Howard Frost donated $90,000 ($1.45 million in today's dollars) to build a memorial. After their son John Laurence Frost, '35, died of polio only a few months after graduation, Mr. They all had great acoustics, layouts.' But none, he says, had Frost's special qualities: 'the bandshell, the nature a beautiful, magical place.'Ī MAGICAL PLACE': The grassy slope and leafy surroundings made Frost a prized outdoor arena. 'We developed amphitheaters around the country.
'Frost,' Brian Becker, '79, recalls, 'was a magical place.' Becker organized concerts for ASSU as an undergrad and has spent his adult career in live entertainment, promoting for some of the top companies in the industry.
'I guess I always think about these warm, sunny afternoons, this big, green bowl of people dancing around,' says Michael Parrish, dean of the College of Sciences at San Jose State and a historian of Bay Area rock music. From the late 1960s, when San Francisco music served as the soundtrack of a generation, well into the 1980s, when the Grateful Dead made an annual pilgrimage, Frost embraced rock 'n' roll. The music has receded into memory, enshrined by ticket stubs taped in scrapbooks and photos scanned onto Facebook. Frost Amphitheater is a dowager now, a Depression baby who matured into a warm and lovely adulthood, a beauty who in middle age throbbed and hummed to the beat of a nation.
