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Gentlemen, put on your spiffiest three-piece suit with loose-fitting sleeves and “Oxford bag” trousers. While you’re at it, throw on your fedora, wingtip shoes and maybe a bow tie.
Ladies, make sure your bobbed hairstyle is topped with a cloche hat. Remember, your day dress should feature simple, straight lines with mid-calf hemlines.
Invite your favorite gangster to join us. Just don’t get pinched for sneaking in bathtub gin.
Yes, it’s time to party because the dedication for the opening of Memorial Stadium at 3300 Wabash Ave. will take place May 4.
It’s sure to be the bee’s knees.
Oops, we’re in 2025. Not 1925.
My bad.
The real dedication for the minor-league baseball stadium — yes, that was its original primary purpose — occurred 100 years ago Sunday (it was a Monday in 1925).
Actually, the field was first used in 1924 when Terre Haute Wiley and Garfield high schools played their traditional Thanksgiving Day football game there.
According to my favorite Terre Haute historian, the late Mike McCormick, a parade of automobiles departed downtown for the former location of the Vigo County Fairgrounds at the northeast corner of Brown and Wabash avenues on the afternoon of May 4, 1925.
“The occasion was the formal dedication of Memorial Stadium at the opening game of the Three-I League season,” McCormick explained in one of his “Historical Perspective” columns from the 2010s. “The Terre Haute Tots were hosting the Peoria Tractors.”
McCormick noted that esteemed architect George E. Kessler of St. Louis designed Memorial Stadium and its surrounding landscape.
“Undaunted by cool breezes and threatening clouds, crowds swarmed into the new $425,000 facility, built in 1923 and 1924 at the former site of Terre Haute’s famous Four-Cornered Track,” McCormick wrote.
The stadium bowl featured 9,000 permanent, stainless-steel grandstand seats and 1,200 moveable box seats covered by a roof, according to McCormick’s book “Queen City of the Wabash.” Unroofed bleachers flanking the right- and left-field lines brought the stadium’s seating capacity to 16,000 people. A Bedford stone archway marked the south entrance. Attached to the arch were bronze tablets, memorializing the names of 6,780 Vigo County residents who served in World War I.
“With Mayor Ora Davis pushing the project, the city of Terre Haute funded the $425,000 cost of building Memorial Stadium through bond sales,” current Tribune-Star sports editor Mark Bennett mentioned in a March 2010 column. “The stone arch accounted for $90,000 of that pricetag.”
McCormick, who enjoyed reading and learning from old Terre Haute Tribune and Terre Haute Star newspaper clippings, described the Memorial Stadium grandstands on May 4 as “filled with quite a few spectators seated in the unroofed bleachers.”
“The crowd was estimated to exceed 8,500 despite proclamations by the Central Labor Union urging union men not to attend the game because the stadium was partly constructed with non-union labor,” his description continued.
McCormick said the stadium was quiet when, without warning, the Harmony Four quartet broke into song to welcome Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, who arrived as a special guest.
That’s the equivalent of current MLB commissioner Rob Manfred showing up for a baseball game at Bob Warn Field.
Back to May 1925, the horseshoe-shaped coliseum was 600 feet long and 375 feet wide. The baseball playing field measured an unthinkable 546 feet from home plate to the center-field wall. Only New York’s original Yankee Stadium had a larger athletic field at that time, according to historical lore.
“A large bouquet was presented to the commissioner from adjoining box seats,” McCormick said of the dedication ceremony. “Landis bowed as the audience stood in reverence.
“Box seats for the Rotary, Kiwanis and Exchange clubs were attractively decorated and employees of Model Ice Cream Co. paraded to their seats in uniform.”
Sounds like a fun day — maybe even copacetic, continuing my desperate attempt to insert 1920s lingo into this column — but the celebration wasn’t over yet.
“Perhaps the most impressive segment of the pregame festivities was the flag-raising ceremony,” McCormick said from the accounts he studied. “The stadium was dedicated to those who fought in World War I.
