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| For decades, the noise meter added to Reynolds Coliseum's unique atmosphere. |
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NC State Athletics, © 2010
(Updated, 2025)Longtime Friends Help Bring Noise Back to Reynolds | A Little Piece of Reynolds
BY TIM PEELER
Granted, we didn’t really need three electrical engineers with
advanced degrees from NC State’s College of Engineering to refurbish and update the old Reynolds
Coliseum noise meter for Tuesday night’s game against North Carolina.
But the trio of former employees of a recently closed
Research Triangle Park company have all had some time on their hands since the
end of December and were willing to volunteer over the last few weeks to make
sure the tower of lights was in perfect working order when it was rolled out to
midcourt of the RBC Center for pregame introductions.
The ring-leader was Tracy Fulghum, who has a bachelor’s
degree and a doctorate from NC State. He was ably assisted by Anthony Fugaro,
Kevin Gard and a couple of kids who were looking to kill some time during a day
off from school. (Full disclosure: Tracy was my roommate at NC State and two of
the three kids were mine. This small part of the on-going effort to restore and
save NC State’s athletics history got us all out of the house on a Wake County
teacher work day.)
The idea to bring the noise meter back was hatched during
the summer, when we started dusting off some of the items stored in the
basement of Reynolds Coliseum. The goal was to have it appear once during the
100th season of NC State basketball, then retire to a less dirty
environment.
Personally, I believe it will be the perfect centerpiece in
an NC State athletics museum/hall of fame, along with some other items that
have been tucked away for safe keeping, when it is time for that project to
proceed.
For younger Wolfpack fans and students who may not have
grown up going to men’s basketball games at Reynolds, the old noise meter was a
device suggested by legendary NC State basketball coach Everett Case, who wanted
a little something to “pump up the volume”
long before coliseums had piped in anthems blaring over loudspeakers.
The 13 white bulbs on the meter would light up, one-by-one,
as the crowd in the coliseum got louder. When the noise reached its peak – as
it did many times during the David Thompson era, and in particular on a hot
February afternoon in 1983 when the Wolfpack beat defending national champion
North Carolina – the red light on top of the meter would flicker on, spurring
the crowd to get even louder.
Opponents knew all about it. And so did the Wolfpack
players.
“No question about
it, you could hear when the game was revving up because the crowd saw the
lights go higher and higher and they would get louder and louder and louder to
get it up to the top,” said head coach Sidney Lowe. “It was one of the great
traditions of Reynolds Coliseum and NC State basketball.”
No NC State player ever had to look up to see if the red
light was on.
“You couldn’t really see when the top light came on,” said
Rodney Monroe, the Wolfpack’s all-time leading scorer. “But you sure could feel
it.”
Though I am not completely positive, the noise meter was
likely built by Larry Earp, who was in charge of maintenance for all athletic
facilities for decades.
“Larry could do or make anything,” said assistant athletics
director for outdoor facilities Ray Brincefield, who learned a thing or two
while working with Earp. “I’m sure Coach Case had the idea and Larry made it
for him.”
The meter first appeared in pictures of Reynolds as early as
1954, just five years after the coliseum opened. It hung from the catwalk in
the rafters, thanks to a heavy-duty cable strung through four eye-hooks, for
nearly half a century.
The simplicity of the meter’s design is ingenious: it’s a
sheet of quarter-inch plywood ripped into four 12-inch strips and nailed over a
10-foot-long frame made of 2X2s. There are standard light sockets for each
bulb, with the wiring on the inside of the meter. For maintenance purposes, one
side panel of the tower is hinged, so it can be opened for access to the
wiring.
For proprietary reasons, I can’t completely explain the
highly sophisticated auditory control mechanism [cough… ears] that measured the
decibel level in the arena to make the lights rise and fall.
Okay, by now most people know that the meter was controlled
by a facilities staff member, by running a specially made wooden block across a
row of 14 light switches.
Three of the people who used to manually operate the old
meter in their younger days – Brincefield, golf coach/facilities coordinator
Richard Sykes, Shannon Yates – are now associate or assistant athletics
directors. Brothers David and Brad Bowles, who both followed in their father’s
footsteps of working in facilities at NC State, often sat in one of the upper
level barges in Reynolds running the old meter. David remembers doing it as a
10-year-old, drunk with power, whipping the crowd into a total frenzy.
“It would get the crowd going like you would never believe,”
Sykes said.
Even though the noise meter had been stowed in the basement
ever since renovations began at Reynolds in 2004, there wasn’t a lot that
needed to be done to get it back in working order. Fulghum connected all the
wires and we plugged it into an outlet adjacent to the rifle range in the
Reynolds basement.
Right after we located the nearest fire extinguisher. Just
to be safe.
The facilities guys moved it over to the ticket office of Vaughn
Towers at Carter-Finley Stadium so we could make some adjustments for its big
appearance Tuesday night. We knew it wouldn’t be possible to hang it from the
rafters of the RBC Center, so we had to come up with a boxed-in base with
wheels to make it portable.
The thing is big – fully 10 feet tall before it was mounted
onto the rolling cart. Or, as my 7-year-old said, “It’s even taller than Mr.
Burleson.”
But it would have been totally dwarfed in the rafters of the
RBC Center.
To make sure it was sturdy, we reinforced the frame with
some 12-foot long 2X4s and screwed it tightly on the rolling cart. That
probably doubled the original weight, but we didn’t want it to tip over and
turn into a pile of splinters on national television.
We replaced all 52 of the 25-watt white bulbs, which might
have been the most difficult part of the entire process. No one store carries
that many low wattage incandescent bulbs anymore. So we’d like to thank the
Lowes stores in Durham, Cary, Raleigh and, yes, even Chapel Hill for letting us
raid their supplies. (We briefly considered going green, but figured that
three-second delay that comes with flipping on CFLs would ruin the effect.)
And Fulghum bought four red 40-watt bulbs for the top row of
lights. They were an improvement over the white bulbs that had been
spray-painted red that were used originally. After several fresh coats of paint
on Monday and Tuesday, we transported it over to the RBC Center on Tuesday
afternoon several hours before the game.
Thanks to Wolfpack Sports Marketing interns Kristen Haller,
Virginia Pace and Jessica Thurston for not tipping it over during its pre-game
trek to midcourt. And thanks to the sell-out crowd for making enough noise to
make the red light shine before and during the game.
Alas, Tuesday will probably be the noise meter’s only
appearance at the RBC Center. It’s held up nicely for nearly half a century,
but moving it from place to place takes a mighty big toll on the fragile
plywood.
It’s nice to be connected with a piece of history that
belongs to Coach Case and the hundreds of players that followed, but the
splinters in our hands from the 50-year-old wood still hurt. There are several
major dings on the corners and no one wants to see this unique icon deteriorate
further.
But, as long as the sounds of Reynolds Coliseum echo in the
ears of Wolfpack fans, the noise meter will have its place in the history of NC
State basketball.
You may contact Tim
Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
