Gene's Blog: One last hurrah for O'Shaughnessy Hall

December 08, 2009

In sports and life, there’s an art to knowing when to bow out gracefully. After 70 years, O’Shaughnessy Hall will soon take that bow and exit stage right to make way for a new chapter in St. Thomas athletics.

A grand old building and the heart and soul of Tommie athletics for seven decades, OSH will turn out its lights for good during the first week of January. It was originally set for a May shut down, and then had a March ending, but that date has again been moved up.

Asbestos assessment and removal will take up the rest of the winter. Then the spring demolition will allow for completion of the $54 million Anderson Athletic Recreation and Athletic Center for its August opening.

O’Shaughnessy Hall’s demolition will also allow crews to begin construction of the $66 million Anderson Student Center. That facility is scheduled to open in January 2012.

Once upon a time, this building was the vision of prominent businessman and Tommie alum Ignatius O'Shaughnessy, who stepped up and addressed the need for a new recreational facility on the campus grounds. O’Shaughnessy recalled his own St. Thomas college years from 1903-07, when the hot spot was Mrs. Tilley's Stand, a farmhouse at Cretin and Grand Avenues where students spent pocket change on pop and candy.

A successful career in business allowed O’Shaughnessy to make his vision a reality. His $400,000 gift let St. Thomas construct a showcase building for athletics, recreation and student life.

O’Shaughnessy Hall opened in January 1940, four months after the onset of World War II. It helped accommodate St. Thomas’ post-war boom in student enrollment.

The venue also helped Tommie athletics expand in the 1940s and 1950s, and later was the home of basketball’s mini-dynasty in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The O’Shaughnessy Natatorium is the oldest college pool in the state still in use. It’s one of three Minnesota college on-campus indoor venues built before 1940 still hosting competitions, joining Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota (1928) and Hamline’s Hutton Arena (1937).

A visionary

Doug Hennes’ 2007 St. Thomas magazine profile of I.A. O’Shaughnessy was revealing:

When World War I broke out, O’Shaughnessy leased a factory in Kansas to make tires on a government contract. In 1917, he moved into a business that would produce his fortune a he established the Globe Oil & Refining Co. of Oklahoma. He negotiated oil field leases with Indian tribes and the federal government, and pumped, refined and sold oil.

With Globe and other companies that he established throughout the Great Plains area, including Lario Oil and Don Oil (named after his two youngest sons), O'Shaughnessy became known as "King of the Wildcatters."

In 1928, O’Shaughnessy moved his family back to St. Paul into a Summit Avenue residence located four blocks from campus. He commuted to his various oil projects in the south.

Hennes wrote that three decades after graduating from St. Thomas, O'Shaughnessy returned to a formal role on campus in 1938 as a trustee. He reached an "arrangement" with Archbishop John Murray, that each would provide for a new building. The new Albertus Magnus Hall and O’Shaughnessy Hall were the result.

Over a 35-year span, O'Shaughnessy's gifts to St. Thomas totaled $8.5 million -- $90 million in today's dollars. He once told a reporter that "Money is like manure. It doesn't do any good unless you spread it around."

Memory lane

Before the OSH doors are locked and bulldozers roll, there’s time to reflect on what the site has meant to students, staff and faculty over the last seven decades.

It’s been more than just a pool or a gymnasium. Some will remember the ‘Cage.” Or the fitness room. The classrooms and teachers. The Health & Human Performance Department. Coaches’ offices. Racquetball courts. Club sports. Aerobics. Locker rooms. The athletic training room. Meeting rooms and game films. Tommie-Johnnie games played before sellout crowds of 1,200.

During its first 33 years, students hung out at OSH’s second-floor bowling alley. The space later became a weight room where athletes from every Tommie team have toiled and congregated.

PHOTO: Steve Fritz (54) played and coached in the grand old OSH

O’Shaughnessy Hall’s first competition was a high school hoops game played on Jan. 12, 1940, between St. Thomas Academy and Minneapolis Washburn High. Ten days later, it hosted its first college basketball game as Gustavus scored a 41-25 win over the Tommies.

Seven Tommie basketball head coaches called OSH their home court. Tom Kosel started the women’s program and had four seasons there. Tom Feely’s 26-year run was the longest of the six men’s basketball coaches. Feely’s teams had a 34-game win streak in the old upstairs gym from January 1965 to January 1968. His teams went 106-6 on that floor in a 10-season run of the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

Steve Fritz made his head coaching debut there in November 1980, and watched St. Thomas drop 105 points on St. Scholastica.

Tom Hodgson has led swimming workouts and meets there over the last 31 seasons.

JoAnn Andregg, a key UST athletics administrator the last 25 years, was head volleyball coach there in the first four seasons the sport was offered.

Long before Mark Dienhart settled into an Executive VP's office in Aquinas Hall, he officed in OSH in stints as a sports information director, track and field coach, and head football coach.

Until 1980, OSH was also the home of UST wrestling meets. It housed the program’s practice rrom until the sport was discontinued here in 2001.

After the new O’Shaughnessy Hall pool opened, the Tommies started an MIAC dynasty in 1941 under coaches Robert Christiansen, Don Adee and Rev. Stanley Martinka. They captured the conference championship nine of the next 11 years the meet was held from 1941-1953. Only Hamline in 1943 and Gustavus in 1952 broke the Tommies' consecutive title streak.

Friday farewell

Over the next six months, the transition to new facilities will challenge several Tommie athletics teams. The swimming team will practice in January at McCarthy Gym’s pool on south campus. The athletic training room will move to McCarthy. The equipment room likely will operate out of McCarthy or a portable trailer. A makeshift weight room will spring up under the bleachers at O’Shaughnessy Stadium.

Offices for coaches, administrators and sports information will move into the top floors of Murray-Herrick Center.

All eight winter sports will compete off campus the rest of the season. Athletes in tennis, baseball, softball and track and field will rent nearby training facilities until weather allows for outdoor practices.

There will be one final event in OSH this Friday. Coach Hodgson’s men’s and women’s swimmers will have a farewell dual meet against Gustavus at 6 p.m.

“The meet will feature events from 1941, when the pool hosted its first meet,” Hodgson said, “including the 150 Medley Relay, 220 Freestyle, 50 Yard Dash, 150 Backstroke, 440 Freestyle, 200 Breast Stroke, and 400 Freestyle Relay.”

St. Thomas is planning to produce a live video webcast of the meet, which is expected to attract several swimming and diving alumni.

Friday will be a celebration of many things, not the least of which is the wise investment by a wise man. I.A. O’Shaughnessy’s 1940 gift produced a unique building. The bricks and mortar lasted 70 years, but  the memories from inside the walls will last for infinity in school archives.

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Your OSH memories

Alumni, fans, faculty, staff and students are invited to submit any favorite O’Shaughnessy Hall memories. Maybe it was a Tommie-Johnnie basketball game from the 1960s? Memories of the bowling alley, weight training, or the long wrestling room. Perhaps it brings to mind fellow students who you hung out with in the building.

Your responses will be posted in a “OSH Remembered” blog on Tommiesports.com. Send short notes, titled “OSH,”  with your name and class if you choose, to ejmcgivern@stthomas.edu