Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Wrestling teaches you how to get off your back
We are back up and running as of January 9th
and people who come in and see what has
transpired and seen the results of the flood are frankly flabbergasted.
The museum is dedicated to preserving the
history of wrestling going all the way back five
thousand years. Wrestling is man kind’s oldest
sport. When people walk in the lobby they will
see a life size portrait of Abraham Lincoln
Mike Chapman, Director of Dan Gable Museum wrestling at the age of twenty three, back in
1832. Also when they come around the corner
then they will see a life size mural of Jacob
wrestling the Angel of the Lord.
We talk about wrestling going back five
thousand years. It is man kind’s oldest sport. -
And then we have a lot of information detailing
the Olympic Games. We have an entire
pavilion dedicated the Olympic Games. We
talk about the history of the Olympics and
when they started in 796 b.c. We also have an
entire pavilion dedicated to the NCAA
championships. The first NCAA
championships were held in Ames, Iowa in
1928. Then we have three or four halls of
fame. We have an entire wing dedicated to
the early days of professional wrestling back
when it was the real thing and not the
theatrics that we associate it with in the last
fifty years or so. So we just have a lot of
artifacts- A lot of memorabilia- A lot of
mementos- A lot of very exciting displays.
They are really chronicled the entire history of wrestling as a sport.
The flood of 2008 really was devastating. Its
just amazing how fast the waters came up. In
the basement we had a lot of storage of our
gift shop items and the gift shop is essential to
our revenue stream. We lost ten thousand
posters, a thousand DVDs, a thousand books
all of which it had already been paid for. The
water came up the steps incredibly fast, and
took over the main display area. We have
almost sixteen thousand square feet here. It
took out everything up to about the three foot
mark. We are up and running. So basically
ninety five to ninety eight percent is has been
restored. The walls have all been put back up.
We brought we hired a cleanup crew from
Michigan. We spent about sixty five thousand
dollars on just the cleanup up. They were here
for three or four weeks. We even had a t shirt
made that wresting teaches you how to get off
your back and old man river put us on our back but he couldn’t keep us there.
The funding that we got from the federal and
state has just been tremendous; I have never
been in a position where we’ve had to ask for
anything like that before either as a private
citizen or as the director of not for profit. But
their response I have to say has just been terrific.
I think the museum has done several great
things for the city. The museum I think is sort
of a beacon that lets the state and the other
areas know that Waterloo is progressive. We
have had seven to eight thousand visitors a
year. We think once the word gets out that we
are back up and running and the summer weather turns.
We could see us in three to four years getting ten to twelve thousand visitors a year.
Honestly to repeat myself it wasn’t for FEMA
we couldn’t of recovered and we’ve recovered fairly well.
For more information, visit www.fema.gov