For the oldest local hockey results, there's a museum for that. The Musée Héritage Museum just completed a massive sports records project so now you can find out how the St. Albert Comets did in the 1977-78 season if you want to.
For the oldest local hockey results, there's a museum for that.
The Musée Héritage Museum just completed a massive sports records project so now you can find out how the St. Albert Comets did in the 1977-78 season if you want to. There are team photos and programs, and game records so complete that you could find out how many penalty minutes your favourite player got for roughing 40 years ago.
Apparently, interest in this kind of memorabilia has only waned over the years but never fully dissipated.
“We post this stuff on Facebook and we get a lot of comments,” explained archivist Vino Vipulanantharajah, noting the ever-ardent interest by local historical sports buffs. “There's a lot of nostalgia about all this stuff.”
The museum has been holding on to a massive and un-catalogued sports collection over the years. The collection includes a trove of photos, ephemera, medallions, text, and audio-visual and other materials related to the St. Albert Comets hockey club and the St. Albert Minor Baseball Association, as well as events organized around the 1988 Olympic Torch relay in St. Albert, and the Alberta Summer and Winter Games hosted by St. Albert in 1979 and 1994, respectively. There is Colleen Pomoty's oversized scrapbook of those 1994 games.
The six-month project was completed thanks to a grant from Archives Society of Alberta.
Assistant archivist Jia Jia Yong said that it was a fascinating look into the city's history and provided some fun moments along the way.
“There were a lot of interesting records. I'm not a huge sports person but I think it's really interesting to see the types of records that are generated, especially for the Summer Games. They also had Festival '79 in conjunction with that. It was really cool that they had the Summer Games happening within a couple day period, but for 17 days parallel to that, they also had a cultural event going on.”
The festival included a craft fair and sale, a fiddling competition, a backgammon tournament, plays, street dances, and a seniors' choir festival. A scrapbook collection of the celebration was also donated by a member of the public. It includes Jack Mcreath's manuscript of a musical production that was put on at the time.
Descriptions of the materials are now publicly accessible through the museum's online database at archives.museeheritage.ca, as well as on the ASA's database at www.albertaonrecord.ca. People would need to visit the gallery itself to view the materials. Some audio-visual files, such as the recording of the 1994 Alberta Winter Games song, Where the Spirit Soars, written and sung by Vicky Belzil, are available online (https://archives.museeheritage.ca/audiovisual-recordings-file) . The museum has Belzil's sheet music too, for those who are interested.
Yong and Vipulanantharajah added that there are some gaps in this kind of material in the museum's archives, most notably anything related to the St. Albert Saints hockey team. People can contact the museum at 780-459-1528 or visit www.museeheritage.ca to enquire.
