Here’s a sampler of tailgating in the Big 10 and Notre Dame, starting with the University of Illinois, the nation’s top tailgating school, according to “The Tailgater’s Handbook.”
University of Illinois
The crowds are a little more sparse this year in Champaign, so the loyal University of Illinois tailgaters are easier to spot. Then again, it’s hard to hide bright orange and blue vans.
Not that the fans would want to.
Clint Atkins of Champaign unveiled his blue panel truck with wide swaths of orange and white and a bold “Illinois Fighting Illini” at this year’s first game.
“We did it to support the team and have fun,” Atkins said. Of course, it’s also nice to have a place to store the Port-a-Potty.
The group from Sullivan, Ill. (south of Champaign), knows about loyalty. Atop the bright orange van is a tally of its years of service, beginning with 1981. Each side has a dancing girl and a frolicking fan–and a spigot to serve beer to the 50 to 60 fans that show up each game.
But not this week. “We won’t have many today because we ran out of beer,” said Bill Tiberend of Champaign, a Sullivan native.
The vans’ interiors pretty much look the same: orange or blue carpeting (patterned into an “I” in the Sullivan van ceiling), bench seating that opens to reveal storage space and room in the middle for the grills, tables and awnings needed for a proper tailgate.
After each game, Lawrence Roessler of Rantoul packs the canopy, flags, chairs and tables into his orange and blue van decorated with a Fighting Illini Chief. And there it stays until the next game.
“You just put everything in and you’re ready,” he said.
Ed LeSage of Manteno and friends pack a lot into their Kamino Express, a motor home with orange and blue racing stripes and a No. 34 emblazoned on the side. Each game, these ’92 grads pull out an orange couch and a TV powered by a generator.
Last year, the No. 34 immortalized on the Crazy Coachmen visited LeSage’s tailgate. But Kameno Bell, a running back from ’89 to ’91, found one small problem.
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“He was a little upset,” LeSage said. “We spelled his name wrong.”
– Linda Bergstrom
University of Iowa
Approaching Kinnick Stadium is like trying to push a piece of rope through a needle. It’s better to park in an outlying lot and walk to the stadium than wade through vans, trucks, buses, cars, grills and football experts. The most impressive array is at the south end of the stadium.
There is the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity’s 1954 American La France firetruck (with Smythe the dog), which it uses to drive around Iowa City to bring non-resident members to the sacred parking spot about four to five hours before every home game.
Once the truck is parked, a generator is hooked up to the CD player and the 32-inch TV. Speakers are placed on top, a tapper adorns the side.
President Andy Royce says all 80 or so Pi Kappa Alpha, or PIKE, houses tailgate with firetrucks.
“We have a member that is studying to be a fireman/paramedic that loves this thing, and he maintains it year-round. It’s also used for homecoming parades and other special school functions. It can hold about 50 people at one time, if everyone chooses to sit atop, but generally they just mingle around it and enjoy the music,” said Royce.
Not to be outdone, Team Mosquito, U of Iowa’s bicycling squad, tailgates in a 1980 Chevrolet school bus they use to haul their bikes off-campus.
Owner and team member Joe Paulus maintains the bus, which can be expensive–$250 for a tire. For home games, 40 people arrive in the bus, outfitted with a parquet dance floor, generator, grill, CD player, TV, two couches and a bicycle rack. To away games, their chariot carries 25.
One camper, with the usual grill and TV set, had an unusual mix of partiers–half of the family was rooting for the Hawkeyes, the other half for the University of Illinois, this day’s opponent.
Six dental students sink their teeth into tailgating with an RV that includes a tent for tables, food and benches. About 100 people were lured away from the stadium to party at the RV with a satellite dish, 32-inch TV, CD player, strobe light for night games and three kegs of beer. Can’t get to Iowa City? Don’t sweat it. They take road trips.
– Dennis Odom
Northwestern University
When Coach Gary Barnett promised to take the Purple to Pasadena, little did he know that Northwestern football fans were as intent on taking the Purple to the east parking lot at Ryan Field.
That is until he met Peter Lograsso, a 1989 graduate of the School of Music and a Northwestern University Marching Band alumnus. Barnett is just one of the NU types who have been tickled purple by Lograsso’s 1996 Jeep Wrangler sporting Illinois vanity plates that proclaim NU JEEP.
“Actually, Chrysler officially calls the color magenta,” said Lograsso at Homecoming.
“I had a Plymouth Horizon with 110,000 miles on it, so it was time for a new car.” He scouted several dealers on Grand Avenue near his Bensenville home, intending to buy a Ford Taurus or Chevrolet Lumina. “Family sedans, but since I have no family I decided to be more adventuresome.” But he never meant to buy a sport-ute, and a purple one at that.
Lograsso, who has been hosting tailgating parties with his classmate Eric Bachmann for 10 years, said the Jeep has become the focal point of the festivities.
“We have become more visible now, especially with the two tall flagpoles (sporting NU and American flags),” said Lograsso, a music teacher at Albright Middle School in Villa Park. Besides drawing larger crowds, the Jeep has caught the attention of players, including Brian Musso and current Chicago Bear Darnell Autry.
Phil Growth also went the sport-ute route for tailgating. Though he was more conventional with a ’97 Chevrolet Blazer, the grill hookup sets him apart.
