This distinctive stone stadium was built by the WPA in 1939. A 1999 document from the Cherokee Strip Museum describes the stadium’s origins:“This year we are celebrating the 60″ anniversary of Perry Stadium, the home of Daniels Field. Men of the federal Works Project Administration (WPA) at an estimated cost of $100,000 built the sandstone structure in 1939. To those too young to remember, the WPA was an agency conceived by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help overcome the Great Depression. Originally the stadium included a baseball field as well as the football gridiron, but old age caught up with the Baseball Park years ago when some of the walls began crumbling, and that part of the stadium was converted to a football practice field.” (http://www.cherokee-strip-museum.org)
Our high school football stadium is named Daniels Field in Hump's honor. However, many of his most notable victories came before that layout was built as a WPA project in the late 1930s. Hump's Maroons achieved a lot of glory on the old Fair Park Field where bits of glass, sticker patches, gravel and occasional animal droppings enriched the playing surface. It was also known jocularly as the Dust Bowl because of the swirling red clouds that sometimes shrouded the field in those drought-plagued years. It had virtually no grass cover. More information at- http://www.cherokee-strip-museum.org/Beers/Beers-19960420.htm