Remember when junior national ski jumping was held in Duluth?
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Pine Knot News subscriber and two-time state ski jumping champion (1966, 1967) Rick Nelson stopped in recently with an obscure item for show and tell. It was a Northwest Paper Company notebook, complete with one of the company's iconic Canadian Mountie paintings, this one showing a mountie on horseback sharing what appears to be a wanted poster with three men working outside.
While Northwest Paper notebooks are fairly rare these days - as the company was a precursor to both Potlatch and Sappi - it was the inside cover that makes it so unusual.
Below three linked, colored triangles was the header:
"National Junior Ski Meet
March 8-12, 1967
Duluth, Minnesota"
Below that was a message from the Cloquet and Duluth ski clubs, wishing participants success.
"We hope the experience you have gained here will play some part in making you a better skier, sportsman, and a finer member of our society."
It was signed: "Joe Nowak, Ski Coach, Minnesota State High School Champions, Cloquet, Minnesota."
"It was pretty neat that Coach Joe got the paper company to do that," Nelson said of the company that also donated the 40 acres of land in 1961 that is home to Pine Valley park, with its ski jumps and recreational trails, as well as the two hockey shelters next door.
Nelson was one of three Cloquet athletes to compete in the Duluth event, along with Steve Rosen and Larry Tuomi.
A senior in 1967, Nelson had also been to junior national tournaments in Oregon in 1965 and Winter Park, Utah, in 1966.
"You usually want to go somewhere far away, but we just got to go to Duluth that year," he said with a smile.
Nelson still attends at least one national ski jumping event per year, and otherwise keeps up with the sport that gave him a college scholarship and Cloquet a dozen state championships.
- Pine Knot News
