Iola’s Riverside Park football stadium was built to last, like so many other Works Progress Administration structures erected in the 1930s.
The stadium’s thick concrete skeleton “was almost built too well,” noted Iolan Donna Houser, whose late husband, Ray, was a long-time football, basketball and golf coach and Iola Middle School teacher. “You can’t do anything with it, it was built so well.”
And through the years, while structurally sound, the old monolith began to show its age.
Its iconic overhanging roof was blown away in the infamous 1986 “inland hurricane.”
It twice was under several feet of water from the floods of 1951 and 2007.
And since a football stadium is used sparingly compared to other facilities in town, city and school officials usually were unable or unwilling to spare much expense for its upkeep.
Ray Houser was instrumental in the early ’70s with construction of the “Mustang Stables,” the nickname he gave the stadium’s dressing rooms.
Before then, players had to change at the nearby community building.
“Ray moaned and groaned about that,” she recalled.
It was Ray who helped form the IHS I-Club, the student group consisting of letter winners in various athletic endeavors, as well as the Spur Club, the predecessor to the IHS Booster Club.
As an adviser for those clubs, Ray Houser convinced local business owners and volunteers to help pay for the dressing rooms, as well as do the construction.
“But this was in the ’60s and ’70s, when we didn’t think about handicap accessibility,” Donna Houser said.
There soon were other problems, stemming from other park improvements. Added layers of asphalt and a new running track meant more stormwater runoff would stream to the lowest part of the park — the doorway to the home locker room.
A crushed drain line exacerbated the problem.
Once one of the crown jewels of sports complexes in southeast Kansas, the stadium had eventually fallen into a state of disrepair.
AS A KID growing up in Derby, Doug Kerr remembers two distinct landmarks when his family would pass through Iola to visit relatives.
