New Plaza Honors a Legend at East High’s Williams Stadium
East High alums cut the scarlet ribbon at the dedication of Savage Plaza at Williams Stadium.
In the dictionary words like fierce, ferocious and untamed are used to define savage. Each of those adjectives would apply to Bob Savage, but to fully and accurately describe him you’d have to add some others like beloved, legendary and passionate. Really, though, the dictionary isn’t the place to go looking for what defined him. East High School is. It has been for decades and will be forever now that there’s a permanent memorial in place.
Yesterday a crowd of East alums gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony that officially christened the Bob Savage Alumni Plaza at the entrance to Williams Stadium where Savage prowled the sidelines for so many seasons as Scarlets football coach. Many of them were shuttled over from the main campus, probably the most, uh, mature load of passengers to ever ride in that yellow school bus.
Savage passed away in 2008 after a five-decade career at East where he led his teams to 477 victories in softball, 198 in baseball and 102 in football. By then he’d been inducted into the National High School Athletic Coaches Association’s Hall of Fame and the Iowa Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame. No wonder his funeral was held at the school.
Though Savage never won a state title at East in any of the sports he coached, part of his enduring legacy at the school is the girls’ softball juggernaut that was crowned state champs in 2011.
The photograph that was unveiled as the centerpiece of the plaza shows Savage riding high on the shoulders of his players after the Scarlets defeated arch rival Roosevelt for the city championship in football in 1960. And it came to life in the persons of Harold Wilson, Wendell Griffis Jr. and Tom McClinton. They were the three players clearly visible in the classic photo and each of them was present yesterday.
The ceremony culminated a campaign that began several years ago when some prominent East alums gathered at the Latin King for lunch and hatched a modest plan for a barbecue patio and a plaque. The original vision was sketched on a napkin but the $1.6M final product came off an architect’s drawing board. Other elements of the design honor all of East’s state champions and inductees in the school’s athletics hall of fame.
The festivities yesterday kicked off what’s annually a big weekend at East. Last night the East Alumni Association, which proudly bills itself as the nation’s largest high school alumni organization, disbursed more than $100,000 worth of scholarships to graduates in the Class of 2013. Today and tomorrow the annual golf outing is held, one of the group’s major fundraisers.
Eastside pride always runs deep. This weekend it’s especially fierce, ferocious and untamed – Savage, even.