“Players from both teams, the Chamber of Commerce band, Terre Haute mayor Ora Davis, Judge Landis, Park Board president Wood Posey and other officials marched around the diamond to the flagpole. When Boy Scout buglers issued a call, hats were removed and the audience stood until ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was played. Applause followed.
“‘Jumbo Jim’ Elliott was the starting pitcher for Terre Haute. It was an extraordinary day made more special when the Tots edged the Tractors 5-4 in 11 innings.”
Yay for the Tots!
According to McCormick, 1920s artist-magician Jimmy Trimble spoke for many that day when he said:
“I paid my taxes this year and felt for the first time in my life that I’d received my money’s worth. Mayor Davis has done more for Terre Haute than any of the other mayors we have had … It is a wonderful thing to know that I can take my youngster and go out to the stadium to a football or baseball game and know that I will be able to get a seat.
“Maybe other mayors spent the city money just as judicially, but you can see where the money went this time.”
The opening of the new coliseum was described as “the finest minor-league stadium in America” by the Chicago Tribune and at least one New York newspaper.
For sure, Terre Haute’s Memorial Stadium had become the cat’s meow. The Big Cheese, Landis, more or less said so.
I I I
According to the Vigo County Historical Society, a nine-hole golf course was installed on the grounds surrounding the stadium in 1932 as a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project. It remained until 2002.
The stadium itself served as home for several minor-league baseball teams at various stages over its first few decades.
Close to 300 future major-league players wore a Terre Haute uniform over the years and thousands more played for opposing teams, McCormick emphasized. Almost every year, at least one major-league team came to the city for an exhibition game. Terre Haute hosted major-league spring-training camps in 1944 and 1945.
In 1945, due to special circumstances, Memorial Stadium was the spring-training site for two major-league teams: The Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers. Vigo County native Paul “Dizzy” Trout was one of the Tigers’ pitching stars, having been a 27-game winner in 1944.
“Though hampered by a personnel shortage, 16 major-league teams played throughout World War II with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s blessing,” McCormick elaborated in a 2004 column.
“FDR believed that the sport boosted morale on the homefront. Club owners did not abuse the privilege. The number of exhibition games was severely restricted and travel schedules had to be approved by baseball commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis.”
The White Sox spent five weeks in Terre Haute. And the future 1945 world champion Tigers, which trained in Evansville during much of March and the first week in April, spent the final week of its 1945 preseason at Memorial Stadium.
But with attendance dwindling after televisions surged in popularity in the 1950s, the final minor-league baseball game at Memorial Stadium took place July 3, 1956, when the Terre Haute Huts blanked the Keokuk Kernels 5-0 in front of roughly 300 fans.
Nowadays, Vigo County still owns the property. But use of the land was given to the city of Terre Haute in December 1920 for use as a public park, athletic field, exhibition ground, playground and general meeting place. Indiana State University leases the property from the city under a 99-year agreement signed in October 1966. ISU pays $10 a year in rent to the city. The lease is valid through 2065. The university has had an option to terminate that agreement any time since Oct. 1, 2016.
According to the gosycamores.com website, ISU has competed in football at Memorial Stadium since the 1967 season and its women’s soccer program began using the stadium in 2009.
“Upon the university gaining control in 1967, a three-part renovation project was started which included: the reorientation of the playing field from a north-south direction to its present east-west configuration; the installation of Astroturf [making Terre Haute’s Memorial Stadium the first outdoor stadium in the country to use it]; and the construction of some 4,500 bleacher seats on the north side of the field as well as the rebuilding of seats on the south side,” the website explains.
The Sycamores opened their 1967 football season with a 41-6 win over Eastern Illinois in the first game played on the new Astroturf surface.
“The original arch still remains from the original structure,” the website continues. “However, the bleacher seats, installed in 1967, were removed in the summer of 1996 and replaced by a landscaped hill, which serves as a general-admission section and a site for pregame tailgating for Sycamore fans.”
