Bring in Da Noise

For decades, the noise meter added to Reynolds Coliseum's unique atmosphere.

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep posts like this free of ads. This blog entry was originally published on GoPack.com before NC State hosted North Carolina at the arena now known as the Lenovo Center.

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 100^th 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.