BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ) – Demolition work on The Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena is set to begin tomorrow, which has many residents reflecting on over sixty years of history.
The arena popped-up officially on Veterans Day 1958, but that came after more than a decade of planning, which left few confident that the venue would ever come into existence.
Like most things in politics, the process was painstakingly slow.
The year was 1945 and the Brown County Board of Supervisors had just signed off on $150,000 for the city of Green Bay, as well as neighboring villages, to put towards war memorials.
“There was a plan by the county to have money that they were going to divide up between the different municipalities,” says Mary Jane Herber, a local historian who works at the Brown County Library. “Green Bay wanted to put up an auditorium of some sort.”
She says the auditorium idea was popular and studies were formed the following year on what it should look like and where it should go.
“And they were talking about that for years,” she explains. “Well, that kind of collapsed.”
Fast forward eight years and there was still nothing to show for all this talk.
Then in 1954, a county board supervisor named Leonard Jahn called a meeting of the veterans organizations to re-ignite talks of a memorial.
After a good deal of discussion, all agreed that a multi-purpose arena was the best way to serve Brown County.
Lisa Kain, Curator at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County, says that’s because conventions, meetings, and gatherings were hard up for space.
“There were almost hotel venues that would host these things or theatres, there were a lot of theatres,” explains Kain. “With the Meyer, you had the Strand, the Bay, the Vic before that.”
Those venues simply weren’t providing the space necessary, though.
“They needed something that was going to handle more than a couple hundred,” says Herber. “They needed something that was going to handle three thousand.”
So while the arena is now remembered for the glitz and glamour of Johnny Cash or Van Halen, the original purpose for building the venue was slightly less sexy.
“Union meetings, chamber of commerce meetings for groups from all over the state, political meetings and conventions,” explains Herber. “The dentists, or the doctors, or the Elks.”
And as those organizations grew locally, they needed somewhere nearby to grow with them.
The option of turning to Milwaukee for bigger and more developed resources wasn’t as easy as we know it today.
“In 1957, there was single lanes,” she says. “Highway 141 along the lakeshore, [Highway] 57, which ran south out of De Pere, and then [Highway] 41.”
So with everyone on-board to back the venue, next-up was picking the location.
Space along the Fox River near the Hotel Northland was already pretty well developed, so the county board, working alongside architect John Somerville, decided on a plot of land next to where the Packers would call home, a new City Stadium.
“I think the idea was to just kind of start building up, because there was a lot of land out there,” explains Kain. “When you’re talking about building stuff downtown or by East High School, there just wasn’t the opportunities that there was out there.”
If they wanted room to grow, there was plenty.
“When you look at those aerial shots showing that whole area around there, people wonder why there was tailgating… Well, there’s no place to eat,” says Herber. “There’s nothing, it’s farmland.”
Plans were finalized in March of ’57, a ground-breaking was held in September of that same year, and the formal dedication was on Veterans Day 1958.
Not even two years later, a soon-to-be president passed through.
“In the ’60 election, about two weeks before the election, John Kennedy was here on a Sunday morning,” she explains. “Huge crowd, the place was full.”
But, this is Green Bay… football wins.
“They had to hold it, I think, at 8:30 in the morning so that the people going to the football game weren’t impeded by the people that were leaving from the campaign rally for John Kennedy,” explains Herber.
Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg, because, in less than twenty years, a multi-purpose venue to host doctors and dentist conventions was all-of-a-sudden rolling out the red carpet for not only a president, but a king.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Elvis is in the building.
But, more on that tomorrow.
You can find more original photographs of the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena on the Neville Public Museum of Brown County’s website.
