When I graduated from high school in 1965, our athletic facilities had recently upgraded their scoreboards to the modern type with little light bulbs to form the numbers.  But back when I was a freshman, that was not the case.  Although the clocks on our scoreboards were electrically operated, they were not digital.  They had a minute hand that went around once in a quarter, plus a second hand. The football scoreboard at Memorial Field consisted of little more than that analog clock at one end of the field, illuminated by a floodlight.  The clock wasn't even official; the official time was kept on the field by the school superintendent, who stood a few yards behind the referee. I sketched a somewhat more elaborate scoreboard, 14 feet high and 36 feet wide, which would at least show the down and yards.  It was still manually operated except for a huge 12½-foot diameter electric clock, here showing 1:27 left in the twelve-minute quarter. (TEXT CONTINUED BELOW) The design was inspired by our basketball scoreboard, which used disks with digits placed around the periphery so that one digit shows through a window.  In the cutaway drawing, the orange disks have ten digits, and the turquoise disks only five (blank, 1, 2, 3, 4).  They are turned manually by scoreboard operators who have climbed the steps into the interior of the board, where they communicate by telephone with the pressbox. These operators also hang signs with the points and the quarter in the appropriate windows.  Because Memorial Field hosted track meets as well, extra windows are provided for scores like "105½."  The larger digits are two feet high, which by experiment I determined to be big enough to be read from 400 feet away and perhaps as much as 600 feet.

The following images are posted here so that they can be linked to the North Union Classmates website. me, spring 1965 Ronnie Hamilton, 1947-1967 North Union High School, 2003 Reagan Street, 2006