When word came that Barack Obama will give his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in a huge Denver football stadium next Thursday, the press noted that this will be the first such outdoor address since John F. Kennedy’s in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1960.

JFK declared, “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier … We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier.”

A droll piece by Russell Baker in The New York Times set the July 15 scene:

“Undismayed by the dim notices given their four-day dramatic flop inside the sports arena, the Democrats moved into the Coliseum today, to try their hand at fresh-air vaudeville.

“For two and a half hours before the candidates arrived for their acceptance speeches, drum corps, bands, majorettes, movie performers, jazz musicians and comedians performed in a scorching sun on the turf where the Los Angeles Dodgers’ outfield normally spends its evenings shagging flies...”

But you might like to know that Franklin D. Roosevelt set a lofty standard for such outdoor appearances with a speech accepting the nod for a second term. It was June 27, 1936, and a vast crowd roared its approval at the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field in Philadelphia.

Democrat Roosevelt, who fought the Great Depression, denounced “economic royalists.”

He praised compassion, hit government “frozen in the ice of its own indifference,” and said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations, much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

The Associated Press report carried in The Providence Journal said, “Some of those who cheered tonight were still soaked by a rain that fell before sundown. But as the New Deal chieftains arrived, a thin moon broke through the clouds.

“This meeting tonight made political history. Never before has a major party nominated its President and Vice President, notified them, and received their speeches of acceptance in the same day.”

Like Invesco Field at Mile High, the Denver Broncos’ home where Obama will speak, Franklin Field was better known as a football venue. Said the AP:

“On the field, down where ‘Red’ Grange brought other thousands to their feet yelling during his heyday, chairs were set up for the convention delegates in the same pattern as in the auditorium of the convention sessions. …

“Entertainers helped the crowd while away the waiting period. Lily Pons, the opera star, brought the vast assemblage to attentive silence as she sang ‘Lo Hear the Gentle Lark.’ ”

Accepting a fourth-term nod in 1944, FDR had another distinctive approach: He spoke over radio from a train at what, because of wartime secrecy, was described only as a “Pacific Coast naval base.” (It was San Diego.)

In The Times, Meyer Berger wrote of the July 20 scene in Chicago Stadium, an indoor arena, when Roosevelt’s voice came over the loudspeakers:

“The listeners sat like people enthralled. Silence hung over the auditorium in the pauses. Throughout the President’s talk a spotlight was fixed on his enlarged photograph which stared down from the roof girders.

“Mr. Roosevelt’s last words died away into echoing silence. The last few accents lingered like audible pulse in the dead quiet. Then came uproar, banner waving, a leaping to seats that lasted several minutes.”

Interesting, no?

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com