Well, we’ve made it. We are only a month (33 days for those quibblers out there) away from the official end of winter (we won’t listen to those two Canadian groundhogs).
Now, why is that important you may ask, considering the topic of this month’s articles?
In Greater Sudbury, we may love partaking in the many various outdoorsy and cold-weather-centric activities associated with living in this northern climate, but we darn well love it when that cold weather is over.
But I digress … Now, the weather that we are currently experiencing (above zero and raining) brings back a memory of my own from the Snowflake Festival of 1988.
As a follow-up to their previous two years of prizewinning snow sculptures (1986’s “Dragon on Guard” and 1987’s whiskey barrel horse cart), the employees of the Sudbury Branch of the Canadian Red Cross decided to celebrate the then upcoming World Junior Championships, which Sudbury would be hosting, with a world-class sculpture bearing the title “Sudbury: A Global Community”. The sculpture was to include a stylized globe with a flame on top and three athletes representing different disciplines within track and field.
Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans that year and as my own mother wrote: “That poor sculpture (didn’t have a chance), we tried, the weather was too warm on Sunday and then too cold by Tuesday.”
So, unlike previous years where they could “work all morning on Saturday then go and have lunch in the Snowflake Room and admire (the) project from afar”, for this group of vaunted sculptors, it was not meant to be.
Looking back 40 years from that unseasonably warm February winter in the late 1980s, all of the memories that were elicited in regards to the 1947 Sudbury Winter Carnival were related to what must have been the marquee event on that week’s calendar of outdoor activities.
The ski jumping events drew in an estimated 20,000 spectators to witness the high flyers compete in the “Ontario Ski Championships.” These events were staged approximately one kilometre east of the current Adanac Ski Hill, as reader Brian Marsh explained. The jump tower was almost at the corner of where Attlee meets Westmount.
The enormous crowd that came out watched the contestants taking off from a specially constructed tower and ski hill that reader Helen Antonini wrote in to share that her “husband helped build … with the (Sheridan) Tech High School boys.”
More than 75 years later, reader Brian Marsh believes that “if you climb the hill (where the ski jump was located) there may still be some remnants of the tower.” This is due to the fact that “they left the lower section up for many years after” and he remembers that as a child, he “used to play there.”
Due to a lack of parking facilities in the vicinity of the ski hill, hundreds of people were forced to abandon their cars on the nearest road and trudge across snow-covered fields. Thousands more arrived comfortably on a special train that travelled from the old CNR station located in the now-demolished Borgia neighbourhood.
Frank Scott, who was five years old at the time, vividly remembers “taking the train from the CNR station on Louis Street out to the ski jump.” As a reminder of how much the city has expanded over the years, he also states that “in those days that seemed like a long way out to the middle of nowhere.”
Thirty years later, and for a few years at the end of the 1970s, the Sudbury Winter Carnival Committee presented a winter festival dubbed Flanagan's Fair in mid-February on Minnow Lake. The ‘Flanagan’ referred to here is Thomas Flanagan. In August of 1883, he was working as a blacksmith on the expansion of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s westward line through the area and is believed to have discovered the rust-coloured material that later identified as copper sulphide. With that find, the Murray Mine was subsequently established and Sudbury took off from there.
As a nod to Thomas Flanagan, the advertising for this winter fair had as its mascot a prospector (holding aloft his bag of treasure). The fair would make full use of both Minnow Lake and the nearby Carmichael Arena. Outdoor activities included a polar bear dip (that annual test of one’s winter mettle), helicopter rides, log sawing competitions, speed skating competitions, cross country ski demonstrations, and car and motorcycle races across the lake ice.
Indoor activities included Flanagan’s Fest and a “Mardi Gras” concert series, Miss Flanagan’s Fair Pageant and an amateur show. Reader Stephen MacLean wrote in that he remembers one of the years of this short-lived winter festival was “particular exciting … because Spider-Man was going to be there” to meet the children.
