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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 20, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 23, 2025

‘No way’ to keep couple from UW stadium’s new roof in 1950

By Clay Eals

At age 19, many of us dream of rising above it all. In 1950, Nancy Knox did just that — literally — by climbing onto the brand-new southern roof of University of Washington Stadium.

This was no sanctioned visit. Nor was it entirely safe. Newspapers had reported two weeks earlier that a steelworker had fallen from the cantilevered construction site to his death.

But for Nancy, a Roosevelt High graduate and incoming freshman who aimed for a job in teaching or librarianship, it was merely a sneaky transgression with her new boyfriend and future husband Charley Lennstrom.

“There was no way I should have been up on the roof,” the 94-year-old Normandy Park resident says, “but there was no way to stop us. When stuff is under construction, sometimes they don’t have all the barriers in place. So it wasn’t hard to get up. There were stairs that took you to the upper level of the ceiling, right? And then we were on the back side, outside of it, and went on up.”

Proof lies in 11 black-and-white snapshots taken by the pair with Charley’s camera during a late-summer caper just 12 days before the expanded stadium opened Sept. 23, 1950, for UW Husky football.

The images show the pair in various rooftop spots, along with impressive vistas. Long before drones and Google Earth, the soaring, 210-foot-tall roof — atop a distinctive zigzag grandstand and twin spiral walkways — provided glimpses never before seen from that vantage because until then, the 30-year-old stadium had resembled a flattened bowl.

Long known as Husky Stadium, the gridiron shrine in 1987 gained a twin north grandstand that famously collapsed during construction when support cables were prematurely removed. Repairs were completed in time for fall ball.

From Nancy’s and Charley’s trespass in 1950 grew a shared lifetime, which began at her family’s U District rooming house. The quieter Charley was a UW engineering student who later worked for Boeing. Outgoing Nancy, after they had four children, finished her degree in 1974 and worked at the Highline Community College library.

Over the years, they followed the Huskies, even attending the Rose Bowl in 1964. Charley died in 2007. Today, Nancy fondly recalls their rooftop rendezvous.

“It was an afternoon adventure, and there’s always the call to look at the view,” she says. “You could see all around to the north part of Lake Washington, around to the east and quite a bit to the south, the Montlake Bridge, all this stuff from above. You know how kids are. They like to explore. And it was our university.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Kathleen Lennstrom Bogue, Diane Lennstrom and especially Nancy Knox Lennstrom, as well as UW information officers Victor Balta, Dan Erickson, Kurt Svoboda Chip Lydum and Jeff Bechthold for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 4 additional photos and 10 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, click here to download the 2010 Seattle nomination report for Husky Stadium.