McCook College preserves historic gym floor logo

MCCOOK — McCook Community College has done its part in preserving a piece of history.

The logo of McCook Community College on the gym floor at True Hall, the college’s original gymnasium, has a place of honor in the lobby at the new, state-of-the-art, $10 million MCC Event Center. Darin Morgan, director of physical resources at MCC, said he and his staff spent about 45 days dismantling the gym floor piece by piece to preserve the logo.

“It was very tedious, it didn’t want to come up very easy,” he told the McCook Daily Gazette.

The floor was taken apart carefully, he said, with staples cut out from each board to prevent breakage. The floor was removed in pieces 2 1/4 inches wide by 18 inches to six feet long, Morgan said.

The historic True Hall, which can be seen through the lobby windows, was built in 1939 as a Work Progress Administration project. Part of the New Deal undertaking during the Depression in the 1930s, the WPA was designed to put millions of people back to work building public buildings.

Another WPA project is the city’s swimming pool, across the street.

True Hall will be used now to store about 11 MCC vehicles, including three buses, one 15-person golf van and eight fleet cars that transport faculty and staff between the campuses of Mid-Plains Community College. This will curb vandalism to the vehicles, Morgan said. The brick building will also store maintenance equipment.

McCook Community College, founded in 1926 as McCook Junior College, was the first two-year institution in Nebraska, according to the Mid-Plains Community College website. The college was organized as part of the McCook Public School system and superintendent, J.A. True was named as college president.

In September 1935, McCook Junior College moved from the YMCA building to Cecil McMillen Memorial Hall. In September 1939, McCook Junior College opened another new facility, an auditorium-gymnasium-classroom complex, later named True Hall after J.A. True.

The Legislature in 1973 and 1975 merged three separate campuses to form Mid Plains Community College: McCook Junior College, North Platte Junior College (established in 1965) and Mid-Plains Vocational Technical School (established in 1967).