Gathered for the Old Shiner Gym
If there’s one thing to be said about Robert Werner, the ol’ boy sure can put on a party.
And party they did Saturday evening, as about 300 people gathered at the Shiner KC Hall for a dinner and Casino Night fundraiser, all in support of the old Shiner Gym.
The largest of the night’s donors—the Don Kaspar Foundation, GVEC, Kaspar Companies, the Spoetzl Brewery, H&C Construction and Boedeker Plastics of Shiner, all donated $10,000—had the best seats in the house, right on the dance floor beside the huge buffet lines.
But there were tables in plethora Saturday, as most everyone had donated toward the project. They had $5,000 tables, $3,000 tables, even real-life game tables—Texas Hold ’Em, Blackjack, a roulette table and even three craps tables—yes, there was some for most every flavor Saturday.
Every dollar raised will go toward helping insulating and adding air conditioning to the gym. 
“I can’t thank you all enough for turning out like you have in support of this project,” Werner said to the crowd Saturday. “It makes me proud to be from a town like ours, knowing that there is this kind of support for something. “
Indeed, after The Gazette’s initial story ran detailing what Shiner Academic and Athletic Foundation was all about and what they planned to do, Werner shared with the newspaper that his phone hadn’t stopped ringing for a day or two, as call after call came in, offering donation after donation.
Several were quite sizable, in fact. Just how sizable? According to Werner, as much as $60,000 in donations came in within the first few days alone.
Considering $250,000 was the target amount and outside funding kept flowing in, they possibly could have reached and/or surpassed that goal by now.
We had hoped to bring you a few numbers from those fundraising efforts in today's story, but as of late Monday, Foundation directors were still working to rectify the numbers, Werner said.
We hope to have those for you soon.
We at The Gazette would like to 
express our gratitude to the fine things Mr. Werner said about our publication and the series we ran this past month, detailing the Old Shiner Gym’s origins, as chronicled in our newspapers during the 1930s.
We’d be remiss, also, if we didn’t credit Doug Kubicek, president of the Lavaca County Historical Commission, as the person who did the lions’ share of the work gathering all our old news clippings. His work made ours go infinitely faster.
We’d also like to thank both Kubicek and Duff Wagner, though it will likely be a week or two before Duff sees it as he’s now living abroad. Still, thank you both for taking time out of your schedules to help guide this writer through a few touchy spots in our history. As always gentlemen, it was a pleasure working with you.
In the meantime, we will leave you with a few scenes from Saturday’s gala and Casino Night fundraiser, and one last final historic item from our old pages.
You might recall in the third part of our series, where the gym’s building contractor is named, how that contractor—giddy at being selected for the project, no doubt—announced right then and there he planned to use as much local labor for the gym’s construction as he can.
What you may not recall so readily was the newspaper’s comment that followed, about how that was great news for our workers, because the pay rates associated with the gym build, a federal WPA project, paid “much higher rates that are usually given for that type of work here in South Texas.”
We share that list with you now and leave you with this thought: Seeing the many job descriptions listed here and how very little they got paid—especially knowing that this amount was a lot more than they usually got—makes my back ache just looking at it.
