 Sell me the bedraggled building, Dick Bliss
asked.
No.
Reconsidered, Bliss urged maybe a year later.
No.
But Bliss kept alive his interest in a place left for dead. Let’s
deal, he offered again after more time had passed.
The Calumet Club was finally his.
“It’s something nobody else would touch,” Bliss said. “That’s what
it amounted to.”
The calumet Club now amounts to something special, just as New
Albany’s elders recall.
On perhaps the year’s last great day for golf, Bliss instead
sandblasted the familiar stone entrance at 1614 E. Sprint
St. His personal compulsion is again soon to be a community
centerpiece.
He rushed to be ready for today’s open house, Come see, from 4:30
p.m. to 7:30 p.m., what has been saved.
“It’s definitely a success story,” said David Barksdale, president
of the Floyd County Historical Society, “And we need more of
those.”
Bliss isn’t worried about why everyone else passed on the challenge
he pursued passionately. He gracefully avoids the irony of
giving back to the city that, just last fall, booted him
from its City Council.
Plus, at age 66, Bliss cannot count on a payoff in his lifetime.
To treat the project right is to spoil it - $350,000 in
round numbers – for replica windows, for refinished walnut
woodwork, for no-corners-cut care inside and out. Barksdale
calls the restoration meticulous and exceptional job.
“I hope they’re smart enough to hold on to it,” Bliss said of his
family.
Only the brick-walled bottom floor so far is fit and sparkling and
available for rent for get-togethers for as many as 250.
“The need is there, believe me,” said Mark Bliss, Dick’s son. “I
haven’t advertised yet, and I’ve shown this place at least
20 times.”
The upper two floors are to reopen in stages, with the cavernous
top one a fitting coup de grace. The vision for it is as a
unique banquet hall, with room perhaps for 500.
“There’s only one of me,” Dick Bliss said, “I’ll get it when I get
it.”
During the club’s prime- through much of the first half of the past
century – New Albany’s youth danced there, played basketball
or, according to some early accounts, swam or bowled.
A social and sports hub, the 17,000-square-foot clubhouse opened in
1920 for an already-thriving organization of 800 or more
members.
“Guys wanting to have a good time and, frankly, also to do some
service,“ said Mary Pat Bliss, Dick’s wife and an eager
consumer of Calumet history.
By the way, she contends, call it Cal-u-may. The proper
pronunciation was lost over time once the organization
fairly collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression.
The tile-roofed building won a second life as an armory, from which
soldiers headed to World War II and to Korea. Its next
reincarnation was as quarters for organized labor.
 In what they’d retitled the Amalgamated Building, union leaders
kept hopping while members churned out garments at local
factories. “It touched a lot of people,” Barksdale said.
“It was such an important building.”
Bliss bought the worse-for-wear place from a union group that by
then required barely a fraction of an expanse that was 110
feet long and 62½ feet wide. He likewise purchased and
demolished two buildings immediately to the east,
establishing parking. The Calumet Club had opened
originally at a time such an amenity was unnecessary.
“Everybody walked here,” Bliss said.
Mark Bliss said he could show me several garages full of stuff that
others pitch but his father boards for some reclamation or
another. Had Dick Bliss not similarly redone the former
Walk Drugs store at Spring and Vincennes streets, he might
not have caught Calumet fever. The building is on the same
block.
“All the time he was doing that (the drug store renovation) he looked
down the street,” Mary Pat Bliss said.
Guilty as charged.
“It needed tender loving care,” Dick Bliss said. “I don’t need
this, really. But New Albany’s been good to me.” Are any Calumet Club members alive? The Bliss family is
not sure and would like to know. To enlighten or learn
more, call the club at 949-1611
Event: The club will
play host to the Floyd County Historical Society on Tuesday
at 7 p.m. The public is invited: Dick Bliss will
speak.
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