At age 88, Howard McKenzie still works at Kroger Field on every UK football game day
If Saturday goes as usual, Howard McKenzie will be on the job at Kroger Field some three hours before Kentucky football’s 7:30 p.m. kickoff vs. the Akron Zips. He probably will not leave the stadium until at least an hour after the game has ended.
Working in guest services in the Longship Club, McKenzie will spend his Saturday night seeing to the needs of a select group of UK football fans, some of whom have suffered injuries that require them to use wheelchairs.
If McKenzie’s responsibilities play out during the Akron game as they did for UK’s season opener with Ball State, he will walk some 3 miles inside the stadium during the game.
Not bad endurance for an 88-year-old.
“I do have a seat,” McKenzie said last week. “But even when I might be able to take a break, I am not watching what is going on (on the field). I am looking down the aisle where my folks are, to see if there is anything they need.”
In this week when we commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the opening of Commonwealth Stadium/Kroger Field, McKenzie is a valuable resource. The Lexington native has been working, not quite continuously but close, for UK at home football games since 1963. That is 10 years before Kentucky ceased playing at Stoll Field and opened Commonwealth Stadium with a 31-26 victory over Virginia Tech on Sept. 15, 1973.
“Like going from a Model A Ford to a brand-new Ford,” McKenzie said of the stadium transition.
With his wife Ellen, McKenzie presides over a blended family of six children, 15 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. So he has every justifiable reason to “slow down.” To understand what instead drives a man to want to work at college football games as his 89th birthday (Oct. 23) draws near, you need to know that McKenzie’s prevailing ethos has long involved doing and joining.
Over the course of his life, McKenzie has served in multiple branches of the military — U.S. Navy, National Guard, U.S. Army Reserve. While working full-time for IBM, McKenzie joined Keeneland and wound up employed as manager of guest services at the racetrack, too.
“You’ve got 24 hours in a day,” McKenzie says. “I have tried to make good use of as many (of those hours) as I can.”
As an employee of IBM here in Lexington in the 1960s, McKenzie said the company encouraged its people to get involved in the community. McKenzie joined the Lexington Police Department Auxiliary — a group that volunteered to work at UK football games.
“After the game, some of us directed traffic,” McKenzie said. “But they found me a job in the stadium.”
At Stoll Field, the booths where the media photographers worked sat atop the press box. The booths were accessible by an open stairway. “They were having a problem, (fans) were slipping up there to watch the ballgames,” McKenzie recalled. “I got the assignment to monitor the activity and keep unauthorized folks out. And that’s how all this got started.”
When Kentucky football left Stoll Field to move to Commonwealth Stadium for the 1973 season, McKenzie made the move, too. In the new venue, he initially continued to supervise the photo deck, which was now in front of the press box.
That lasted until 2015, when a major stadium renovation turned the photo deck McKenzie had been supervising into a loge seating area. UK shifted McKenzie into a guest-services role in the premium seating area now known as the Longship Club.
Over the course of six decades working at UK football games, McKenzie says the most unforgettable Kentucky player he’s seen was 1970s star running back Sonny Collins. “He looked like fluid motion,” McKenzie said. “It was amazing to watch him run.”
His most memorable game was Kentucky’s 40-34 overtime victory over Alabama in 1997. After Tim Couch hit Craig Yeast with the game-winning touchdown pass, jubilant UK fans stormed the field and tore down the goalposts.
“It looked like an avalanche of people coming out of the stadium to get on that field,” McKenzie said.
A photograph in the following morning’s Herald-Leader carried a surprise for McKenzie. His grandson, Gabriel Wilburn, was in the photo “sitting on the cross bar” of one of the goal posts, McKenzie said.
In recent years, McKenzie says Wilburn bought UK football season tickets and tried to talk his grandfather into giving up working at the Kentucky football games to instead come as a spectator for fun.
Still every bit a doer and a joiner as age 89 approaches, McKenzie can’t imagine not working at Kentucky football games.
“I just have a lot of fun. (I deal with) wonderful, wonderful people,” he says. “I really, really enjoy working these games.”
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