Throwback Thursday - The vote to buy the Odd Fellows Hall

On Tuesday, Dec. 6, 1938, a special election was held to give Laurel voters the opportunity to approve or reject issuing $8,500 in bonds to purchase the vacant Odd Fellows auditorium and to fix it up for public use. 

Of this amount $7,000 was earmarked to purchased the building from William B. Chambers and $1,500 was to be used for repairs and remodeling.

When the votes were tallied, the proposal carried by a margin of 188 to 69. 

The plan called for putting a stage on the south end of the main floor and installing a basketball court for high school use. 

Showers and locker rooms would be built in the basement. At that time, the Laurel High basketball team played in a tiny court in the basement of the 1908 building that was demolished to build the present Learning Center.

The building that is now the City Auditorium was erected by the Odd Fellows in 1913. 

The lodge rooms were upstairs while the large room on the lower floor was used for plays, graduation exercises, movies and various community activities until January 1936 when the building was badly damaged by fire. As the Odd Fellows lacked the resources to repair the building, possession reverted to William A. Wickett who still held a mortgage on the building.

At a special election held on April 2, 1936, voters approved a plan for the city to acquire the building but they failed to approve the bonds needed to raise the money to do it. Wickett then sold the building to William B. Chambers who remodeled the lower floor for his implement business and converted the second floor into a hotel. The old hotel sign still can be seen above the stairway door on the east side of the building.

In October 1937 Chambers sold the implement business to George Berglund of Hartington. Chambers retained ownership of the building and continued to operate the hotel  but Berglund moved the implement business to another location.

Although the bond issue passed in December 1938, there was a delay issuing the bonds. This was cleared up and the city took possession of the building in May 1939. Work began shortly after. Although the remodeling had not yet been completed, the first event in Laurel’s new City Auditorium was a dance held later that month. The first basketball game on the new floor was played on Dec. 13. To look at the size of the auditorium floor today it is hard to realize that this was a “splendid improvement over the cracker box gymnasium in the old school.” High school basketball games were played on the auditorium floor until the first “new” gym was completed in 1957.

The approval of the bond issue to acquire the auditorium building put an end to plans to build a swimming pool. In September 1938 voters approved a $5,000 bond issue to acquire land and to build a pool.

According to the Advocate, the general consensus was that the town could not afford do both projects at the same time. The pool would have to wait until 1954.

In other news of December 1938: The Advocate’s short-lived competitor ceased publication. The Laurel Messenger was started in June 1937 by Ed Fehlhaber of Humboldt, S.D., and Art Hoffman.  But Laurel wasn’t big enough for two newspapers and Editor Allison observed that “the venture was ill-advised from the start.”

Miss Ida Mohr, 36, died at the home of her brother John Mohr who lived south of Laurel. The cause of death was determined to be suicide by poison.

“Little” Gene Twiford, son of Mrs. Lillie Twiford, gave his mother a scare when he drank from a can of kerosene. Mrs. Twiford was badly frightened for a while, said the Advocate, but there were no serious consequences and Gene was reported to be getting along fine.

The Laurel Fire Department was called to Randolph to assist in putting out a fire in a wooden building that housed a beer parlor. 

The building was located in the center of a group of wooden buildings and had the fire spread it might have taken out the entire block.

One of the Advocate’s inside pages contained a picture of Henry D. Zeitz who once served as an Indian scout for Buffalo Bill Cody and also guarded stage coaches on the old Overland Trail. The accompanying story noted that the 73-year-old man now traveled in passenger airplanes. Quite a change in less than one lifetime.

The Advocate reported that a number of traveling salesmen had expressed the opinion that Laurel’s 1938 Christmas decorations were the best in this part of the state. The lamp poles along Main Street\ were transformed into Christmas trees with hundreds of colored lights and garlands of lights stretched across the streets between light poles. A large decorated tree was placed in the center of the intersection of Oak and Main with lighted streamers coming from the posts at each corner.

Laurel High School had two basketball teams. One was the regular school team; the other was the Future Farmers. It was announced that the Future Farmers team would soon get new uniforms. The suits would be black and trimmed in orange with FFA emblems.  Members of the 1938-39 FFA team included Francis Urwiler, Morris Ebmeier, Bernard Pehrson, Doyle Hattig, Herbert Guinn, Thorkild Kastrup, Eugene Lessman, William Wickett, Carlo Kastrup, Leo Nelson, Richard Wickett, Ray Miner, Virgil Anderson, Ronald Keifer, Carroll Danielson and Robert Wickett.

With electricity starting to come to the farm, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) put on a demonstration in Coleridge. The displays included electric powered corn shellers and other pieces of farm equipment as well as demonstrations of electric refrigerators, stoves, and small kitchen appliances.