Sunday, September 21, 2014
By EMMALEE C. TORISK
etorisk@vindy.com
STRUTHERS
Here, it’s almost sacrilege to suggest that perhaps a 7-foot-long Wildcat didn’t always guard the entrance to the old Struthers High School.
After all, for generations of SHS students, the Wildcat statue, proudly perched atop the crenellated front archway, was “what we looked at coming into school each day,” recalled Capt. Pat Bundy of the Struthers Police Department — himself a 1976 Struthers graduate.
It was practically a life-size version of the school district’s mascot.
Bundy, though, can remember the day the Wildcat, albeit in a different form, showed up at SHS.
The year was 1975. Bundy was a junior, and he was enrolled in a wood shop class taught by Steven Helvak.
In one day came a statue of a
leaping tiger, procured somehow by Dom Russo, an SHS science teacher, from a then-closed Humble Oil gas station in the city. The brand’s slogan? “Put a tiger in your tank.”
At the Humble Oil in Struthers and at others across the country, the circa-1960s fiberglass tigers sat atop the roof, exposed to the elements. So, when the soon-to-be Wildcat arrived in Bundy’s shop class — Exxon had replaced the Humble, Esso and Enco brands in the U.S. just a few years prior — its stripes were visible but faded.
He and other woodshop students sanded it and prepared it for Helvak to paint. Afterward, the Wildcat “was taken from there right out to the front archway,” Bundy said.
There it sat — untouched, with the exception of a number of mysterious disappearances — for a couple of decades.
William Griffin, SHS art teacher, said that attempts to restore the Wildcat in the early 1990s likely were the reason for those disappearances. At the time, Griffin was teaching woodshop, and he remembers how his students repaired the statue’s shattered paw and leg, then built a new wooden base for it.
Marianne Fimognari, who taught art at the high school until her retirement in 1995, when Griffin took her place, led efforts to repaint the Wildcat.
By the time it was taken down from its perch in January 2003 before the old high school could be demolished, the Wildcat “was really beat up,” said Sandra J. DiBacco, a 1971 Struthers graduate and the district’s superintendent from 1999 to 2007. The Wildcat was so out of sorts, in fact, that its sole remaining tooth led to a new, affectionately given nickname: “Snaggletooth.”
Still, the people of Struthers wanted the Wildcat, missing teeth and all, to make the move to the new high school building. People “wanted to keep some tradition around,” DiBacco said.
“I found it funny,” she added. “When I went to school, that cat didn’t exist. It wasn’t there forever. ... People think that cat’s been there since the beginning of time.”
Bundy, too, remembered there being “a little uproar in the community,” because “people wanted to know where the Wildcat went.”
As it turns out, the Wildcat sat in a storage garage for a while before its most recent makeover, courtesy of Harry Groner, a 1978 graduate of SHS and owner of Jack’s Auto Body in Struthers. Groner said he had to completely strip it down and repaint it.
“There was a lot of paint on it,” he noted.
The Wildcat made its comeback not long after it disappeared, at one of the first home football games of the season, DiBacco said. It then was brought out on a trailer bed for various special events, and discussions about its future ensued. At one time, DiBacco and Griffin recalled, there was talk about building it a cage, then having it sit on top of rocks inside.
Now, and for the past few years, the Wildcat calls home a ledge on the Garfield Street side of the football stadium. It’s tradition, and “that’s Struthers,” Griffin said.
Jim Vespasian, a 1976 Struthers graduate who helped paint the statue initially, said he, too, is glad to see it displayed because “usually everything gets thrown away nowadays.”
DiBacco also said she recognized how important the Wildcat was in the community, and noted that it is “a nice tradition, even for a new tradition.”
“It was a tiger that became a Wildcat,” she explained. “We just had a lot of fun with it.”