Kurt Kragthorpe
Courtesy of Idaho State Athletics
This whole thing may never have happened, if not for hunting season.
The development of Idaho State University’s famous multipurpose facility, originally branded the Minidome and forever to be known as Holt Arena, stemmed from marketing desperation. Milton “Dubby” Holt, ISU’s athletic director, determined that the solution to drawing more fans to football games than the Spud Bowl attracted was playing at night, a fairly novel concept in the 1960s.
Moving the games indoors was even more creative. And the building that bears Holt’s name is being celebrated in 2020 after a half-century of history and highlights, having been funded by bonds to be repaid with increased student fees and serving as an inspiration to other on-campus venues around the country.
Holt is remembered as “a very visionary person,” says Mike King, the arena’s first manager.
The origin of Holt Arena, where ISU would showcase a national champion football team and many other outstanding men’s and women’s athletes in multiple sports over 50 years, begins with Dubby Holt himself. The story involves how the student body voted to support the project, and how construction came with complications including an iron workers’ strike and significant flooding of the football field that occurred less than three months prior to the 1970 home opener.
“It took a hard selling job on the students,” Holt once told the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, one of many publications that took interest in the project. “I give them full credit for logical thinking. Now, they could not be happier with the facility.”
Holt’s logic was that when the Bengals played home games in the afternoon, they were competing with a lot of outside forces – including the weather. As he observed, “One cloud in the sky, and we’ve lost thousands of fans to TV.”
Plus, Saturdays in the fall were made for hunting in southeast Idaho, and businesses were open during the day. If lights were added to the 6,000-seat Spud Bowl, evening temperatures would allow for comfortable night games during only a portion of the season.
This way, fans could count on staying warm and dry, under a steel-gray roof.
The concept was not embraced immediately or universally, of course. A domed stadium was a radical idea in an era when only the Astrodome in Houston hosted indoor football. And now they were talking about doing it on a college campus in Pocatello, Idaho?
“When Holt started talking about a covered football stadium, I wondered if he hadn’t been sitting at too many outdoor track meets with his head exposed to the sun,” William “Bud” Davis, then ISU’s president, told the Idaho State Journal of Pocatello. “And when I later endorsed the idea and put a price tag on it, people wondered if I were smoking loco weed. … One sportswriter from a neighboring community nominated me for the ‘idiot of the year’ award.”
In reality, Davis deserves considerable credit for being “imaginative, willing to try it,” King says. “It was really experimental, when you think about it.” Administrators such as vice president William Bartz and John Korbis, campus engineer and director of physical plant, also were instrumental.
The funding phase was a story in itself. Fifty years later, the $2.8 million price tag seems astoundingly low. Even when an inflation-conversion table pushes the figure to $18.7 million in 2020 dollars, the cost remains remarkable. “We had money left over, actually,” King says.
Yet anyone familiar with the climate of college campuses in the 1960s understands that building student support for any project would be challenging. That became King’s job, as the ISU student body president in 1968-69.
“It was a battle,” King says. “It gets political. Ultimately, we won the day. There was a lot of controversy over it initially.”
Glenn Alford, formerly ISU’s longtime sports information director, says of the national culture, “Students weren’t voting for anything.”
Yet ISU students backed the dome concept with 56% approval, the school website says. The cost to each student was a $14-per-semester fee (roughly $93 in today’s dollars), according to the Journal.
The benefits? Naming rights, for one thing. “Since we paid for it, we’re certainly going to have our name on it,” says Bill Isley, another former student body president.
That’s how the building became the ASISU Minidome, recognizing the Associated Students of ISU.
The word “Mini-dome” (using the hyphen and quote marks) first appeared in the Journal in August 1969. In that column, sports editor Joe Richmond also noted the first suggestion by boosters that the building be named to honor Holt. The renaming would occur in 1988; Holt died in 2007 at age 92.
Other benefits to students, Isley says, included $1 admission to concerts, with a steady stream of artists performing in the venue. A half-century later, Isley remains an advocate. “The Minidome’s just paid for itself time and time again,” he says.
With capacity once reportedly targeted for 15,000, the facility was built with 12,000 molded seats. Amid his enthusiasm, Holt said in 1970, “I’m making a prediction: This place will be too small in a hurry.”
A crowd of 12,300 for Idaho’s visit in the second home game that season may have validated his belief, although only the national championship football season of 1981 would consistently test that attendance limit as the years passed.
