Goderich Memorial Community Centre celebrates official re-opening

BY BOB MONTGOMERY

The re-opening celebration for the Goderich Memorial Community Centre on Saturday was a huge hit.

 

The doors opened at 2 p.m. and the former arena was almost filled just an hour later. Matt Hoy is the Chair of the Goderich Memorial Community Centre Committee and he says he's not surprised the former arena started filling up that quickly. The arena was built in 1949 as a tribute to Goderich’s war veterans and has hosted everyone and everything from Wayne Gretzky to COVID-19 vaccination clinics. It even welcomed the special guest for the 50th anniversary of the Young Canada Week Tournament: Montreal Canadiens’ superstar Jean Béliveau.

 

Hoy points out that, for several years, the centre was a hockey arena and now it’s a community centre and the committee is just getting started with all of the things it has planned. Hoy says originally that the town had to shut the arena down because the gas lines were leaking to the point that they could no longer be used to keep the ice cold, so it sat empty for several years.
That was until some of the service clubs in Goderich got together and proceeded to give the building a new life. Hoy says the new club rents the building from the town for $1 per year and the rentals and the fundraising will all go towards the renovations for the building.

 

Hoy says there were several people at one time who wanted to just destroy the arena, but he says there were more who felt the old arena had a lot of character and history and was still a very strong building that just needed a little help. They were determined to make it something new and even better than the old building.

 

And Hoy says the building is already very busy. The committee already has a couple of trade shows booked and the upstairs hall is absolutely amazing and that will be available for rentals as well. Back down on the main floor, the centre can accommodate pickle ball, ball hockey, baseball and shuffleboard and he says that’s just the beginning. 

 

Requests for rentals are coming in all the time, he said, and the number of people who wanted to be part of the grand re-opening is just another example of what the building means to the community and how many people have jumped in to help get it up and running again. He says volunteers Barnie Purser and Earl Pennington had just about lived in the building lately and all of the service clubs have done a great job.

 

Hoy says that the committee is currently applying for grants and corporate funding. Members still have a lot of work to be done. The entire building has to be clad, the downstairs kitchen has to be done and the mezzanine at the top has to be renovated, although committee members haven’t identified how they want to use it yet. So, he says, there’s still a lot of work to be done and a lot of money raised in order to get it done. But he says the people of Goderich have always cared a great deal about their town and the committee is confident it will get all of the work done.