Out in Greene County, Iowa

The new Iowa Hall of Pride: Best one-stop showcase of life in our state you can find

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
February 21, 2005
COOPER, IOWA

“The Iowa Hall of Pride,” a major new $12.5 million attraction nine years in the planning and development, opens in Des Moines this week and, take it from me, it will amaze you.

Originally conceived as a place to celebrate the accomplishments of the students and leading alumni of Iowa’s high schools through the decades, the 26,000-square-foot Hall of Pride has turned into so much more.

Since it is a project of the Iowa High School Athletic Association, many people have mistakenly thought all along that it would be little more than a hall of fame for boys’ prep sports, which the IHSAA has sanctioned for 100 years.

But it also includes girls’ sports, music, drama, speech, wellness, officiating – plus the stories and philosophies of 30 of Iowa’s best-known citizens, like Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, astronaut Peggy Whitson, all-time best-selling pianist Roger Williams, opera great Simon Estes, Academy Award-winning actress Donna Reed, composer Meredith Willson, famed opinion pollster George Gallup and others. There is a whole lot of education to be absorbed there.

In fact, the Iowa Hall of Pride is the best one-stop showcase of Iowa life you can find anywhere in the state.

It uses high-definition video, inspiring background music, mind-boggling interactive computer technology, original artwork and well-researched history to tell the Iowa story.

You can sing with the All-State chorus, conduct an orchestra, officiate a wrestling match, see yourself play an animated one-on-one basketball game, compete against your pals in Iowa sports trivia contests, call balls and strikes while the video system hurls 90-mile-per-hour fastballs and wicked curve balls right at you – it’s so “real” that you wear a mask.

The histories, highlights and bragging points of every high school in the state – even several hundred of them that no longer exist – are being told on computer consoles with essays, lists, photographs, video and audio. You’ll even be able to sing along while a band plays your old school’s fight song and the words are shown on the screen!

The hall may be a little light on some of the more sorrowful chapters of our state’s history, but that wasn’t its mission. And it does a good job of portraying the Iowa character honed by those challenges. It also nicely handles the changing Iowa – from the closing and consolidating of small high schools into larger ones, to the increasing racial and ethnic diversification of our people.

It is so well done that it meets two huge tests that I think awaited it: 1) It will be completely and equally captivating to 80-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 20-year-olds and 10-year-olds. And 2) my prediction is that out-of-staters will be almost as interested in it as native Iowans are going to be.

My wife Carla and I got to experience it one late-afternoon last week as part of our training to be occasional volunteer hosts at the facility.

I’ve had a close-up view of the hall’s development. In its early phases, I wrote columns about it in the Des Moines Register. For the past 18 months, I’ve been watching and researching it as I’ve worked on a book “Bernie Saggau & the Iowa Boys: The Centennial History of the Iowa High School Athletic Association,” which will be available soon.

The facility is “the signature of Bernie’s career,” said Hall of Pride director director Jack Lashier, who came aboard in 1996 to work directly with the IHSAA’s then-executive director Saggau on the project.


The Iowa Hall of Pride, a $12.5 million, 26,000-square-foot celebration of the accomplishments of Iowa's high school students and alumni, is built as part of the new Iowa Events Center just north of downtown Des Moines. The Hall of Pride is on the lower level of the Hy-Vee Hall exhibition center. That is on the south side of old Veterans Memorial Auditorium, and just west of the new Wells Fargo Arena. Another artist's rendering here shows what the display areas inside the Hall of Pride look like, in this case the wrestling display. The Hall of Pride uses high-definition video, inspiring background music, amazing computer technology and well-researched history to tell Iowa's story. The original artwork in the facility includes life-sized bronze statues, a clay wall-sculpture depicting a recess scene at a country school and coming soon are two 12-by-24-foot stained glass works by Bogenrief Studios of Cherokee. While the Bogenriefs are doing the stained glass, one of those huge panel spaces is temporarily being filled by a super-enlargement of this gorgeous photo of an Iowa cornfield by Ida Grove photographer Don Poggensee, whose work is regularly featured in ''Poggensee's Postcards'' on our Internet site Offenburger.com. (Exterior rendering of the building is by HOK Sport+Venue+Event, of Kansas City, Missouri. The rendering of the wrestling display is by SynthesisDesign, LLC, of Haddonfield, New Jersey.)


