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authority records
Rossland Ski Club
A2024.000.006 · 1933-1984

The Rossland Ski Club was formed during the gold boom by Scandinavian-American miners, and they held the first recorded competitions in Canada. The first downhill race was held on Red Mountain on February 15, 1896. Olaus Jeldness, a Norwegian mining engineer, won the race. He became a major driving force behind the development of skiing in Rossland. Skiing tournaments were held annually in conjunction with the annual Rossland Winter Carnival, and the event attracted people from all over North America. The club, and organized skiing in Rossland, ceased to exist after 1918, due to World War I and an influenza epidemic in 1918.

A second Rossland Ski Club formed in 1933 by Harold Fox, Trig Nora, Ivor Moen, Fred Hackney, and Harry O'Reiley (these were members initially part of the Trail-Rossland Ski Club, but wished to form their own club). In 1934, the club made the base of Monte Christo their headquarters. Archie Coombes presided over the club's newly-built cabin, and the club purchased the land the cabin was on in 1937. The Rossland Ski Club hill held many competitions, including the Western Canadian Amateur finals, zone and club tournaments. By 1939, club membership peaked at 238. Also in 1939, the club built a new cabin in Squaw Basin, which remained in use by the club until the Granite chair lift was erected in 1965. The club held the Grey Mountain Grind from 1943 to 1946. In 1947, the Trail and Rossland ski clubs amalgamated and became the Red Mountain Ski Club.

Trail-Rossland Ski Club
A2024.000.007 · 1929-1942

Near the end of 1929 Trygve (Trig) Nora, Geoff Colls, Bert Both, Robert Lapse and Ole Nyhus formed the Trail-Rossland Ski Club, which attracted a number of skiers from Trail and Rossland. The cabin at the Rossland Golf Course acted as their headquarters for the next is to seven years. By 1933, the club had built two hills for ski jumping, the Nels Nelson Hills, and one north of the Rossland reservoir. The club hosted the 1934 Western Canada Ski Association tournament, where the jumping took place on the hill north of the reservoir. The club dropped "Rossland" from its name at the request of the Rossland Ski Club (Harold Fox, Trig Nora, Ivor Men, Fred Hackney, and Harry O'Reiley in 1934, and became the Trail Ski Club.

Shuswap Narrows Lodge
MA 150 · Corporate body · 1945-

Shuswap Narrows Lodge was operated by Frank and Kaye Oben from 1945-1952. Frank Edwin Oben was born on February 25th, 1913 in Vancouver to Mary McConicky and Edwin Alfred Oben.

On May 11th, 1937, at twenty-four years old, Frank Oben married a divorced bookkeeper two years his senior named Kathleen Law in Vancouver B.C.

Frank Oben learned the craftsmanship of baking from his father, and owned a bakery on Homer Street, Vancouver. During the Great War, Mr. Oben inherited the bakery and subsequently provided food provisions to armed workforce stationed in the Vancouver area.

In the summer of 1945, Frank and Kathleen Oben moved from Vancouver to the B.C. Interior where they owned and ran Shuswap Narrows Fishing Lodge in Eagle Bay. It was an extremely successful business endeavor due to his pragmatic personality and business savvy intellect, a favorite place amongst nature aficionados throughout the Pacific Northwest.

On June 11th 1952, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Oben sold their property, the Shuswap Narrows Fishing Lodge, to a Vancouver couple: Mr. and Mrs. Perrault.

In its aftermath, Kathleen and Frank Oben ended their marriage. Hereinafter, he remarried Joan Mary Dunn and had an efficacious career in Real Estate and property investing as a salesman in Salmon Arm.

Since 1945, Frank Oben was a resident of Salmon Arm, and has been a paramount participant in community life. Furthermore, he was the former president of the curling club, President of the Okanagan Real Estate Board, a Rotary club director, a member with the Shuswap Power Squadron, and a fervent golfer.

Tragically, on June 15th 1987 at the age of 75 Frank Oben committed suicide. The immediate cause of death was a gunshot to his head, and the antecedent cause was a fractured skull and lacerated brain.

The people who played a significant role in his life are; his former wife Kathleen Law, his second wife and widow Joan Mary Dunn, daughter Nicole Marshall, brother Edwin Albert Oben Jr., nephew Grant, and niece Joanne.

