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Turning Back the Pages: What it took to build a large community centre

I’ve recently been given several topics that I could cover in this column for general interest of people who may have forgotten or for newcomers to Golden who may not have read this information previously. This column is about the early days of the building of the civic centre.
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I’ve recently been given several topics that I could cover in this column for general interest of people who may have forgotten or for newcomers to Golden who may not have read this information previously. This column is about the early days of the building of the civic centre.

Early in May 1945 a group of concerned citizens met to discuss the centralized need for a centre for social activities. First and foremost, the hall had to take care of the needs of the young people, so it had to house sports like badminton, basketball, gymnastics and athletics.

The building also had to meet the needs of the older folks, such as card parties, theatricals, dances and other social activities.

Out of this meeting a committee was to determine if the proposition was a workable one. It was, and in April of 1946 the canvassers started a door-to-door fund-raiser. This was so promising that they made the decision to go ahead full steam. They even had a slogan “It’s Yours to Build. It’s Yours to Enjoy”’

It would take up a lot of space to build a building of the size of the one that the committee felt was needed. It would also take a lot of lumber, cement, and manpower.

Thomas King stepped forward and donated three lots for the building to sit on. At this point the committee started to get quite excited, as they were offered the donation of 1,000 bricks, 500 sacks of cement, the roof trusses from the old sawmill and for a very small fee they could also have the floor joists.

It was the roof trusses and the floor joists from the old mill that determined the size of the new centre as they didn’t want to cut them.

So now they had the property, roof and joists and although the canvassing was going very well, money was tight and the committee successfully applied to the John Dahlstrom Fund for financial help (they applied three times to this fund in all).

These added finances allowed the group to hire two experienced men, not only to work on the building but to act as starters to get the volunteers on the right track, Mr. Whit Moyer and Mr. Gable.

During the week of June 8, 1947, was indeed a red letter one as that was the week that the basement walls were poured. Actually, the entire basement was poured by a group of thirty-five men and a small number of teenagers in what was to became known as the longest 14 hours in history. These men didn’t have modern equipment, just wheelbarrows and shovels. Is it any wonder that these men weren’t seen around town for three or four days after the cement was poured, one night of dancing around that big building leaves most of us limping.

It is interesting to note that of the hundreds of dollars worth of shiplap used to build the forms for the basement walls only about $10 worth was destroyed. This same shiplap was then used on the floor.

The volunteer picture continued to be very good and the volunteer hours were recorded each week in the paper with a total accumulation at the end of each column. By the end of June 1947, 1,026 hours had been contributed to the building by 99 volunteers.

The next order of business was to get the floor joists from the sawmill to the site and erected. The shiplap was then laid on the beams for the sub-floor. Little action took place at the building site for the next couple of weeks, not from lack of interest, but because the crew had moved down to the old mill where they were taking the roof and rafters down.

Here in the height of summer, the crew climbed the three storeys, wrestled the beams lose and then pushed them off the edge to the mud below. Thankfully the mud helped to break the fall and very few of the beams were broken. The beams were finally trucked to the building by Sam Thompson and additional hauling was done by Steve Petruik and Golden Motors, who brought in materials from Donald.

And this wasn’t the end of the story, just the end of this column. So please, the next time you are attending an event or even driving by give a nod to the many volunteers who worked so hard to create this asset for us.