Filed under: Saskatchewan
For most of the twentieth century, before corporate hockey and the health kick of an hour of daily exercise, curling was a prominent sport in every city, town and hamlet in Canada – including snow-less Vancouver and Victoria. People used to dress in home-made sweater jackets, drink beer and rye whisky rink-side and pull back deeply on a filter-less cigarette while tossing a curling stone down a sheet of ice. Curling rinks were rife with alcohol and tobacco advertising; even the scoreboard encouraged avid curlers to buy a pack of smokes, preferably their brand. But those days – and many international curling champs from across Canada – are long gone, to be replaced by svelte, track-suited athletes in what is now merely a niche sport. But the many, many artifacts remain. Imagine you’re so keen on curling that you filled your basement with curling paraphernalia – then invited strangers to come and peruse your leisure activity? When Don and Elva Turner of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, both avid curlers, first started a curling museum in the basement of their home in the late 1960s, it was the first and only major museum in the world dedicated exclusively to curling.
It still is. In November 1990, when their extensive collection outgrew their re-modelled basement, the Turners went the museum to a 800-square-metre building attached to the Weyburn Leisure Centre. Recently the entire collection was went across the parking lot from the curling rink at Crescent Point Place, possibly its final resting place.
Continue reading Eccentric Museums: Rush Hard to the Turner Curling Museum
Eccentric Museums: Rush Hard to the Turner Curling Museum originally appeared on AOL Travel Canada on Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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