Historic Hoosier Gyms: Discovering Bygone Basketball Landmarks

PERU

Brian Strong’s curiosity got the best of him.

Newly hired as the Peru High School athletic director in the summer of 2009, Strong dropped off his son at daycare, located in classrooms adjoining Tig-Arena, Peru’s vintage 1940 gymnasium. After one look, Strong was hooked.

I couldn’t believe it, he said. I thought right away that we had to do everything we could to get a game here.

On December 4, 2009, for the first time since the end of the 1990 season, the old Tig-Arena was hopping again. Before a sellout crowd of more than twenty-five hundred fans, Peru defeated rival Wabash 81–35. Among those in attendance were 1975 Indiana Mr. Basketball Kyle Macy and six-foot-eleven John Garrett, an Indiana all-star from 1971 who went on to play at Purdue.

Though Peru moved to a new home for the 1990–91 season (also called Tig-Arena), the old arena remained standing as an important piece of the community’s rich basketball heritage. Peru hosted the sectional from 1941 to 1963, winning it seventeen times. It also hosted the 1943 regional, defeating Monticello 36–34 for the regional championship.

Tig-Arena was a basketball mecca, said Bob Biddle, who coached at Peru for seven seasons beginning in 1958. It was a true basketball arena, not a bad seat in the house. It was packed for every game. It was hot and it was loud. It was a true showplace, a great venue for basketball.

The Miami Nation of Indians bought the building from the school for $1 in 1990 and has used it for a variety of community functions, including bingo nights three times a week. When Strong approached Miami Nation of Indians vice-chief John Dunnagan about bringing basketball back to Tig-Arena, he was all for it. Dunnagan said the heating bill can run $6,000 a month in the winter.

Just having [a game here] is the main thing, Dunnagan said. There’s still a use for it. Too many nights it just sits here empty.

Strong hopes the success of the first game at Tig-Arena in almost twenty years will help make the gym a part—albeit a smaller part—of Peru’s future. There are many others in the Miami County community who feel the same way.

It takes you back to the days when basketball was really the only source of entertainment in town, Biddle said. I’ve already heard some people ask, ‘Why don’t we go back and play there all the time?’

Tig-Arena, built in Peru in 1940, has been owned by the Miami Nation of Indians since 1990.

An interior look at Tig-Arena in Peru. The team played a throwback game in the gym in 2009 to a sellout crowd.

LEBANON

Sometimes the outdoor courts just wouldn’t do.

On sweltering summer nights in 1965, just before his senior year, Rick Mount would stop by coach Jim Rosenstihl’s house and ask for the key. Usually, it was the coach’s wife, Patricia Ann, who answered the door. She knew the key Mount was after was to Lebanon Memory Hall, which filled its twenty-two-hundred-seat capacity throughout Mount’s illustrious high school career.

But on these nights, it was just Mount and the basketball echoing as it bounced in the empty gym. The lights from Memory Hall shined out from the high windows into the neighborhood. That caused a problem.

I’d be in there for a couple hours and lose track of time, said Mount, who still lives in Lebanon. I didn’t realize it, but that light would shine right out into those people’s houses. So they called the mayor and complained; he called coach Rosenstihl, and he told me to quit shooting so late at night.

Mount begged his way back into the gym, only after promising to shoot by the light of the moon and the exit sign. In February 1966, Mount would become the first high school athlete to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He led Lebanon to a regional championship as a senior and finished his career with 2,595 points, now fourth on the state’s all-time list.

The fans would be right up there close, Mount said of the gym, which was built in 1931. It was always so hot. Even in the middle of January, they’d open those big windows to cool it off in there.

Lebanon’s high school team moved out after the 1967–68 season. Mount took a tour of the new gym while on a break from Purdue.

Coach Rosenstihl asked me to test out the new baskets, Mount remembered. He wanted me to make the first shot in the new gym.

The city bought Memory Hall and the adjoining school in 1974, after a new middle school was completed. Though it appeared in a scene in the 1986 movie Hoosiers, there was talk of tearing it down in the 1980s and ’90s, as it sat empty.

In 1996, Leo Stenz, owner of Stenz Construction Development Corporation in Indianapolis, bought and refurbished the gym and school, turning it into a health club and senior living center.

Memory Hall looks much like it did during Mount’s playing days. A portrait of Mount, Indiana’s 1966 Mr. Basketball adorns the gym’s south end.

It was a great old gym, said Mount, whose father, Pete, was a star on Lebanon’s 1943 state runner-up team. I’m so glad they didn’t tear it down. If it could talk, you wonder what stories it could tell.

