Noise, Traffic and Light at UC Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California.

The Editor

The Berkeley Daily Planet

Berkeley, CA

To the Editor:

Your recent front page story, "Stadium Neighbors Oppose TV Lighting" and the inside story, "Memorial Stadium Controversial From the Start" (The Daily Planet, Sept. 2-4) were both very interesting.

It seems to be part and parcel of the fall UC Football season in Berkeley: the annual autumn whining about traffic, noise and light by a few local residents living near the Memorial Stadium on the UC campus, which hosts several home college football games.

The UC Memorial Stadium was completed in 1923, some eighty years ago. Any local neighborhood bitches about traffic and congestion on Fall Football Saturday from anyone younger than one hundred and five years of age are ridiculous: foot traffic and car traffic were there long before any of the current local residents were even born, let alone being old enough to bitch about it.

It would seem that some of the hillside neighbors living above Memorial Stadium want to have fantastic views of the Bay Area, which is home to several million people, without having any local lights visible in the dusk or evening hours. We all have our selfish demented dreams, I suppose. If you don't want to live next to a vibrant college campus, perhaps you should consider moving a few miles north to quieter digs in Albany, El Cerrito or El Sobrante.

Yours truly,

James K. Sayre

2 September 2003