125 Things You Might Not Have Known About St. Louis Park: Part V

Editor's Note: As St. Louis Park today, we're presenting 125 unique tidbits of local history in a five-part series. Parts I, II, III and IV are , and .

1. Westwood Junior High was built at 2025 Texas Ave. S in 1959. When Central Junior High closed in 1980, it became . It is situated on land that was formerly nine holes of the 27-hole Westwood Hills Golf Course, built in 1928.
2. The girls track and field team won the 1998 state title.
3. Renowned race horse Dan Patch trained in St. Louis Park in the early 1900s. The Dan Patch rail line, which was built a few years later, came through town.
4. is the largest employer in St. Louis Park, with more than 8,000 employees.
5. Before Parktacular debuted in 1997, St. Louis Park celebrated summer with "Party in the Park" for 16 years.
6. Classical guitarist Sharon Isbin graduated from St. Louis Park High School.
7. St. Louis Park High School baseball coach Aaron McEachran was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in 2001.
8. St. Louis Park's Cooper Theater, which was open from 1962 to 1991, was one of the first theaters in the country to feature Cinerama, which used three film projectors synchronized to make a panoramic image.
9. In 1934, St. Louis Park held a dance marathon contest, where couples were able to win prizes for outlasting others. The event drew the ire of the court system, as a number of people became seriously fatigued from all the dancing.
10. St. Louis Park's Jim Mattson made the all-state hockey team as a goalie in 1949.
11. Minnesota's first shopping center—the 30,000-square-foot Lilac Way—went up on the corner of Excelsior Boulevard and Highway 100 in the late 1940s.
12. was built in the early 1950s with the help of $4,000 from a nearby Skippy Peanut Butter Plant.
13. In the 1920s, the Brookside and Oak Hill neighborhoods unsuccessfully attempted to secede from St. Louis Park.
14. St. Louis Park's first Boy Scouts troop organized in 1918.
15. Three Park firefighters have died in the line of duty. In 1964, Kurt "Cord" Scheibe, a Park firefighter since 1922, died of a heart attack at age 61 while fighting a small fire in the "bag room" at the National Lead Company.  In 1971, firefighters Arnold "Arnie" Johnson, a professional, and Robert "Bob" McElmurry, a volunteer, perished in a blaze at the Pizza House on Excelsior Boulevard.
16. St. Louis Park's first post office opened in 1887.
17. In St. Louis Park's early days, the city was served by street cars that ran into downtown Minneapolis.
18. At one time, there were nine different streets named "Summit" in St. Louis Park. A city ordinance passed in 1933 changed all the local street names.
19. The St. Louis Park boys track and field team has won five state championships, most recently in 1966.
20. The intersection of Highway 100 and Highway 7 was one of the country's first cloverleafs.
21. Before it merged with St. Margaret's Academy, Benilde High School was an all-boys Catholic high school. It opened in 1956.
22. Charlie Brown was a real person and lived in two locations in St. Louis Park. He met "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz in the late 1940s.
23. The opened in 1930 as an indoor horse arena.
24. Professional snowboarder Steven Fisher graduated from St. Louis Park High School.
25. The St. Louis Park Historical Society was started in 1969.

Special thanks to the St. Louis Park Historical Society and Patch reader John Froom for helping to compile this list.