The Old Red Barn

The outside of Olympia Stadium, at the close of the Red Wings' 1979-1980 season (Photo courtesy of Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

Hockey season is again upon us, and the Detroit Red Wings will don their classic sweaters (“jerseys” are for soccer!) adorned with the iconic Winged Wheel. They will vie again for the most venerated sporting trophy in North America, Lord Stanley’s Cup. As one of the “Original Six” teams in the National Hockey League, the Red Wings are steeped in tradition; their history bound in a lexicon of legends and folklore that would rival that of any historical society. But there was a day that the Wings broke with tradition, and I was there to see it. The day was December 15, 1979, and it marked the Red Wings’ last home game at Olympia Stadium, their home for fifty-two years. I, on the other hand, was a bit less historic… I was only six years old!

Impressions of Olympia

Though my father had taken me to numerous Red Wings games in the past (babies and toddlers weren’t charged admission.), my first vivid hockey memory is of that last game at Olympia. If memories are snapshots of our lives, then my memories of that night are those of a wide-eyed child, devoid of context but rife with wonder!

Attending the game with my late grandfather and three of my teen-aged uncles, my first recollection was of Olympia’s infamous escalator. I recall riding them while securely held in my grandpa’s arms. The escalators, due to space constraints, were nearly vertical, moving fans upwards at a nearly eighty-degree angle! Such contraptions probably wouldn’t pass any safety regulations today, but to me, they were marvelous… the closest I’ll ever be to levitating. Beyond the escalators, I recall the outer concourse, wreathed in a pallid haze of cigar smoke and – like everything else in Olympia – very narrow.

Upon reaching our seats in the upper level, nestled behind the “home” end of the arena, I experienced what is still my most vivid memory of the evening… the interior of Olympia itself. The two levels of seats were stacked neatly, one on top of the other, in a manner that represented the limits of early twentieth century architecture (Olympia opened in 1927). Seeing a hockey game in one of these older arenas was a very different experience from seeing one in a modern arena. If hockey arenas today are designed like the Colosseum of Rome, which awe with their expansiveness, then Olympia was more akin to a Shakespearean theatre-in-the-round. Even in the upper level, we could hear the player’s skates cut the ice, their shouts to one another and the reverberating thump of the boards as they crashed into them.

Olympia Stadium, 1963 (Photo courtesy of Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

The Game

While I don’t recall much of that night’s game – which saw the Wings trailing 4-0 in the second period – I do have a clear memory of the Wings’ comeback in the third period. The 1979 Red Wings were an awful team and would finish the season in seventeenth place in the then-twenty-one team NHL. Luckily, the Wings’ opponent that evening was the equally-bad Quebec Nordiques, one of the four teams added that season from the defunct World Hockey Association (Coincidentally, the Nordiques are now the Colorado Avalanche, the Wings’ nemesis through much of the 1990’s). For that last period of hockey, Detroit shed its “Dead Things” image and gave Olympia, “The Old Red Barn”, a more appropriate send-off. Storming back, the Wings whipped the final crowd into a frenzy by scoring three goals in the third. Then, with only a few minutes to go, my favorite Red Wing on that team, defenseman Greg Jolly, took the puck on an end-to-end rush and scored to tie the game. I’ve been to many loud sporting events since that night in 1979, but I can’t remember another where I could actually FEEL the cheering of the crowd! The hysterical cheering went on for the remainder of the game, which would end in a tie, and for a long time afterwards. As the Wings lingered on the ice, the fans chanted and shouted… a collective dirge for a fallen friend. In the corner opposite from where I was sitting, some fans unfurled a huge banner of stitched-together bed sheets. It read, “Goodbye Olympia, Goodbye Quebec”. I’ll never forget that image, and how lucky I was to be there, at that moment, to see it.

Aftermath

Olympia Stadium would linger for eight more years, empty and neglected. As with Tiger Stadium, the Hudson Building and other iconic buildings in Detroit, the wrecking ball eventually erased it. But it lives on in the collective memory of Detroit hockey fans. Among those fans is a little boy who now exists only in the back of my mind.

A Note on Sources

Images for this article are courtesy of Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University. They can be found at the Library’s Virtual Motor City digital collections page.