Looking for that personalized brick you purchased months ago from the Salt Lake Organizing Committee? It probably won't be installed at The Gateway's Olympic Legacy Plaza until this fall.

That's when the names of the thousands of volunteers at the 2002 Winter Games are scheduled to be posted on a wall at the plaza beside the fountain that's shaped like the Games' snowflake logo.

Only bricks purchased by last summer were in place around the fountain when The Gateway opened in November. None has been installed since then, Mark Lewis, SLOC's former head of marketing, said.

More than 18,000 of the $50 bricks were sold before SLOC stopped taking orders on March 17. During the Games, which ended Feb. 24, Lewis said organizers sold several thousand bricks a week.

"We didn't sell millions of bricks, but I think it's been a moderate success," he said.

One recent buyer is Joyce Ostler, who lives in the East Millcreek area. Ostler said she bought five bricks for her family in February or March because she thought "it would be a neat way to contribute to the Olympics."

But Ostler said she was disappointed when she went to take a look at the bricks, which bear the names of her and her husband, their two sons and daughters in-law, daughter and two grandchildren.

"I made a special trip to go down to see them but could not find them," she said in an e-mail interview. "I was waiting for a nice, warm wonderful day to take my time looking at them."

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She chose last Friday. "I must have looked for an hour," said Ostler, who up until that point, had only been impatient with the weather. "Back in the corner of my mind, a horrible little thought is lurking, 'Did mine even get done?' "

Her bricks are probably yet to be manufactured. Lewis said its takes one month to six weeks to make and engrave the bricks. The first post-Games batch is just now being finished, he said.

Tracy James, the general manager of The Gateway, said the wall-sized plaque with the names of the Olympic volunteers is scheduled to be finished by the end of September. James said the bricks will all be installed at that time, completing the legacy plaza.


E-MAIL: lisa@desnews.com

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