In fact, not only was Flanagan’s Fair graced with the superhero presence of the Amazing Spider-Man, much to the delight of Sudbury youngsters, but he was also joined by the Incredible Hulk (unfortunately, not Lou Ferrigno).
By the early 1990s, another sports championship came to the Sudbury Region and attracted spectators from far and wide to our winter paradise. The Canadian Snowmobile Championships (what could be more “Northern Ontario” than racing snowmobiles?) came to Coniston with an event that has been talked about among long-time residents even all these years after it ceased to exist.
Unlike the motorbike and car races that took place on Minnow Lake during Flanagan’s Fair, the snowmobile championships settled on an oval ice track just below the twin stacks of the old INCO Smelter. The organizers teamed up with the many community groups in the town of Coniston in order to create a jam-packed weekend of events aimed at both young and old.
These included the old standbys present in the myriad of previous winter carnivals across the Sudbury Region: the log sawing competition, the helicopter rides, a ball hockey tournament (which, by the way, this authors team won), and a beer fest.
At the Sudbury Then and Now Facebook page, one of our “group experts”, Terry Closs, shared with us a couple of family videos of the Speigel Playground Winter Carnivals from 1961 and 1962. Its carnivals included many children’s sporting competitions, including speed skating, hockey and broomball. There as even a healthy dose of comedy with Gatchell’s own Ice Capades, the “Clowns on Ice.”
The Winter Carnival also featured the Sudbury district's own Gertrude Desjardins and Maurice Lafrance, who were the 1958 Northern Ontario junior pairs champions and 1960 Canadian junior pair champions. They were accompanied by members of the Sudbury Figure Skating Club.
Speigel Playground was in Gatchell between Dean Street and the future site of the Big Nickel. After building a larger sports facility at Delki Dozzi park, as well as a children’s park and tennis courts, which were also constructed nearby on Logan Avenue during the same period, Speigel Playground was closed and the land was no longer needed by the city.
Although Speigel Playground is no more, the memories of its winter carnival events are still strong within the minds of those who experienced them.
The smaller, usually single-day winter carnivals, whether they were put on by a playground, a church or a school, also elicited their own share of vivid memories from readers. Outdoor rinks, hockey games and skating have always been a quintessentially important fixture for these winter carnivals.
Reader Stephen MacLean painted a vivid picture of the local playground winter carnivals, with its ongoing playoff hockey games among all ages. He remembers“penny tables inside the shack to place your tiny tickets for the item you most wanted … the chili and hot chocolate and frozen toes.“ And as the carnival day wound down, the “big fluffy snow falling through the outdoor rink lights against a dark blue and golden sky as the sun set in the west” gave way to “the sudden appearance of 20 shovels as 20 teens and adults jumped the boards with them to clear the ice for the next game.” This was something he marvelled at as a youngster.
Sy Desloges echoed Stephen’s frozen toes comment, remembering that after a long stretch of skating (or playing hockey) outdoors, one always looked forward to “that pot belly stove to warm your feet on” along with the hot chocolate to warm the rest of your body.
And, lastly, reader Nicole Frappier shared that she most remembers the skating and costume competitions at past school carnivals in Coniston. She “remembers walking around the outside rink all dressed up in different costumes and they would select three winners.”
Among the usual costumed wizards, nuns, policemen, and red riding hoods, there were also costumes rooted firmly in those times (“flower children”) and nods to the future (astronauts and robots).
Well, dear readers, it is time to bring this month’s stroll down Memory Lane to a close. I hope that even though the topic was cold (and may have caused a shiver or two), the memories of our past that it elicited were heartwarming. Now, get out there, enjoy the rest of the winter and make some new memories for the future.
Jason Marcon is a writer and history enthusiast in Greater Sudbury. He runs the Coniston Historical Group and the Sudbury Then and Now Facebook page. Memory Lane is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.
