Utah State University was this past weekend’s opponent for the Boise State Broncos. The game took place in Logan, Utah. Utah State won 52-26 as BSU committed eight turnovers.
The good news? Before this weekend, in nine games at Romney Stadium, the Broncos were seven and two. The bad news? The Aggies no longer play in Romney Stadium.
The stadium was named after Mitt Romney’s cousin, Dick Romney, Utah State’s head football coach from 1919 to 1948.
But, since the Broncos’ most previous visit to Logan, Romney Stadium has a new name: Merlin Olsen Field at Maverik Stadium. The field is now named after probably the best player in USU history, Merlin Olsen, and the stadium is named after Maverik Country Stores. It’s actually the same place, but the university makes more money with a paid corporate name.
When Utah State announced the renaming in April, they hailed their new partnership with Maverik as a catalyst for new stadium renovation, which has already begun. The west side of the stadium looks different than in 2013, with the demolition and rebuilding of a large section of seating and the press box. And yes, there is now a mini Maverik Store in the stadium, and it carries a lot of the same items, with the exception of auto accessories and beer.
Dick Romney’s grandson, Richard, says renaming Romney Stadium is bittersweet, but the family realizes that to be competitive and relevant in today’s sports world, the team needs to have strong financial backing. He didn’t mention that the family has enough money to have kept the name, but if I were them, I would have let Maverik Stores have the rights, too. It would be difficult to rationalize dropping a few million of the family’s dollars to gain the naming rights to a stadium that’s already been named after you for free for 47 seasons.
I found a detailed history of the Romney’s online, but I didn’t read it for lack of time. And that brings up someone about whom I did take the time to read, Evelyn Wood.
Evelyn Wood was born in Logan in 1909 and started her teaching career at Jordan High in 1929. She served as the girls’ counselor, but her main interest was teaching reading. And she was good at it. Mrs. Wood was able to read six-thousand words a minute, and she developed a technique of reading straight down the page, rather than left to right, and of reading complete thoughts, rather than single words.
She taught others her tricks and found that faster readers were more effective. Among people she studied was Senator John F. Kennedy.
Mrs. Wood developed a style of reading using your finger to trace lines of text and eliminating sub-vocalizing, where you read under your breath or aloud in your head. She called it “speed reading”, and in 1959, she started the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics business. Classes were advertised on television through the 1960’s and 70’s, and original Tonight Show host Steve Allen was one of its highest-profile celebrity endorsers.
The name Evelyn Wood became a household word with TV appearances like that of an early student on the game show “I’ve Got a Secret” who claimed she could read “Gone With the Wind” in just under one hour. Evelyn Wood courses were taught on college campuses until the late 1990’s, including at her hometown school, Utah State University in Logan.
I never saw the TV commercials myself, but I did hear about them through comedy shows and albums. “SCTV” did a parody called “Evelyn Wood Eating Dynamics.” Cheech and Chong had a skit called the “Evelyn Woodhead Speed Reading Course”. And “Saturday Night Live” in 1977 featured Ray Charles in a sketch about the “Evelyn Woodski Slow Reading Course” for people who read too fast. He signs up because his habitual speed reading of braille has caused him to suffer blisters.
Personally, although I read a lot, I tend to go slowly. I’ve been known to read a 500-page novel in bed, reading myself to sleep each night for a year and a half, since it doesn’t take me long to get to sleep. And I’m still one of those who doesn’t really understand how information is retained when you average ten pages a minute. To quote Woody Allen, “I took the Evelyn Wood speed reading course, then I read ‘War and Peace’. It’s about Russia.”
