Often, when the phone rings, there’s someone on the other end saying they have a bit of a strange question. Usually, that turns out to be a request for an obituary or birth announcement. Which is really not that strange at all – we respond to those requests at least once a week. But on one occasion, the question definitely took me by surprise.
“Is it true,” the caller asked, ”that there used to be a ski jump up there that took off in the US and landed in Canada?”
This was a new one for me! And finding the answer led to one of my favourite things: Weird Random Question Day at the Creston Museum.
When I first started working here, I was really nervous about calling up complete strangers and asking them random questions about local history. But I very quickly learned that people LOVE it when Weird Random Question Day rolls around! I have had the very good fortune of being able to talk to a lot of fascinating people, about everything from A (apples) to Z (Zambonis). I still fondly remember Ralph Moore walking around the Fall Fair scratching his head and muttering to himself: he’d stopped by our display at the Fall Fair and we’d taken the opportunity to ask him about historic apple varieties on his family’s farm…he was literally pacing off the orchard in his mind, trying to recall which varieties were grown in the various rows!
In the case of the international ski jump, I talked to half a dozen people and eventually wound up at Bob and Ethel Vigne’s house – who I had not met until that day – having cocoa and cookies while he told me about that ski jump.
FYI – It was at Kingsgate.