I honestly struggled all day yesterday with what to name this blog. First I took a descriptive approach, then an historical one that would probably have been lost among most readers (at least those who hadn't studied the Napoleonic Wars as part of a European history course). So I decided to name it after the seating section in RFK Stadium in Washington, DC where my grandfather had season tickets to the Washington NFL team for many years, until they moved into their current stadium in Landover, Maryland.
Section 514 is the uppermost section of the stadium, and our seats were in literally the next to last row. The building has a steel band running around it that functions as a wall for these seats, and my favorite memory of football games there was the guy who would kick the wall throughout the whole game, which would resonate loudly until his foot probably went numb.
RFK is the exact opposite of a "lyric little bandbox" like John .Updike described Fenway Park in Boston. It's concrete, circular, and even when the NFL, MLS, and MLB teams played there didn't have much in the way of personality. There was always something anachronistic about it and the experience of watching a game there, whether it was the Redskins band that was playing "Beat It" in the late 1990s, the spare digs and unusually short outfield for an Expos-Cardinals exhibition game in 1998, or the peeling paint and painfully small concourses when I returned, for the last time, for a Nationals game in 2005. As small and underwhelming as it may have seemed as a building, it was our major league stadium.
My grandpa, Marvin Korengold, was a well-known neurologist and arts patron for as long as I knew him, and I was lucky enough to have him in my life until this past September, when he passed away just weeks short of his 96th birthday. My kids knew him too and remember him very fondly,
I chose our section for this blog because he was interested in so many different things and could hold a conversation about all of them, and was always so interested in what the people around him cared about. He was well-read but didn't show it overtly, highly educated but didn't hold himself about others, and I think that he would have enjoyed the premise about this blog.
So this is for you, Grandpa Marvin.
RFK Stadium in 1988. Photo by MSGT Ken Hammond.
Section 514 is the uppermost section of the stadium, and our seats were in literally the next to last row. The building has a steel band running around it that functions as a wall for these seats, and my favorite memory of football games there was the guy who would kick the wall throughout the whole game, which would resonate loudly until his foot probably went numb.
RFK is the exact opposite of a "lyric little bandbox" like John .Updike described Fenway Park in Boston. It's concrete, circular, and even when the NFL, MLS, and MLB teams played there didn't have much in the way of personality. There was always something anachronistic about it and the experience of watching a game there, whether it was the Redskins band that was playing "Beat It" in the late 1990s, the spare digs and unusually short outfield for an Expos-Cardinals exhibition game in 1998, or the peeling paint and painfully small concourses when I returned, for the last time, for a Nationals game in 2005. As small and underwhelming as it may have seemed as a building, it was our major league stadium.
My grandpa, Marvin Korengold, was a well-known neurologist and arts patron for as long as I knew him, and I was lucky enough to have him in my life until this past September, when he passed away just weeks short of his 96th birthday. My kids knew him too and remember him very fondly,
I chose our section for this blog because he was interested in so many different things and could hold a conversation about all of them, and was always so interested in what the people around him cared about. He was well-read but didn't show it overtly, highly educated but didn't hold himself about others, and I think that he would have enjoyed the premise about this blog.
So this is for you, Grandpa Marvin.
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