The stadium’s latest additions are a state-of-the-art FieldTurf artificial surface, installed prior to the 2018 football season, as well as new locker-room facilities for the football and women’s soccer programs.
The press box also received a major overhaul with a newly designed president’s and athletic director’s entertainment area, as well as upgraded amenities for the media.
“Today, a mile-long paved path surrounds the stadium, still serving as home to Indiana State University football,” the Vigo County Historical Society said in a 2022 Facebook post. “The path, roughly contoured in the shape of the state of Indiana around the stadium grounds, connects to the National Road Heritage Trail on the property’s north side.”
I I I
The building cost of $425,000 (with some reports saying $400,000) for Memorial Stadium can be compared to the much higher costs of modern construction.
“Nearly $6 billion in construction at new and renovated professional and college sports facilities is scheduled to finish in the United States and Canada in 2025,” according to Sports Business Journal’s annual venue preview published in January, “buoyed by record spending on stadiums at the college and minor-league levels.
“Overall, 2025 is projected to be a decline of 4% compared with the average over the previous three years as the industry gears up for 2026, when a record $14.2 billion is expected to close.”
Hypothetically speaking, what would it take if a big-money donor wanted to help Indiana State build a new stadium to replace Memorial Stadium?
“In college stadium work, $2.4 billion is expected to be completed this year, nearly double the 2024 spend and a half-billion dollars higher than the previous record set in 2023,” SBJ’s preview story pointed out. “But the record won’t last long, as spending in that niche is projected to top $3 billion in 2026.”
The category in 2025 is led by Kansas football’s $458 million makeover of Booth Memorial Stadium (designed by HNTB and Multistudio, built by Turner) and Florida State’s $265 million Doak Campbell Stadium renovation (designed by Populous, built by a Manhattan-Culpepper joint venture), according to the SBJ preview.
SBJ also said that a record 58 stadiums and 27 arena projects at the college level are scheduled to conclude in 2025, up from 53 and 19 respectively in 2024.
Continue reading...
Ladies, make sure your bobbed hairstyle is topped with a cloche hat. Remember, your day dress should feature simple, straight lines with mid-calf hemlines.
Invite your favorite gangster to join us. Just don’t get pinched for sneaking in bathtub gin.
Yes, it’s time to party because the dedication for the opening of Memorial Stadium at 3300 Wabash Ave. will take place May 4.
It’s sure to be the bee’s knees.
Oops, we’re in 2025. Not 1925.
My bad.
The real dedication for the minor-league baseball stadium — yes, that was its original primary purpose — occurred 100 years ago Sunday (it was a Monday in 1925).
Actually, the field was first used in 1924 when Terre Haute Wiley and Garfield high schools played their traditional Thanksgiving Day football game there.
According to my favorite Terre Haute historian, the late Mike McCormick, a parade of automobiles departed downtown for the former location of the Vigo County Fairgrounds at the northeast corner of Brown and Wabash avenues on the afternoon of May 4, 1925.
“The occasion was the formal dedication of Memorial Stadium at the opening game of the Three-I League season,” McCormick explained in one of his “Historical Perspective” columns from the 2010s. “The Terre Haute Tots were hosting the Peoria Tractors.”
McCormick noted that esteemed architect George E. Kessler of St. Louis designed Memorial Stadium and its surrounding landscape.
“Undaunted by cool breezes and threatening clouds, crowds swarmed into the new $425,000 facility, built in 1923 and 1924 at the former site of Terre Haute’s famous Four-Cornered Track,” McCormick wrote.
The stadium bowl featured 9,000 permanent, stainless-steel grandstand seats and 1,200 moveable box seats covered by a roof, according to McCormick’s book “Queen City of the Wabash.” Unroofed bleachers flanking the right- and left-field lines brought the stadium’s seating capacity to 16,000 people. A Bedford stone archway marked the south entrance. Attached to the arch were bronze tablets, memorializing the names of 6,780 Vigo County residents who served in World War I.
