CommunityNews
Phyllis Johnson accepts that this fall’s demolition has made Memorial Hall, the building finished in 1915 at a cost of $225,000 and as a tribute to Civil War soldiers, a memory.
“But those that are in my age group and older won’t ever forget the things that were presented there.”
With the help of Johnson and others who called the News-Sun to share their Memorial Hall memories, we today present special stories — stories of elephants and wrestlers, boxers and pianists, graduations and an encounter with Jack Dempsey.
Willie Cooney’s daughter
“I may have been in grade school or maybe a freshman in high school,” Mary Ann Burr recalled. Whichever it was, she was swept off her feet when Jeanette MacDonald came to sing on the Memorial Hall stage.
“It was fascinating to see her in the movies and to think she was in Springfield, Ohio.”
A bookend experience came the day she was in the hall for her 1945 graduation from Catholic Central High School.
“I was kind of down in the front” because her maiden name was Cooney, she said. And when her name was announced, Monsignor Quinn, representing the Cincinnati Archdiocese, jumped up and shouted “That’s Willie Cooney’s daughter!”
“In the home brew days,” she explained, “Msg. Quinn was here as a priest. Whenever he’d come over, he and my father would eat soda crackers and drink home brew.”
A patriotic act
On Jan. 30, 1935, the nation did a thing that seems strange today. It celebrated President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 53rd birthday by holding a coast-to-coast fundraiser to help fight polio, or as it was then called, infantile paralysis, Roosevelt’s well known affliction.
“We had a dance at Memorial Hall,” said George M. McCann, who was then in eighth grade, “and the prettiest young lady in Springfield agreed to attend with me.”
“Her name was Kathleen Collins,” McCann explained. “We were both students at St. Raphael School. And the only reason she agreed to go with me was it was the patriotic thing to do.”
Besides, said McCann, back then, Memorial Hall “was the place to go.”
The first balcony
Phyllis Johnson was “just mesmerized by Peter Nero. I can still picture him sitting at the piano.”
Johnson’s earlier memories of Memorial Hall involve Handsome Johnny Baron, the Magnificent Maurice and Wild Bill Curry.
“My father was a wonderful person who enjoyed wrestling matches,” she said.
Perhaps for his daughter’s safety, “we never sat ringside,” said Johnson, who was “8, 9” when she went to the events. “But if you sat up in the first balcony, you could see more of what was going on.”
The memories may be all the more important to her because Johnson lost her father when she was 14.
Elephant memory
In 1970, then-sheriff’s Deputy John Loney took an extra duty assignment at Memorial Hall and was keeping an eye on the happenings around the wrestling ring when he warned a rambunctious woman to settle down.
Said Loney, “She whispered in my ear in a very soft and feminine voice, ‘Honey, I’m part of the act.’ ”
Loney was called to the hall on a more serious matter in the late 1970s.
There he found “a full box of Spanish American War rifles still wrapped in cosmoline.”
No one claimed them.
Loney’s father, Gene, passed on another memory to him.
While security for a circus, Loney and a firefighter noticed the floor sagging near the stage area when the elephants passed by.
“They both went to the basement and saw the flooring above was about to collapse under the weight of the animals. No more circuses were held there again.”
A nasty clown
The circus ban didn’t come soon enough for Helen Gearhardt’s son Doug.
Mrs. Gearhardt, who received the telling advice “don’t be half-baked” at Memorial Hall during 1949 commencement exercises from Springfield High School, took 4-year old Doug to the circus there in 1957. It was a special day for more than one reason.
“It was the first time I said, ‘I’ll let you comb your own hair,’ ” she said.
Although she was worried about whether the trapeze artists might come down on the audience, the real problem came when “this clown came along and messed up my son’s hair. To this day he’s upset.”
A two-piece dress
Peggy Fenton Balzer had been there in the 1930s as a child, when International Harvester Co. had its annual Christmas party there.
“Everybody brought their families, and Santa Claus was there,” said Mrs. Balzer. “He handed out these little boxes of candy that had at least one chocolate drop in it.”
In the ninth grade, something bigger happened.
“A young man took me to the symphony,” she said. “I remember getting a new outfit for it. It was a blue two-piece dress.”
Among her husband Charles’ most vivid memories was a home show that featured the Combustioneer Stoker made by Springfield’s Steel Products Engineering Company. The device rotated coal into a furnace so no one had to hand-stoke the fire at night.
He recalls, too, the Civil War memorabilia then stored in the room set aside for the Grand Army of the Republic, the room where he and other members of the Marine Corps League met.
Phillips or regular?
Retired Springfield policeman George Belcher was on extra duty in the early 1960s when the Calvalcade of Stars came to Memorial Hall.
Trying to keep traffic moving in the alley behind the building, things got chaotic when excited teeny boppers saw heart-throb Bobby Vinton take his shirt off in his room at the nearby Travel Lodge.
Belcher’s supervisor ordered him to tell Vinton to put his shirt on or be arrested — “only he said it in plainer English,” Belcher recalled.
Vinton cooperated.
Belcher recalls another moment from a Policeman’s Ball that featured Stan Kenton’s band.
Between sets, a group of policemen took Kenton and his bandmates across Main Street to the Atlas Night Club, where Freddie Fick, Belcher’s father-in-law, for years sold hard liquor to men getting off their shifts at Crowell-Collier.
The bar wasn’t much in the way of serving mixed drinks, which became apparent when “one of the policemen came up and told my father-in-law ‘Mr. Kenton would like a screwdriver,’” Belcher said.
His father-in-law “went over and opened his little tool drawer and got one out.”
Dempsey’s call
In the late 1960s, Dick Bishop took his Perrin Woods basketball team to practice in the dim, dusty, dank and cold Memorial Hall. But he’d seen a circus there as a child, enjoyed the Golden Gloves boxing matches, and recalls a brief fight in which an up-and-coming Davey Moore floored his opponent in the first round.
There because the father of his friend, Melvin Houston, had sponsored the event, he stuck around for an eight-rounder that followed and, later got the thrill of a lifetime.
Jack Dempsey, brought in to referee the fight, came out from the shadows with Houston, and waved the boys over.
“I got to shake Jack Dempsey’s hand,” Bishop said, which meant he got to saw his hand disappear into it. “He had the biggest fist I ever saw in my life.”
Dempsey also said something Bishop won’t forget: “that Davey Moore’s going to be world’s champion.”
Dempsey was right.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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