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Like pretty much every boy, I grew up thinking my dad was a superhero.

I thought he was the toughest man alive, and I figured there was nothing he could not do. When I was 10 years old, he reinforced that belief after a Little League practice at Montana Tech’s Leonard Field.

My dad was my coach, and our practice was cut short when a violent storm rolled it. We ran to the car as the rain, wind and lightning hammered the Butte hill.

Suddenly, a tree in the yard across Park Street blew over and knocked down a power line. A woman slammed on her brakes to avoid hitting the fallen tree, and the wire draped across the hood of her car.

The woman was terrified, knowing that she would be electrocuted if she stepped foot outside her vehicle. 

But my super dad got out of our car and walked over toward the damsel in distress.

He told her to stay in her car as he got close to the hood to examine the wire. My heart almost stopped when my dad reached out, grabbed the wire and tossed it aside.

The grateful woman drove away, and my teammates got to see what I had known all along. My dad was Superman.

“How did you do that?” I asked my dad as he got back in the car.

I was still impressed with him when he told me the answer, but it unfortunately exposed his lack of superpowers. My dad was an electrician. He simply saw that the wire was insulated, and he knew he could touch it.

(Please do not try this if a wire falls across a car hood near you. You are not as cool as my dad.)

My dad was hardly the only person to look super human on the corner where Western Avenue meets Park Street. That was the site of decades worth of heroic athletic performances.

Before Alumni Coliseum, Leonard Field is where Montana Tech played its football games. Well, a lot of those games were played when the school was called the Montana State School of Mines.

Leonard Field was named after the school’s first president, Nathan R. Leonard. It was built during the Great Depression and it opened for football in the fall of 1933.

The place was beautiful, thanks to the hand-built stone walls on the west and north ends of the field. It hosted track, football, baseball and skating.

Leonard Field comes from a time when sports fans didn’t need fancy chairs or luxury boxes. People sat on the slope of the wall. They crowded the rails on top, looking for the best spot to peek at the action.

The west wall also provided a short porch that was ideal for left-handed hitters.

Of course, Montana Tech didn’t play on that field when I was old enough to watch. I did, however, get to see many scrimmage games when Bob Green was coaching the Oredigger football team.

Parents and diehard fans would line the field and sit on the wall just like they did in the old days. The Orediggers used to practice there, too, before they put in an artificial turf at Alumni Coliseum and named the field after Green.

As a young reporter for the newspaper, I would watch the players practice, and then I would get some inside scoops as I walked with some of them up the walkway through the wall to the statue of Marcus Daly.

The Leonard Field walls have certainly seen better days. Today, they are full of weeds and crumbling in parts.

So, Montana Tech hired a contractor to reinforce the lower part of the north wall using rebar and concrete blocks.

On a John Emeigh report on the KXLF News, Montana Tech alumnus Larry Hoffman said they are fixing the historic walls with “modern trash.”

Hoffman pointed out that the walls at Leonard Field were quarried by hand and transferred to the campus by horses pulling wagons.

You would think that would classify the field as a historic site that would be protected by the Butte-Silver Bow Historic Preservation Commission.

You would think altering that historic site in such a manor would call for much more of an outrage than just a couple of guys — Hoffman and Sid DeBarathy — coming out to speak out on a short segment on the news.

In 2009, Dr. Rindo Sironi requested to tear down a decrepit drug house on South Idaho Street as he built a beautiful new building near the hospital. The doctor, though, had to put up with a months-long fight with historic preservation officials before the eyesore he purchased could finally be brought down.

In October of 2011, Butte-Silver Bow tore down the crumbling Greek Café on Park Street. First, though, the fire department had to use a heavy-duty bolt cutter to remove Brian McGregor, the owner of the Silver Dollar Saloon, from the building.

Like he was Fonzie trying to save Inspiration Point on Happy Days, McGregor chained himself to the building with a thick logging chain and threw away the key.

Leonard Field has a million times more historic value than that house and building combined.

Montana Tech Chancellor Les Cook did not appear on camera for Emeigh’s report on Friday’s newscast, but he did issue a statement.

The chancellor said repairing the wall with concrete blocks is a safety issue as well as an economic issue.

“If additional funding becomes available in the future, we can remove the block portion of the wall and attempt to restore the original wall,” the chancellor’s statement read.

That statement seems to be a fair one.

Rather, it would seem to be a fair one if a $31 million donation to the school from Ryan and Lisa Lance wasn’t so publicly hailed in April of this year.

That is not to say that the money from the generous gift from the Lances should be used to fix the walls at Leonard Field. But it does show that the school has some serious fund-raising ability.

When Tech needed new stadium seats for Alumni Coliseum, they got the money in a matter of days. When they needed money for the Jumbotron at the stadium, it was no sweat.

Well, maybe it was a lot sweat and hard work by Joe McClafferty, who was then the director of athletics, but the school easily came up with enough funds.

The same could be said for the artificial turf on the football field and the number of new buildings on the campus.

Montana Tech is a great school. It is one of the very best institutes of higher learning in the world. 

The school has a very high placement rate, and its graduates make a lot of money right after their graduation day. We know this because the school tells us that, as it should.

Montana Tech should preserve the historic value of Leonard Field. If it doesn’t want to, then the Historic Preservation Commission should step in.

Restoring that history should be as easy as a simple letter-writing campaign. The many wealthy graduates of Montana Tech would probably come up with that money in less time than it took my dad to toss that wire aside.

I bet they would even get some donations from graduates of Montana Western and Carroll College.

Yes, it should really be that easy. Our schools should care about historic preservation, and the hallowed walls of Leonard Field need to be restored without using “modern trash.”

This should not take a superhuman effort.

— Bill Foley, who is claiming ‘Modern Trash’ for his band name, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 before that billionaire weirdo ruins it. Listen to the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.