Wade Entezar Finds The Hoquiam Olympic Stadium, An American Treasure!
Olympic Stadium is part and parcel of Hoquiam City’s past, present and future, many friendly and not so friendly competitions have been held within its heavy wooden walls and many hundreds of thousands of fans, participants and players have enjoyed its warm and welcoming embrace. The stadium has known in one sense or another the many faces of those who just passed through or made their homes there, from great grand fathers to grand fathers to fathers and their sons and those that come after them Olympic stadium has always stood in silent testament to the greatness of these men in whatever endeavor they have chosen to undertake.
The town truthfully got its interesting name from the river, which is its namesake that the Native Americans called in their own tongue “hungry for wood” river and this name aptly applied also to the first white settlers who in the 1850′s, established the first lumber camp on it’s shores, because the men never stopped coming over the years due to their insatiable hunger for wood. It is then but natural for the City fathers of the 1930′s to commission an all-wood design for their City’s stadium not so much so because they had an overflowing supply of it, but rather they wanted to make it as an underlying statement that logging has been good to the town and this is absolutely true for some of their so-called lumber elite.
The city applied for a Civil Works Administration grant with the all wood design persistently present and in 1932, the grant was approved. 6 years later, with enough funds, a final architectural design that almost everyone agreed to and a whole lot of lumber, construction started of the all-wood Olympic stadium.
The stadium officially opened for use by the public on November 24, 1938 with the construction itself not taking more than a year from start to finish and this is their take on things much like how the lumber industry takes time to let trees grow for decades, to agree that everything is right or satisfactory and when the time has come it takes but a moment to finish what took decades or even more than a century to nurture and give life to, such are the circumstances there, the patience and understanding of a tree farmer that completes his task as a lumberjack with a razor sharp axe.
After hosting hundreds of games whether from baseball to football and various city and even state fairs and community events, the residents finally stood together to give back in simple recognition what the stadium has given so much to the City and its people, love and appreciation. In 2005 the Congressman from this town requested and got approved a renovation grant from the federal government through the “Save America’s Treasures” program that allowed the community to make much needed repairs and refurbishment to the long time serving building. Congressman Norman Dicks also made the Olympic Stadium a National Registry of Historical Places recognized heritage site in 2006.
The all-wood construct that is Olympic Stadium is made up of old growth fir heavy-timber frame with cedar shingle siding. The stadium was designed and built in a truncated U-shape with angled corners, an open segment of a 2 story grandstand faces to the east to shelter fans and players alike from possible wind and rain coming from the ocean. The all wooden park appears to be one of the more bizarre in the country, with the shingled exterior, the covered from top to bottom ‘L’ shaped grandstand extending all the way down the line in right and extending into the outfield. The seats are wooden grandstands, which survey the fields and are in exceptional shape.
The Olympic stadium is presently home to the semi-professional football team the Grays Harbor Bearcats. In the 1990′s the historic stadium was the base of operations for the now defunct Grays Harbor Gulls of the independent Western baseball League. This is testament to the resilience of the stadium and its continued contribution to the prestige and honor of the town and its people.
The people of Hoquiam and Grays Harbor in general know and love their sports and athletics and as such people do they make contest out of almost everything that they can compete about. Take the city’s high school football team who has a football rivalry with twin city Aberdeen to the east that even goes farther than the history of the stadium itself. The heritage and historical Olympic Stadium also bears witness to more tame but not less quite events such as the Annual Grays Harbor Bluegrass Festival. The Olympic stadium, truly an American treasure.
Wade Entezar does the Hoquiam Olympic Stadium, A symbol of Hoquiam’s sense of camaraderie!