“We started tailgating a few years ago with an ’86 mini-van that was all beat up so we decorated it, to honor NU, with shoe polish,” said Growth of Chicago, an NU alum-in-law by virtue of his marriage to Kathy, a 1993 College of Arts and Sciences grad.
The van held Growth’s grill handily but not so the Blazer. So Growth went to J.C. Whitney, the automotive catalog folks, to buy a hitch and carrier to cart the grill on the back of the Blazer.
To further cement Growth’s commitment to tailgating and NU, the Blazer sports Illinois plates that read GO KATS 7. “And next year, the grill will be painted purple,” he said.
John Luken, a 1978 grad of the College of Arts and Sciences, outfitted his maroon ’95 Ford Windstar with magnetic NU decals and decked out the interior with a Willie the Wildcat mascot doll.
Luken, of Cincinnati, has been seriously attending NU games for three or four years, and his Windstar made its tailgating debut in January at the Citrus Bowl.
– Mary Jane Grandinetti
University of Notre Dame
Game Day at the University of Notre Dame is like a huge neighborhood festival. On the campus, folks dressed in clothes emblazoned with leprechauns or “ND” stroll past guys in kilts cooking steaks on barn-sized grills while students play ball on the grass and a line a block long snakes around the bookstore.
But nowhere is the party spirit stronger than in the parking lots, where flags soar 50 feet above the blacktop to direct tailgaters to their parties. Here, the make of your vehicle is of no importance–it’s the kind of Notre Dame shrine you make of that vehicle that counts.
In the far lot, where RVs settle in, a school bus was painted green with Irish signs in the windows and a yellow canopy sheltering a pregame spread.
The owner, David Harlow of Rochester, Ind., proudly told told of customizing his “RV.”
“I bought it for $800 four years ago,” he said. “I took out the seats in an afternoon with my daughter (he has three) and my wife (Cindy), and I framed the inside in about two weeks.”
Harlow has partitioned off a “master bedroom” with wood from an old pier, created a wet bar from pallet lumber and added a refrigerator, bathroom and beds. A generator runs the appliances. Harlow says the bus gets 8 miles per gallon and sleeps 10 comfortably and four more on the floor.
Harlow, his wife and several friends are waiting for the start of the ND-University of Southern California game. “We usually get just two tickets,” Harlow said. “Everyone else stays here and watches the game on TV.”
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Just steps from the stadium entrance, where most of the vehicles are luxury class and the party food gourmet, a car was decked out in tasteful understatement–a Mercedes with an Illinois license plate that reads BEAT USC.
Patent attorney Jim Zeller (ND class of ’71) of Evanston says he gets lots of comments on the vanity plate, which he put on his car six years ago. “I went to Notre Dame during the Parseghian era,” Zeller says. “The Notre Dame-Southern Cal rivalry is the biggest one ND has.”
– Karen Torme Olson
Purdue University
Tailgate parties at Purdue University football games start long before you park your vehicle and break out the beer and burgers. A “movable feast” begins on Interstate Highway 65, when you join other fans in a long line of mini-vans, sport-utility vehicles, pickup trucks and cars wending their way toward the campus in West Lafayette, Ind.
Gold-and-black-bedecked Boilermaker faithful greet one another with shouts of “Go, Purdue” and, for the beer-for-breakfast crowd, the party has begun this Homecoming.
Kickoff is set for 1 p.m., but the areas closest to Ross-Ade Stadium are a sea of vehicles, people and Weber grills by 10 a.m.
One of the most popular spots is Slayter Hill, a 10-minute walk from the stadium.
At the base of the hill, Mike and Arlene Ayres, Purdue grads from New Castle, Ind., and their friends, John and Carolyn Harms, Wisconsin grads from Pewaukee, Wis., join other alums who are unloading from a Toyota 4Runner what looks to be enough food and drink for most of the residents of the dorm across the street.
That, of course, is why mini-vans, SUVs and other like-sized vehicles are the most popular ones here: volume.
“You don’t come to these games by yourself,” says another Saturday-morning chef nearby, shouting over the “Purdue Fight Song” playing on the boombox atop his Dodge Ram pickup. “You need something big enough to haul people, food, ice chests, the grill. . . . I’m not about to drive my Miata down here.”
His truck is back-to-back with a Chevrolet Suburban, an outsized station wagon that looks big enough to be the Purdue team bus and is filled with enough food to stock a 7-Eleven.
“It’s not unlike home games in Madison,” says Badger alum Carolyn Harms, “except up there, the student union sells beer–and brats, of course–at the pre-game concert at Union South,” across the street from the Camp Randall Stadium complex.
An unofficial tally would make SUVs the hands-down vehicle of choice, with Jeep being the most popular badge. The most popular non-production vehicle is the “Boilermaker Special,” a truck chassis under a body that resembles an old-time locomotive, which has been a fixture at Purdue events for generations. At 23 feet long, weighing nearly 11,000 pounds, it’s hard to miss.
Good weather, great memories, the band, the Boilermaker Special, the black-and-gold colors everywhere and the mouth-watering aroma of burgers cooking over charcoal fires. Does it get any better than this? Today it does: Purdue 45, Wisconsin 20.
– Jack Wade