If you grew up around Westby, Wisconsin, skiing was a part of your life, especially ski jumping when I was young. I think skiing goes hand in hand, or foot and foot, if you prefer, with our ancestors coming from Norway. They say Norwegians are born with skis on their feet. That should scare any soon-to-be mother of Norwegian descent! I think the desire to strap a pair of boards on our feet and slide down a hill is in our genetic make-up. Flying through the air on that pair of boards just adds a little more excitement to the fun.
This year the Snowflake Ski Club in Westby hosted their 90th annual ski jump. It used to be a 90-meter jumping hill but it’s now 118 meters. That’s 387+ feet for the metrically challenged, which includes most of us.
Back in the 1950’s and early 60’s we always went to watch the jumping. Some ski jumpers that stand out in my memory from those days are: Ralph Bietila, Gene Kotlarek, Art Devlin, Billy Olson, Joe Perreault, John Balfanz, Lloyd Severud, Art Tokle, Rudi Maki, and of course Lyle Swenson from Westby, who captained the U.S. Olympic team and competed at Innsbruck, Austria in 1964.
When my brother, David, and I were talking on the phone one night this week, he reminded me of a ski jump we built when we were in grade school. I had forgotten all about it until he started describing it. Then the images started flooding back from deep within the recesses of my memory. I wonder why our mother didn’t take a photo of it to save for posterity? Perhaps she didn’t find it as great a marvel of engineering and artistic ability as we did.
We built it out of cardboard pieces that we cut from discarded boxes. We think we got the idea from a miniature ski jump that was displayed in the window of the Flugstad Hardware Store during the annual ski tournament. That ski jump is now on display in the window of Dregne’s Scandinavian Gifts, where Flugstad’s store used to be.
David was the engineer and I was the artist. Between the two of us we think we built a pretty fine ski jump. We cut out all the strips to use as supports and struts and fastened them together with that white paste in a jar that we used as glue in school. We curved the cardboard for both the scaffold and landing hill and then glued white paper on it for the snow. Our scaffold even had sideboards on it so the skiers wouldn’t fall off.
Yes, we even made ski jumpers and gave them the names of those jumpers from the 1950’s listed earlier. They were also cut out of cardboard and colored with crayons. We made the skis from used popsicle sticks. We can’t remember how we bent the wood up in the front to form the skis. We think we soaked them in water to make the wood more pliable. Then the skiers were attached to the skis and we were ready for our tournament. We had to keep the skiers straight up or even tilted a little to the rear or else they would topple forward when going down the scaffold and hill. The incline of our scaffold was pretty steep so the skiers could slide fast enough to fly off the takeoff and not just plop over.
As David said, there was nothing electronic about our old ski jump, but we had a lot of fun playing with it in the living room. Most of the materials to make it were recycled from things that would have been burned or thrown away. We didn’t spend any money on it other than the paste. There’s something special about toys that you make yourself. It gives you a satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment that you created and built something. You also have hours of fun making them.
Our toy making didn’t stop with ski jumps. We also built our own earthmoving equipment, caterpillars, and dump trucks out of broken tobacco laths. I wrote about those toys several years ago. If you have a copy of my first “Across the Fence” book, you can find that story about the creative use of tobacco laths on page 99.
There again, it helped that David was the carpenter and builder, and I was more of the designer, trying to make them look good. We were a good team. We used our imagination to create many of our games and toys when we were young. I was glad to see our kids also use their imagination to create things. Everyone needs to keep their brain creatively active, no matter what age they are. You’re never too young or too old to learn new things. Better yet put the old and young together. If you have grandchildren, get together and create and build something. I hope I can show our grandson how we built tobacco lath trucks and let him help put them together.
We need to let kids know that back in the dark ages, before computerized games and electronics, people actually made toys and games with their own hands. We let our imagination and creativity run wild and the toys we envisioned in our mind, soon took shape and came to life.
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