Alumni
Portland Magazine
September 20, 2019
The old pile had to go, yes, but saying good-bye came a little harder than most of us expected.
by Marcus Covert '93, '97
IN 1928, HOWARD HALL was an ambitious undertaking for a small, cash-strapped university. But the old Columbia Colosseum—a giant wooden Quonset hut that reacted to wind much like a sail—was leaking and falling apart. So the Holy Cross fathers launched a fundraising drive and built Howard Hall for about $75,000. The designers utilized every available cent and centimeter: the single basketball court could be used as an auditorium thanks to the stage at one end; a three-story “tower” held offices and storage rooms; and the ground floor was packed with locker rooms, weight rooms, more offices, practice rooms for the music department, and a swimming pool. Basketball games could seat some 1,000 spectators, and plays, performances, Masses, and graduations could hold nearly 2,500. It seemed a great leap of faith on the part of the priests, that the University would grow into and around its new athletic facility.
Growing up as a UP faculty brat in the 1960s and 1970s, I could see Howard Hall had already passed from the “splendid edifice” to its more familiar battered state. Fortyplus years of constant use and at least one near-gutting by fire in 1949 had taken their toll, but I remember Howard as a place of great fun and opportunity. You didn’t need to be a faculty member’s kid to have free run of the place; as long as you didn’t cause any problems, just about anyone from the neighborhood could play pickup basketball, pummel friends with medicine balls, or try to hit the shallow end from the pool’s ridiculously torqued diving board.
For all its faults and shortcomings, Howard Hall was rarely quiet. Even though it was used for a dizzying number of events, basketball was its foremost draw for male and female athletes and even for secret Portland Trail Blazers’ scrimmages. For a time in the 1970s, faculty members, administrators, employees, and some of the more daring students would gather after work for raucous street-rules basketball games. Just to make it interesting, according to my dad, Jim Covert, the winners got to adjust the shower temperatures for the losers.
My most vivid memories are from the Pilot varsity basketball games held there from about 1968 to 1976. This was Howard Hall in all its shabby glory. Opposing teams seemed to wonder what they’d gotten themselves into when faced with 1,000 or more tightly packed, hooting Pilot fans bent upon shaking old Howard into a boisterous heap. For a couple of years Pilot games featured a special guest cheerleader carried to midcourt in a purple coffin. Fans would erupt as the mystery guest sprung from the coffin—Manny Macias, Art Schulte, Joe McCoy, Jim Covert, Ernie Hays—dressed in their signature hat and overalls. Even UP president Fr. Paul Waldschmidt, CSC, got in on the act and found it hilarious when the coffin wouldn’t close thanks to his love of good beer and bratwurst. They were riotous, warm, even intimate gatherings, a shared UP experience fading each year from living memory.
Sentimentalists will say a space like Howard Hall still reverberates with the love and energy it once hosted, and I have to say I agree. Around the time our recreational services office moved into the gleaming new Beauchamp Center, I paid my last visit to the old basketball court, eerily quiet after so many million dribbles and footfalls. It was perfect. Alone with my thoughts, silent but for the creaks and groans and hisses of the venerable old structure, I could hear the echoes loud and clear.
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