Red Mountain Ski Club
Corporate body · 1947-1995

In 1947, talks started between the Trail Ski Club and the Rossland Ski club which resulted in the amalgamation of the two clubs. This formed the Red Mountain Ski Club (RMSC) in 1947. The immediate Objectives of the clubs were to build a chairlift up Red Mountain, a lodge at the base, and to extend the base area. Chuck Sankey was the first president of the club. The first chair lift on Red was built in this same year, and ran until 1973 when it was replaced by a Mueller lift. The Red Mountain Ski Lodge was built in the fall of 1947 using the timbers from the Black Bear Compressor House.
More area for skiing was cleared in the 1950s, and during this decade some of the prominent organisations to come out of the ski club were organised too. This includes the ski patrol, the ski school, and the start of the Red Mountain Racers. In 1960 a poma lift was installed from the lodge to the Back Trail. The Granite Mountain chair was installed in 1965 which opened up a wider area for skiing. This same year the Main Run was cleared, with Jumbo and South Side Road following the next year.
The ski area has also been the host for large events. These include the first World Cup to be held in Canada (the du Maurier International) in 1968, the Export “A” Cup, and the Shell Cup. The world cup was held at the RMSC again in 1988 (The Husky World Downhill). Additionally, the Red Mountain Racers held many different events at the Ski Hill over the years.
Many different professional athletes have trained and competed at and with the RMSC. Nancy Greene is a two-time winner of the World Cup (1967 and 1968 – winning the Giant Slalom) and an Olympic Champion (1968). She grew up in Rossland and was a member of the club. Kerrin Lee-Gartner, who won gold at the 1992 Olympics, grew up in the area and was a Red Mountain Racer.
In the 1980s, it was decided to sell the Ski Club as it was becoming much too large of an operation for volunteers to run. The RMSC and its facilities were bought by Eric Skat-Peters in 1989, though the Ski Club still ran until 1995.

Trail Ski Club
Corporate body · 1934-1947

The Trail-Rossland Ski Club dropped “Rossland” from its name at the request of the Rossland Ski Club in 1934 and became the Trail Ski Club. They built a cabin in Squaw Basin (on the North side of Granite Mountain), which became a hub for downhill skiing in the surrounding hills. Their main club cabin was at the North end of the Rossland Reservoir, and they skied largely on the East side of Red Mountain. In 1947, the Trail Ski Club and the Rossland Ski Club amalgamated and became the Red Mountain Ski Club.

Corporate body · 1960-1962

The Rossland-Trail Olympic Promotion Committee was founded in 1961 with the goal of hosting the 1968 Winter Olympics. Whistler, Fernie, and Rossland-Trail all bid to be Canada’s entry for the games, but Calgary was selected. The committee wrote letters back and forth with Canada’s Olympics Committee, as well as compiled maps and research about the area and snow fall history. In the end, the 1968 Olympics were held in Grenoble, France.

1940-1942

The association was formed by members of both the Trail Ski Club and the Rossland Ski Club. They organized the building of a gas-driven rope-tow at the base of the north face of Red Mountain around 1940, which increased the amount of downhill skiing that could be done and eventually led to the idea of building a chair lift. Both the Trail Ski Club and the Rossland Ski Club used the tow. The tow was the only existing up-hill facility at the time. In the 1950s, the rope tow was moved to the west side of the hill and electrified, then later replaced by a T-bar.

Corporate body · 1928-[196?]

The Rossland Swimming Pool Society was formed in 1932 to offset the lack of natural aquatic facilities in a mountain city. Donations of volunteer labour and supplies resulted in the opening of the pool by August of that year. The swimming pool is presently operated by the City of Rossland.

