Stephen Decatur High School (Decatur, Illinois)

Stephen Decatur High School was a public high school in Decatur, Illinois which existed from 1911 to 2000. The original Stephen Decatur High School was simply known as Decatur High School until 1957, when the city's only high school was joined by Lakeview High School (absorbed by consolidation), and MacArthur and Eisenhower High Schools, which were newly constructed to accommodate the student population that was exploding as a result of the post-World War 2 "baby boom".

The older building was unique among the city's high schools in that it was located in the heart of Decatur's business district, at 400 North Franklin Street. The original portion of the building was constructed in 1911 of red brick and had marble columns on the main west entrance. An additional three-floor classroom wing was added on the north end of the building in 1932.

A much larger 4200-seat gymnasium was added in the late 1940s to house the crowds packing in to watch legendary coach Gay Kintner chase his fourth state title at the helm of the Stephen Decatur "Running Reds" basketball team. He had guided the team to state championships in 1931, 1936, and 1945. No Illinois high school basketball team had ever won four state championships. On February 15, 1960, the last game of the regular season, Kintner had coached what many observers said was his best team since the 1945 state championship team to an 8-point lead over the crosstown rival MacArthur Generals.^[1] He had just emerged with the team from the locker room to begin the second half, when he collapsed from a heart attack and died on the court.^[2] The facility was renamed Kintner Gymnasium in his honor. The 64-year-old Kintner (1895-1960) had coached the Running Reds for 32 years. The Running Reds finished that fateful 1959-1960 regular season with a 22-2 record, won the Regional, Sectional, Supersectional, and Quarterfinal rounds of the 1960 tournament, before falling to eventual state champion Chicago Marshall in the Semifinal round, and to West Frankfort in the consolation game, finishing fourth in the 1960 tournament.

Two years later, under Kintner's successor, Coach John Schneiter, the school won its fourth, and final, state championship, defeating a Chicago Carver High School team that featured future University of Michigan and NBA superstar Cazzie Russell. Decatur's Ken Barnes provided the winning margin on a free throw with six seconds left in the game.^[3] All four championships were won under the older unified system, where all state schools competed in the same state tournament, before the introduction of the current class system that divides the state's schools by enrollment size and results in multiple "state champions" each year. Stephen Decatur High School is one of only a handful of Illinois schools with over 1000 basketball victories in its history (W-1352, L-912 for a .597 winning percentage 1913 - 2000)^[4]

For a school fight song, the high school adapted the Northwestern University fight song, "Go You Northwestern", restyling it as "Go You Decatur". A recording of the song, made in the 1960s by the school's Redcoat marching/concert band, can be found here^[5]

After an arson fire in March 1970 destroyed classrooms and school offices in the southwest corner of the building, the facility reopened some weeks later, but after a study recommended replacing, rather than rehabilitating, the building, the building was scheduled for demolition in 1975. In the final school year for the original Stephen Decatur High School building (1974-1975), school class schedules were changed to accommodate the students from the crosstown Lakeview High School because of extensive damage that the Lakeview building received when a railroad car filled with isobutane exploded in a nearby railroad yard on July 19, 1974.^[6] Stephen Decatur students attended the building in the mornings and Lakeview students used the facility in the afternoons.^[7]

When the new campus opened in the fall of 1975 on the north side of the city, it was the first high school in Decatur to be handicapped accessible (as it was all on one level) and the first to have air conditioning in the classrooms. The center jump circle from the old wooden floor at Kintner Gym was removed and hung on the wall in the new school's gym as a tribute to the original high school building. It could not be incorporated into the new gym's floor because the new gym floor's surface was rubberized rather than wood construction.

Stephen Decatur was closed as a high school when Decatur Public Schools consolidated from three high schools to two due to reduced enrollment in District 61. It re-opened as Stephen Decatur Middle School in 2001.

A 2012-2015 renovation project for the Eisenhower and MacArthur high school facilities caused the Stephen Decatur building to be used as a high school once again, while "Stephen Decatur Middle School" met in another facility in the center of the city--ironically, just across the street from the former site of the original Stephen Decatur High School.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, February 01, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.