This mural where the stage was once located depicts Lebanon’s school through the years and honors former Lebanon and Purdue star Rick Mount.

Leo Stentz of Indianapolis bought the Lebanon gym and former school in 1996 and converted it into a health center.

Memory Hall in Lebanon was built in 1931 and was the site of several sectional tournaments.

SANDUSKY

For two years, Chris and Michele Komora searched the United States, looking for an old school to renovate and call home.

We wanted to find a building that wasn’t too huge and unmanageable but something that was unique that we could fix up and keep us busy, said Chris Komora, a Chicago native who is retired from the military. Also, we are foster-care certified, so the idea of having this much room—and a gym—was really appealing.

In 2003, after looking at more than two hundred schools from Idaho to New York, they found their nirvana: the former Sandusky High School, a few miles north of Greensburg in Decatur County. For $95,000, the Komoras bought a building that hadn’t been used in thirty-five years, with a gym built in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration project.

The Sandusky gym was built in 1936. A group of Sandusky alums helped Chris and Michele Komora renovate the school and gym, which they use as their home.

Rooms were filled with trash. There were dead rodents. The roof leaked. Windows were broken.

As the Komoras worked to restore the building over the next three years, they drew curious stares from residents of the unincorporated town, many of whom were Sandusky graduates.

Some were skeptical, but not all. A group of Sandusky alumni, led by Jim Spillman (class of 1944), helped the Komoras renovate. A new roof was put on the gym, handicapped-accessible bathrooms were added and the bleachers and original goals were scraped and painted.

Now the gym is just another room—a big one—in the house. Named for Spillman, who died in 2007, the gym looks much as it did in 1936. The Komoras hosted a Sandusky reunion in the gym in 2006, twenty-eight years after the previous one.

I’m thrilled to see it still standing, said Arthur Cleland, a 1947 graduate who helped with the renovation. Every time we drive past it, it means a lot to see it there. Every game back then would be standing-room only.

KEWANNA

A sign greets visitors coming from the north on Indiana 17 just outside of Kewanna. It proclaims the Fulton County community of six hundred to be The Little Town With a Big Heart. It’s a motto not without merit. For years, much longer than most communities its size, Kewanna fought off the school consolidation that had ripped the pulse of many small towns in Indiana.

The final graduating class of 16 students passed through Kewanna’s doors in 1982.

It was a pretty bustling little town at one time, said Tom Troutman, a 1966 graduate. They fought off consolidation as long as they could. But like most little towns, it eventually happened.

Depending on their address, Kewanna’s students were sent to one of three schools: Caston, Rochester or Winamac. The 1917 school was torn down a few years later, but the gym—built in 1928—was purchased by the Winamac Coil Spring Company in 1985, a family-owned business that moved from Winamac to Kewanna in 1958.

We purchased it to keep it from becoming a sore sight, said Gene Huber, one of the owners. We use the classrooms up above the gym for storage and tore out the floor and use the gym part of it for production.

Though it’s filled with machinery now, it’s not hard to imagine what it looked like as a basketball court. The shell of the stage is still visible on the east end (though the actual stage has been torn out), and there is a balcony on the west end above the cafeteria where elementary and junior high students would congregate during games.

The Kewanna gym, built in 1928, is now used by the Winamac Coil Spring Company. It was so small that Kewanna rarely played its home games there by the 1950s.

The gym had bleachers on just one side—the south—and seated maybe 250 at capacity. By the 1950s, the Indians played many home games at neighboring schools, mainly Aubeenaubee Township.

We’d play a couple home games a year, but the gym was so small, Troutman said. We had two ten-second lines, which was usually confusing for the other team. It was a great home-court advantage.

Kewanna won sectionals in 1927 (when it played in a basement gym at the old school) and in 1954, but it usually ran up against bigger schools in Rochester or Logansport. The teams in 1965 and ’66 combined to go 33-10, led by six-foot-two Ron McColley and five-foot-eleven Jim Talbott. Also a star pitcher on Kewanna’s baseball teams, Talbott scored 1,029 points in his career.

On August 6, 1969, just two weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Talbott was killed in combat in Vietnam. The community built a Veterans of Foreign Wars post three years later and named it for Talbott.

After all these years, we still grieve for him, said Shirley Willard, a former teacher at Kewanna.

SHARPSVILLE

Virginia Chambers took a seat in the first-row bleachers at the O.H. Hughes Memorial Gymnasium—named after the school’s first superintendent—just a few feet from where she sat fifty years earlier as a vocal member of the cheer block known as the Bulldog Barkers (complete with a live bulldog).