The site at the north end of the campus was a former runway where airplanes once landed on the campus as part of the Vo-tech mechanics’ education. Coincidentally or not, the arena resembles an airplane hangar and is “not an architecturally innovative structure,” Alford acknowledges.
Even so, it was a landmark project. The University of Idaho and Northern Arizona University of the Big Sky Conference later would build domes of their own, as did schools in North and South Dakota. Utah State University officials visited ISU and considered developing a similar facility, before building separate football and basketball venues in the late ’60s, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
Alford, hired by ISU in 1967, remembers being “kind of flabbergasted that this could be built in Pocatello.” It all seemed “extremely ambitious,” he says, “but what did I know?”
Jerry Dunne, the quarterback of the first Bengal football team to play indoors, says, “You picture in your mind something, but until you see it in construction, it is hard to imagine.”
Some neighbors were said to not be thrilled with the construction process, Alford says, but the project created a stir in positive ways.
Addressing an ISU Forum in August 1969, King said, “The dome has brought us nationwide interest. People are asking, ‘Where is Pocatello?’ ”
Cedric Allen, the Pocatello-based architect, told the ISU Gridiron Club, “To my knowledge there is no other project like it in the world.”
One element of the design was influenced by the ISU football team’s trip to New Mexico for the 1967 season opener. Davis and other administrators toured UNM’s new basketball arena, known as “The Pit,” because of its mostly below-ground construction.
Davis determined that digging a hole was less expensive than building walls, so the field is 20 feet below ground level.
This story may be apocryphal, because the dates don’t quite line up. But some have suggested that an ISU football trip to Drake (in Des Moines, Iowa) or Nebraska-Omaha, amid the grain silos of the Midwest, also may have had something to do with the dome’s design.
In any case, the initial timetable called for construction to be completed in November 1969. A season-ending football game vs. Drake would be the first event, followed by basketball season. In September, however, the Journal cited an “iron workers strike and other construction difficulties” that caused a month’s delay, pushing back the opening date.
In April 1970, the Deseret News reported attendance of 7,900 for ISU’s Orange-White spring football scrimmage in the new facility, although the late-September home opener vs. UNLV is considered the first major event. More complications developed between those dates.
On July 1, the field was flooded with “over a foot of water and tons of silt and debris,” according to a lawsuit filed by the school. King by then had been hired to manage the building, as a recent graduate. As he explains, “I had always wanted to be part of athletics. Plus, I didn’t have a job.”
His job description suddenly became disaster cleanup. Flooding from failure of one of the two main water pipes supplying the structure resulted in water coming through the southwest corner and required “day and night” mitigation, King says.
Dunne remembers the field being dusty for months, due to the dried mud. Regardless, he was thrilled to become part of the facility’s debut.
Dunn Reflects Back on Playing in Holt
While being recruited to Idaho State University from his hometown of Boise, Jerry Dunne fully expected to play all of his home football games outside in the Spud Bowl. Only after arriving on campus did he hear any talk of a domed stadium.
Fifty years later, Dunne vividly remembers the feeling of Sept. 26, 1970, walking down the ramp and seeing more than 10,000 fans in the facility then called the ASISU Minidome and later renamed Holt Arena. “It was just amazing,” Dunne says. “You just kind of stopped and looked around. You just feel so fortunate that we were involved in something like that.”
Dunne helped make the venue’s debut memorable in a 64-34 victory over UNLV, then in its second year as a football program. The Bengals took a five-game losing streak into the contest, counting two road games to begin the 1970 season, but they overwhelmed the visiting Rebels.
ISU’s scoring total stood as the arena record until 2014, when the Bengals beat Simon Fraser 66-14. Dunne accounted for 343 total yards and scored the first touchdown in the building on a 1-yard run. He delivered three TD passes, including a 92-yarder to Ken Warren.
The stadium was not filled to capacity for the inaugural game, with announced attendance of 10,400. Even so, that was a huge crowd by ISU standards and the gathering compelled the Idaho State Journal to publish a detailed traffic map for the next week’s home game, vs. Idaho. That was prescient, because ISU drew 12,300 fans for the Vandals’ visit.
The Bengals beat Idaho 35-14 behind Carlis Harris’ punt returns for touchdowns of 83 and 65 yards, a record that still stands. An ISU team that would finish 5-5 overall went 3-2 at home that season, also beating Portland State (37-6) and losing to Montana (35-34) and Boise State (24-3).