The 76-year-old Saggau has said for years he was postponing his IHSAA retirement until the Hall of Pride opened. “When they open the front door,” he’s told everybody, “I’ll be out the backdoor.” And he essentially stuck with that plan, officially retiring January 1.

However, he is still very much involved at the facility, especially as the final touches are completed and a series of grand opening events is held over the next month. The IHSAA, now headed by Rick Wulkow, Saggau’s longtime lieutenant, is hosting Saggau’s official retirement salute at the Hall of Pride on March 20.

It has been dizzy getting to this point, and it may get dizzier as the huge crowds flock to the hall while they’re in Des Moines for this week’s state wrestling tournament, then the girls’ and boys’ state basketball tournaments March 7-19.

“I’ve never had a job that I was working on weekends,” said Lashier, who has earlier taught, coached and worked in sales. “Now I’m 57 years old and I’m working nights and weekends – and loving it!”

He works with marketing director Anne Janotta, as well as his wife Kathy Lashier, who is serving as coordinator of the volunteer hosts.

One of the most exciting – and challenging – aspects of the project is that there was no real model for it. Nothing quite like the Iowa Hall of Pride has been put together anywhere in the nation. It was hard for a lot of people to get their minds and hearts into it. They had to be sold on the whole idea.

Frankly, it would never have been completed had Saggau not devoted the full measure of his tenacity and salesmanship to it, as well as his lifetime of good contacts and loyal friendships around the state.

“We had some heartbreaks,” Saggau told me. “Whooo! Some real heartbreaks.”

The prospective location for the Hall of Pride was bounced from Boone, where the IHSAA is headquartered, to two different locations in Des Moines, back to Boone and finally back to Des Moines. Fund raising proved 10 times harder than Saggau and Lashier expected.

The key financial components ultimately included $5 million from the State’s “Vision Iowa Program,” $3 million from the IHSAA Board of Control, $2 million from the Iowa Farm Bureau, $750,000 from Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino, $600,000 from the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, $300,000 from Allied Insurance, $250,000 from an individual who requested anonymity, $100,000 from the Iowa Bankers Association and other smaller corporate, organizational and individual donations. The smallest has been for $5, an individual donation someone made to one of the five memorial funds directed to the Hall of Pride by the families of deceased IHSAA supporters, including a couple of coaches and game officials.

As the fund raising and planning went on, Saggau said “we kept visiting different museums and halls of fame around the country. None of them were quite what I wanted. Several times we came out of those visits, and I told Rick Wulkow, ‘If ours isn’t better than that, I’m going to be a sick goose after we open.’ ”

Well, what does he think now of the Iowa Hall of Pride?

“It’s better than I ever dreamed it could be,” Saggau said in an interview last week with WOI Public Radio’s Rob Dillard. “I think everyone is going to walk away from the Hall of Pride with a different experience in it than everybody else. But no one will be disappointed when they leave this building.”

That’s a bold statement. But I’ve now been through the place, and I agree with Saggau’s assessment.

I’ll tell you one thing Iowans should be proud about when they leave the Hall of Pride – that there are companies in this state that could do the video, technology, artwork and intricate construction you will have enjoyed, probably without giving a thought to who did it. Those include the video company “Keep It Memorable Sports”; more video, editing and technology at Applied Art & Technology, and the builders from The Weitz Company’s Capital Resources subsidiary, all based in the Des Moines metro area.

Here’s a thought: Let’s find a way to keep them collaborating on other projects around the state, too.

All of the early disappointments and delays on the Hall of Pride project turned out to be very positive in one way nobody anticipated, as I report in my IHSAA book.

Over the nine years of the hall’s planning and development, telecommunications technology was taking the great leap into the Internet era. The possibilities for gathering, transmitting and displaying data and video advanced to levels that were beyond most people’s understanding, even beyond their wildest dreams.

