'It seems like it was just yesterday.' Lost Gyms series to explore former high school gyms

Indianapolis Star

20 hours ago

This is an introduction to IndyStar's "Lost Gyms" project. A few years ago, we visited Indiana's great high school basketball cathedrals, some of the nation's largest gyms. This summer, we'll take you to some gyms lost to time, where Hoosier Hysteria has long since moved on, but is not forgotten.
We were sitting in the Cabby O'Neill Gym in Jasper on a bright spring afternoon recently as the sunlight shined through the windows and glistened on the hardwood floor.
Across from us was the man who spent months glazing the windows in 2009 and '10 as part of the effort to save the gym where we were sitting. For 16 months, hardly a day passed by when Rick Begle did not spend time working on the Cabby O'Neill Gym. He poured hundreds of hours into the gym where he sat on Santa Claus' lap as a 5-year-old, watched Jasper basketball games as an elementary-age kid, then played for the Wildcats in the 1970s, scoring the last basket in the gym before a new gym was built on the outskirts of town.
All of that work proved more fruitful than Begle even realized when the roof of the Jasper gym collapsed after heavy rains in 2011. For two years, Jasper played its home games at the Cabby O'Neill Gym. Rick's son, Caleb, scored the first basket in a high school game at the gym since his dad made the last one 33 years earlier.
'That was kind of precious for me,' Rick said.
When Jasper's new gym was finished and the high school games moved back, the Cabby O'Neill retreated from the limelight again. But it remains a busy place. There are dance and cheerleading practices, middle school basketball games, wrestling meets and more.
'There is definitely some gratification,' said Begle, 'that we did the right thing.'
These buildings are just that to some … buildings. They do not see what Rick Begle sees when he sits inside the Cabby O'Neill gym, 60 years after he first sat there behind the goal and thought, 'What do I have to be able to do get out there and play in this environment?'
It does not feel like 60 years, of course. Time is a thief.
Several years ago — going on 16 or 17 now — I traveled around the state to visit places like the Cabby O'Neill gym for a project for IndyStar. These former high school gyms in towns that no longer had schools, or maybe just elementary schools. Some of the gyms had new lives as community centers or businesses. One was part of a fire station. One was a church. Another a library. A few were part of people's homes. Some were barely hanging on.
I don't remember how many I visited. Too many. The project for IndyStar turned into a book called Historic Hoosier Gyms: Discovering Bygone Basketball Landmarks published by The History Press. I condensed it down to 100 gyms for the book, which published in 2010.
My goal at the time — certainly arguable whether it was achieved it not — was to document these places, and their stories, before they were gone. But the fun part for me was not necessarily visiting the gyms themselves; it was hearing from the people who loved them. I remember vividly talking to 80-year-old George Sutton, who had lived next door to the Arlington school and gym in Rush County for 36 years. The school, built in 1909, and the gym, built in 1939, would soon be torn down.
As we stood outside the gym on a snowy January night, Sutton eloquently stated his thoughts on the future of the gym.
'Yesterday's gone,' Sutton said. 'It has value, but only in the minds of those of us who remember it. It's like a pumpkin at the end of the vine.'
Sutton died in 2015 at age 86. So, too, have many of the people I talked to for the book. Bud Tutterrow told me he would cry his eyeballs out and buy the gym himself if they ever thought of tearing down the gym in tiny Economy. Bud died in 2010. A few miles away, Jon Detwiler amazed me with how much work he put into the Williamsburg gym in Wayne County. I talked to him two months before he passed away in April of 2009. The community renamed the gym for Detwiler that summer.
Every time a Tutterrow or Detwiler passes away, a little bit of basketball history is lost. We become further removed from the era when these unique gyms popped up — mostly from the 1920s through the 1950s — and before the School Corporation Reorganization Act of 1959 drastically cut down on the number of schools in the state over the next decade. Those gyms, once the center of activity in the community, went quiet. Consolidations and antiseptic, multipurpose gyms followed.
And little by little, every year, there are fewer of the old gyms still standing. In January of 2023, I visited the old Pine Village gym for a going away party for the 1940 gym that was soon to be demolished. Walking through the door that morning at the former home of the Pine Village Pine Knots was something I will never forget. The outpouring of love for the gym was clear from those who wore letter jackets and shared stories of a school that was consolidated in 1973.
'I bet if I chained myself to the building, he would chain himself to the building, too,' said 1963 graduate Mary Gamble, wearing her school sweater, to '64 graduate Marv Blessing.
But there are old gyms still out there, hiding in plain sight. Over the past few months, we visited several of them for our 'Lost Gyms' series. We sat down inside these gyms and listened to those who played in them, coached in them and cheered in them to understand what made these gyms so special, and so personal.
Some laughed. Some cried. Some laughed and cried. And over the next few weeks, starting Monday, we will share their stories.
'When you are 17 or 18 years old, you don't think of the gym you're in,' one 80-year-old man told us as he sat in the gym where he played. 'You just take it for granted. That's just where you play. What's kind of sad is that it seems like it was just yesterday.'
Yesterday might be gone. But it's not forgotten.