It holds a lot of memories, said the former Virginia Henderson, looking out onto the court. This is what kids did. Friday night, you were here.

Built at a cost of $15,000 in 1926, the Sharpsville gym is all that’s left to remind visitors that the rural Tipton County community once had a school of its own. Sharpsville absorbed Prairie Township in 1963–64 and was known as the Sharpsville-Prairie Spartans until 1970, when the school consolidated with Windfall and became known as Tri-Central, located just outside Sharpsville.

The adjoining school building—which was rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original school on February 4, 1928—was used as an elementary school until 1982. It was razed six years later, and a park was erected in its place with money raised by the Sharpsville Park Committee and through a grant from the Tipton County Foundation.

After moving out of its original gym, which was located above a hardware store, the Bulldogs had immediate success, winning the 1927 Tipton Sectional and Anderson Regional. Led by coach Dwight V. Singer, the Bulldogs lost 29–22 to Muncie Central in the first round of the sixteen-team state finals played at the Indianapolis Exposition Center. Sharpsville would go on to claim sectional titles in 1928 and 1948.

The seven-hundred-seat-capacity gym is still used today for league games, reunions, parties and community celebrations, even one wedding. Among its unique features are long vertical windows on the north end and a stage on the south end.

It was always packed, said Rick Grimme, a 1969 graduate. A lot of guys, including my dad, would stand up against the wall surrounding the court. They never sat down. We thought it was fun to sit on the stage (on the south end) to catch the ball if came flying up there.

The Sharpsville gym in Tipton County was built in 1926.

Before playing in this gym, the Sharpsville Bulldogs played in a gym above a hardware store.

MATTHEWS

The unusually wide main street of Matthews recalls a time of great ambition. Located in the center of the Trenton gas field, the Grant County community was a boomtown in the late 1800s, with a population upwards of 100,000 residents and nearly twenty surrounding suburbs.

Around that time, in the 1890s, a long wood structure called the French Club was built a block east of downtown as one of the growing community’s original bar and dance halls. The building was moved to Main Street a few years later, in 1900, and soon found an alternate use as a tiny high school gymnasium.

Doyte Kibbey, interviewed in January 2010 at age ninety-five, is one of the few remaining members of the former Matthews Minutemen. Kibbey graduated from Matthews in 1933, and the school was consolidated with Upland to create Jefferson Township in 1934.

The story goes that they were named the Minutemen because they were scoring a point a minute, Kibbey said. That was quite a bit in those days.

Matthews never won a sectional tournament in its short history, but it did advance to the Grant County Tournament championship in 1932, losing by one point to Van Buren. Kibbey was the team captain as a senior. He played back guard and rarely crossed half court.

In one home game against nearby Harrison Township in 1933, Kibbey was told by coach Herbert Groninger to smother sharpshooter Jimmy Yeager. He did, holding Yeager to one point. The Muncie Star lauded the Minutemen for doing a better job on Yeager than eventual regional champion Muncie Central.

We had some great games there, Kibbey said. There wasn’t much room, just maybe two rows of spectators and some up on the stage. When the people sat on the bleachers, their feet would be on the playing floor. We had a lot of good teams there over the years and a lot of enthusiasm.

The elementary school students used the facility for many years, into the 1970s, after high school was consolidated. The Lions Club now leases the gym from the town corporation (through the school corporation) for $1 a year, and the building was extensively renovated in 1997, including new metal siding, a new roof and other upgrades for an estimated $15,000.

The gym is available to rent, although it doesn’t attract as many visitors as it once did. Kibbey, who lives two blocks from the gym, is one of the few who remember it as a high school gym.

We feel like it’s a service to the community to keep it going, Kibbey said. We don’t cover our expenses, but hopefully there’s still a use for it.

The exterior of the Matthews gym, former home of the Matthews Minutemen.

This gym in Matthews was originally known as the French Club in the early 1900s. The Grant County community only had a high school until 1934. The gym is now available to rent.

PERRY CENTRAL

Want to buy a gym? Bob and Ginny Patterson did, and in 1986 they bought the former Perry Central gym in rural Boone County.

The gym, built in 1939, was in bad shape. The windows were boarded up, and the roof was caving in. It was barely salvageable.

For two years, the Pattersons lived in a motor home parked at center court while they refurbished the west end of the building—where there was a stage that overlooked the court—into a cozy home. They turned the area that was once the gym into storage for their business, Fayette