In New Jersey, Saggau and his team found a young designer who understood the possibilities. He is Jason Ramos, now 39, who heads SynthesisDesign LLC in Haddonfield.

Ramos looked at the rapidly changing technology and saw it for exactly what it could be – a wonderful new tool to convey ideas to people in this new age of video and instant communication. He has been fine-tuning it the last few days, working long days in blue jeans, T-shirt, tennis shoes and a ball cap. “I look kind of like a computer geek, don’t I?” he said to the group of us getting a preview.

He told me three months ago about how he was introduced to Iowa, to Saggau and to the man’s dream for the facility.

“Steve Knierim, who is one of the partners with OPN Architects in Cedar Rapids brought me into the Hall of Pride project,” said Ramos. OPN did some of the earlier building designs for the IHSAA. “Our companies had done some work together in Cedar Rapids, and he called and asked me to take a look at the Hall of Pride. He sent me some material, and then he told me a group of them were going to Mississippi to look at a hall of fame, and asked me to come meet them there.”

To turn to someone like this Ramos, and ask him how best to present the stories of Iowa and its young people in a new Hall of Pride, was perhaps a leap of faith. Maybe you could have searched America and come up with a less-likely candidate to be the designer of this project. But it’s a fair statement that Ramos was a surprising choice for a fellow like Bernie Saggau to make.

“He didn’t know a thing about Iowa high school athletics,” Saggau now says, almost proudly.

Honestly, Ramos knew very little about high school athletics anywhere.

“Because of where I grew up, on Staten Island, New York, I really never had much of a brush with sports, other than a little tennis and swimming maybe,” Ramos explained. “I went to the High School of Art & Design at 57th and 2nd Avenue in the heart of New York City. You don’t find any ‘Fields of Dreams’ there. I never saw a yellow school bus. I commuted two hours each way to go to school – just like businessmen commuting to their jobs – by train, ferry, subway and a walk.”

He went on for his architecture training at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and was about to start graduate school when an opportunity for one of the much-sought positions as Fellows of the American Academy in Rome came up in 1991. He was the youngest architect ever selected for one of those fellowships, and he spent a year there studying among 100 select artists and scholars from several different disciplines.

Then he came back to the U.S. and in 1994 formed his company in New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s a small firm – five people full-time – with other necessary services contracted. Ramos said the company’s one venture into any sports-related project had been “helping develop the idea for the ESPN Zone” sports restaurants and bars later in the 1990s.

“We’re known, I think, for being very specific on our projects,” he said. “We don’t do just anything, and we try not to take on more than we can handle. Then we give it everything we’ve got. We put a whole lot of our staff focus on any project we do, and that’s how we’ve approached the Iowa Hall of Pride.”

So that’s the background and outlook he brought to his first ever meeting with Bernie Saggau. What did Ramos think?

“Well, the first time I met him, I knew instantly that I could not risk disappointing him on this project,” Ramos said. “I knew I could not fail on this, that he would not accept that. I came to see him as a father. When he speaks, you’re totally attentive, and you can see and feel his passion in all his presentations.”

When he started making monthly and eventually bi-weekly flights to Iowa during the key planning phases of the project, Saggau got nervous about him traveling so much – where would they be if there was a plane crash? So Saggau took out a million-dollar insurance policy on him.

“No one had ever done that before on one of my projects,” Ramos said, with a laugh. “Usually people don’t care that much about what I’m doing.”

He said he told Saggau “that I was going on this project not for financial reasons, or because I had some specific design in mind that I wanted to use somewhere, but because this was something I wanted to see done the right way.”

That fit precisely with what Saggau said he expected.

“He told me there were two things he wanted in this,” Ramos said. “First, he wanted to make it a project that would be unique to Iowa. The second, he wanted to make sure the IHSAA’s pride in Iowa showed through.”

And now it’s happened.

The Iowa Hall of Pride opens Wednesday, February 23. Normal operating hours will be Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m., and it will be closed on Mondays. The admission charge is $5 for adults, $4 for students, with kids in kindergarten and younger free. For more information, visit the Internet site iowahallofpride.com