Read, Frank
Person · 1911-1994

Frank Read was born on March 1, 1911. In the early 1930s, he became an accomplished oarsman with the Vancouver Rowing Club. Following a back injury, suffered while playing football, that ended his rowing career, he went into the hotel industry. In late 1949, Read agreed to coach the University of British Columbia rowing team which, at the same time, began a formal co-operation with the Vancouver Rowing Club. In recognition of both institutions, it was decided to call these new members "VRC/UBC" oarsmen. Despite very limited resources for UBC’s fledging rowing program, Read focussed on the importance of training and conditioning and instilling in his athletes dedication to the sport.
His intensive training program soon produced results. Competing against other top Canadian teams to represent the country at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, the UBC team was beaten by the Toronto Argonaut club. Two years later, Read’s eight-oared crew represented Canada at the 1954 British Empire Games in Vancouver. There the team won Canada’s first ever gold medal for the eights. The following year, invited by the Duke of Edinburgh to compete against the world’s best at the Henley Regatta in England, the students scored an upset victory over the world champion Russians in the semi-finals, and finished second to the U.S. team in the finals. In 1956 Read lead his rowing teams to the Melbourne Olympics where the coxless four won a gold medal and the eights came a very close second to capture a silver medal – these were the first Olympic medals won by Canada in rowing.
After a brief retirement (1957-60) Read returned to coach the rowing team at the 1960 Rome Olympics. That year, his eights finished second, earning Canada’s only medal at the games. Following the Olympics, Read once again retired, bringing to a close an important era in this country’s rowing history.
Read was also a mentor to those who followed him as rowing coaches. During his first retirement, John Warren coached the UBC team which represented Canada at the 1958 Empire Games in Cardiff, Wales, winning a gold and two silver medals (in the eights, fours, and coxless fours, respectively). Two others, Wayne Pretty and Glen Mervyn, were on the coaching staff for Canada’s rowing teams at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo (resulting in one gold medal in the pairs) and the 1967 Pan American Games in Winnipeg.
John Carver in "The Vancouver Rowing Club: A History, 1886-1980" offered the following assessment of Frank Read’s accomplishments:
Starting with almost nothing, operating on the most meagre budgets. he took his crews to the top international competition and, incidentally put himself among the top rowing coaches in the world. He had the drive, and the patience to stand the rugged twice daily grind in all kinds of weather; he demanded discipline and condition, and got them, and he had the
knowledge and knew how to impart it to his crews. He will say to himself that it is the horses in the boats that win races and of course he is right. But no sport demands more coaching than crew rowing and Read supplied it beyond measure.
Frank Read died in Vancouver in 1994.

Corporate body · 1952-

The School of Kinesiology was originally named the Bachelor of Physical Education Program, and in the interim was called the School of Physical Education, the School of Physical Education and Recreation, and then the School of Human Kinetics. The first physical education courses were offered in 1946 after the appointment of Robert Osborne (who directed the program until 1972) in 1945. The Bachelor of Physical Education Program ran until 1952 when the program was formed into the School of Physical Education in the Faculty of Arts and Science. In 1960 “recreation education” was added to the name, though Bachelor of Recreation Education were only conferred starting in 1969. In 1958 a master’s program was added to the School of Physical Education. In 1963 the School moved to the Faculty of Education. When Robert Osborne retired in 1978, he was replaced by Robert Morford. At the same time the school began to align with the greater University’s goals of implementing more academically centred programs. There was a new emphasis on science relating to physical activity, and the School’s laboratories began to develop and grow. In 1979, a Sports Medicine Clinic opened in the School’s John Owen Pavilion on the south campus with specific faculty of this clinic also being associated with the School in both teaching and research. In 1992 the School was renamed the School of Human Kinetics and The Bachelor of Recreation Education was phased out in 1995. In 2011 it was renamed the School of Kinesiology.
The School of Kinesiology’s mission is to “generate, advance, and disseminate knowledge about the biophysical, psychosocial, managerial, and pedagogical dimensions of human movement to enhance the health and quality of life of all populations across diverse settings.” Their specific goals are to advance knowledge about a) the factors underlying human physical performance, (b) the nature of the human quest for excellence in competitive and expressive forms of human movement, and (c) the role of sport, leisure and exercise in society from both a contemporary and a historical perspective; teach students about physical activity in general and about sport, exercise and leisure in particular; to prepare educated professionals to serve the present and future needs of society in a variety of professional settings related to the active health, leisure, sport and physical education fields; and facilitate the application of pertinent knowledge to professional and lay agencies concerned with the promotion of recreation, physical education, sport, fitness and active health at local, provincial and national, and international levels.

Kokanee Derby
Corporate body · [ca. 1973]-[ca. 1990]

The Kokanee Derby was a club in the area for fishing and hunting. There were competitions for weight and game. They had meetings at the Rossland Club and some competitions at Big Sheep Creek.