“With Mayor Ora Davis pushing the project, the city of Terre Haute funded the $425,000 cost of building Memorial Stadium through bond sales,” current Tribune-Star sports editor Mark Bennett mentioned in a March 2010 column. “The stone arch accounted for $90,000 of that pricetag.”
McCormick, who enjoyed reading and learning from old Terre Haute Tribune and Terre Haute Star newspaper clippings, described the Memorial Stadium grandstands on May 4 as “filled with quite a few spectators seated in the unroofed bleachers.”
“The crowd was estimated to exceed 8,500 despite proclamations by the Central Labor Union urging union men not to attend the game because the stadium was partly constructed with non-union labor,” his description continued.
McCormick said the stadium was quiet when, without warning, the Harmony Four quartet broke into song to welcome Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, who arrived as a special guest.
That’s the equivalent of current MLB commissioner Rob Manfred showing up for a baseball game at Bob Warn Field.
Back to May 1925, the horseshoe-shaped coliseum was 600 feet long and 375 feet wide. The baseball playing field measured an unthinkable 546 feet from home plate to the center-field wall. Only New York’s original Yankee Stadium had a larger athletic field at that time, according to historical lore.
“A large bouquet was presented to the commissioner from adjoining box seats,” McCormick said of the dedication ceremony. “Landis bowed as the audience stood in reverence.
“Box seats for the Rotary, Kiwanis and Exchange clubs were attractively decorated and employees of Model Ice Cream Co. paraded to their seats in uniform.”
Sounds like a fun day — maybe even copacetic, continuing my desperate attempt to insert 1920s lingo into this column — but the celebration wasn’t over yet.
“Perhaps the most impressive segment of the pregame festivities was the flag-raising ceremony,” McCormick said from the accounts he studied. “The stadium was dedicated to those who fought in World War I.
“Players from both teams, the Chamber of Commerce band, Terre Haute mayor Ora Davis, Judge Landis, Park Board president Wood Posey and other officials marched around the diamond to the flagpole. When Boy Scout buglers issued a call, hats were removed and the audience stood until ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was played. Applause followed.
“‘Jumbo Jim’ Elliott was the starting pitcher for Terre Haute. It was an extraordinary day made more special when the Tots edged the Tractors 5-4 in 11 innings.”
Yay for the Tots!
According to McCormick, 1920s artist-magician Jimmy Trimble spoke for many that day when he said:
“I paid my taxes this year and felt for the first time in my life that I’d received my money’s worth. Mayor Davis has done more for Terre Haute than any of the other mayors we have had … It is a wonderful thing to know that I can take my youngster and go out to the stadium to a football or baseball game and know that I will be able to get a seat.
“Maybe other mayors spent the city money just as judicially, but you can see where the money went this time.”
The opening of the new coliseum was described as “the finest minor-league stadium in America” by the Chicago Tribune and at least one New York newspaper.
For sure, Terre Haute’s Memorial Stadium had become the cat’s meow. The Big Cheese, Landis, more or less said so.
I I I
According to the Vigo County Historical Society, a nine-hole golf course was installed on the grounds surrounding the stadium in 1932 as a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project. It remained until 2002.
The stadium itself served as home for several minor-league baseball teams at various stages over its first few decades.
Close to 300 future major-league players wore a Terre Haute uniform over the years and thousands more played for opposing teams, McCormick emphasized. Almost every year, at least one major-league team came to the city for an exhibition game. Terre Haute hosted major-league spring-training camps in 1944 and 1945.
In 1945, due to special circumstances, Memorial Stadium was the spring-training site for two major-league teams: The Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers. Vigo County native Paul “Dizzy” Trout was one of the Tigers’ pitching stars, having been a 27-game winner in 1944.
“Though hampered by a personnel shortage, 16 major-league teams played throughout World War II with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s blessing,” McCormick elaborated in a 2004 column.
