for father and mother,” reported the Call.

A similar frenzy took place outside the morgue as coroner’s deputies began to deliver bodies, some on makeshift stretchers made from fragments of the destroyed roof. The influx forced officials to open the city’s new morgue, still under construction.

One of the first victims named was 12-year-old William Eckfeldt, whose weeping father recognized his disfigured body by his socks. Then came 17-year-old William Valencia, whose grandfather was the namesake of nearby Valencia Street. Edgar Flahavan, a classmate of Guehring at Mission Grammar School, died in an ambulance.

While the tragedy claimed victims with a range of ages — the oldest, Mekke Van Dyk, was a 46-year-old miner — most were boys and young men. The youngest, Lawrence Miel, had turned 9 only a month earlier. Most of them lived within walking distance of the grounds. (See map, page 48.)

Thirteen were declared dead that day and scores were hospitalized, with further fatalities rolling in. The closest connection to Stanford was 17-year-old Peter Carroll, critically injured but clinging to life, whose younger brother Jimmie had been adopted as Stanford’s mascot. A short story by a Stanford grad based on Jimmie describes his character as a “tiny, ragged boy” who meets the team selling carnations.