“FDR believed that the sport boosted morale on the homefront. Club owners did not abuse the privilege. The number of exhibition games was severely restricted and travel schedules had to be approved by baseball commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis.”
The White Sox spent five weeks in Terre Haute. And the future 1945 world champion Tigers, which trained in Evansville during much of March and the first week in April, spent the final week of its 1945 preseason at Memorial Stadium.
But with attendance dwindling after televisions surged in popularity in the 1950s, the final minor-league baseball game at Memorial Stadium took place July 3, 1956, when the Terre Haute Huts blanked the Keokuk Kernels 5-0 in front of roughly 300 fans.
Nowadays, Vigo County still owns the property. But use of the land was given to the city of Terre Haute in December 1920 for use as a public park, athletic field, exhibition ground, playground and general meeting place. Indiana State University leases the property from the city under a 99-year agreement signed in October 1966. ISU pays $10 a year in rent to the city. The lease is valid through 2065. The university has had an option to terminate that agreement any time since Oct. 1, 2016.
According to the gosycamores.com website, ISU has competed in football at Memorial Stadium since the 1967 season and its women’s soccer program began using the stadium in 2009.
“Upon the university gaining control in 1967, a three-part renovation project was started which included: the reorientation of the playing field from a north-south direction to its present east-west configuration; the installation of Astroturf [making Terre Haute’s Memorial Stadium the first outdoor stadium in the country to use it]; and the construction of some 4,500 bleacher seats on the north side of the field as well as the rebuilding of seats on the south side,” the website explains.
The Sycamores opened their 1967 football season with a 41-6 win over Eastern Illinois in the first game played on the new Astroturf surface.
“The original arch still remains from the original structure,” the website continues. “However, the bleacher seats, installed in 1967, were removed in the summer of 1996 and replaced by a landscaped hill, which serves as a general-admission section and a site for pregame tailgating for Sycamore fans.”
The stadium’s latest additions are a state-of-the-art FieldTurf artificial surface, installed prior to the 2018 football season, as well as new locker-room facilities for the football and women’s soccer programs.
The press box also received a major overhaul with a newly designed president’s and athletic director’s entertainment area, as well as upgraded amenities for the media.
“Today, a mile-long paved path surrounds the stadium, still serving as home to Indiana State University football,” the Vigo County Historical Society said in a 2022 Facebook post. “The path, roughly contoured in the shape of the state of Indiana around the stadium grounds, connects to the National Road Heritage Trail on the property’s north side.”
I I I
The building cost of $425,000 (with some reports saying $400,000) for Memorial Stadium can be compared to the much higher costs of modern construction.
“Nearly $6 billion in construction at new and renovated professional and college sports facilities is scheduled to finish in the United States and Canada in 2025,” according to Sports Business Journal’s annual venue preview published in January, “buoyed by record spending on stadiums at the college and minor-league levels.
“Overall, 2025 is projected to be a decline of 4% compared with the average over the previous three years as the industry gears up for 2026, when a record $14.2 billion is expected to close.”
Hypothetically speaking, what would it take if a big-money donor wanted to help Indiana State build a new stadium to replace Memorial Stadium?
“In college stadium work, $2.4 billion is expected to be completed this year, nearly double the 2024 spend and a half-billion dollars higher than the previous record set in 2023,” SBJ’s preview story pointed out. “But the record won’t last long, as spending in that niche is projected to top $3 billion in 2026.”
The category in 2025 is led by Kansas football’s $458 million makeover of Booth Memorial Stadium (designed by HNTB and Multistudio, built by Turner) and Florida State’s $265 million Doak Campbell Stadium renovation (designed by Populous, built by a Manhattan-Culpepper joint venture), according to the SBJ preview.
SBJ also said that a record 58 stadiums and 27 arena projects at the college level are scheduled to conclude in 2025, up from 53 and 19 respectively in 2024.
Continue reading...
