Concrete Floor for Curlers

Detroit Free Press * November 4, 1909

Detroit Curling Club Plans to Lay One Before the First Frost Comes to Town.

Plans are being made by the Detroit Curling Club for the laying of a concrete floor in its clubhouse.  It will benefit the club and its members in two ways.  With a concrete floor it will enable the curlers to get under way with the first freezing weather, make possible more curling days, and do away with the necessity of waiting for the ice to build up.

The second reason is, when the curling season is over, it will make the club desirable as a roller rink, for which purpose it would be rented by the club, following the plan now in use by the Windsor Curling Club.

When this floor was installed they made ice by waiting for cold weather and then they opened the windows.  About 15 years later this floor was torn up and a new floor was installed that contained piping connected to a steam powered compressor for ice making – possibly the first compressor installed in a curling club in North America. 

 The above photo was taken about 1910.

(Ed. Note:  I have not yet found an article that indicates if The Club did rent the place out for roller skating.)

The History of Pebbling

When?  Where?  Who?  These are difficult questions to answer.  How?  Is the question we will try to answer.  Pebbling the ice is not something a person does to outdoor, natural ice.  Once curling moved inside, the pebbling became a necessity.  Therefore, pebbling began in Canada and the USA.

 

The earliest reference we have found is in John Kerr’s book Curling in Canada and the United States published in 1904.  Mr. Kerr writes:  “Pebbling is the final finishing touch for making ice for curling.  Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, in this final process hot water is used; and when the mercury indicates a near approach to zero the water may be almost at boiling point, the objective being that the heated water may melt a seat for itself in the ice-sheet before freezing.  … In all the best rinks it is now applied by means of a “sprinkler”. 

 

Another member of this 1902 Scots tour wrote:  “The surface of the ice is either sprinkled or corrugated.  In the former case a watering-can with a very fine rose is used, and hot water is sprinkled sparingly over the whole surface.  This, of course, makes no pattern on the ice.  In the latter,  small streams of water issue from a pipe about 5 feet long, with a pin-head aperture an inch apart, the pipe being fed from a tank attached to it containing hot water.  This is rapidly run diagonally across the ice first from one side and then across so as to make a diamond pattern.  This gives a certain texture to the ice surface, so that the stone answers more readily to the turn of the hand than it possibly can do on perfectly smooth ice.”

 

Try to imagine a 5 or 6 foot pipe with small holes drilled in one straight line an inch apart the entire length of the pipe.  The pipe is connected to a six or eight foot hose which is then connected to a large tank of water.  Now imagine a three man team to work this contraption.  One fellow would lay the pipe on the ice near the hack on sheet number 1.  The other two gents would handle the tank of water.  When they are all ready, someone turns on the water and it flows out of the small holes onto the ice.  The man starts dragging the pipe across the ice in a diagonal ending up at the far end of sheet number 4.  They repeat the process until the entire arena is covered in one diagonal direction.  Then they start again at the near hack on sheet 4 going diagonally to the opposite end of sheet 1.  This new pebble crisscrosses the first pebble. The result is long ridge pebbling in a diamond shape instead of the individual ‘dots’ that we see today.

 

What would this pebble look like?  The picture below was taken at The Detroit Curling Club in 1949 during the Scots Tour.  The players stacked brooms for a photo-op.

When the photo is enlarged the diamond shaped “ridge” pebbling is easy to see.

This type of pebbling is normally done only once per week.  Even at the Canadian Brier they only made ridge pebbling at the start of competition.  No more pebbling during the week.  As the week progressed the ice would become more “swingy”.

Curling in the Olympics

Curling made its first appearance on the Olympic program as a medal sport in 1924 in Chamonix, France then returned in 1998 at the Nagano Games.  The 1924 games saw teams from Great Britain, Sweden and France.  Great Britain (Scotland) won the gold medal in 18 end games.  Yes – I said 18 ends!

Curling was a demonstration sport five times: in Lake Placid in 1932, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936, in Innsbruck in 1964, in Calgary in 1988 and in Albertville in 1992. Since its re-introduction in 1998, curling has been made up of one women’s and one men’s tournament.

At the 1932 Winter Olympics the venue was the Olympic Indoor Arena in Lake Placid, New York. Eight teams from two countries (4 American teams and 4 Canadian Teams) competed in this event. Only men's curling was contested at these Olympics. The matches were held on February 4 and 5, 1932. Each of the Canadian teams played against each of the American teams – only 16 ends this time.

One of the American teams was from The Detroit Curling Club.  They represented Michigan.  Unfortunately, they lost all four games:  Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec and Northern Ontario.

Skip: George Lawton
Third: Don Fraser
Second: E. R. Palmer
Lead: W. Herb Morley

1932 - Michigan vs. Quebec

The three men facing the camera are the Detroiters

The patches given to the contestants

The "D" is for Demonstration - not Detroit

Detroit Curling Club - Harlem Shuffle

Cool video at:  Detroit Curling - Harlem Shuffle

Even James Cameron Could Not Find Them

In 1974 Mr. John W. Taylor wrote:  “In 1941…a lousy Boche sub sank the ship carrying our stones.  Somewhere in the deep Atlantic lie fifty sets of beautiful Ailsa Craigs.  …we had to wait until the following season for the replacements before we could curl with our new matched stones.”  With those words he launched a legend of a story.  Fact or fiction?  This myth-buster says ‘fiction’.

1)  Oct 1, 1942 The Scots Wha Hae reports:  “In the summer of 41, a syndicate of 37 members provided $1,833.33 to acquire 50 pairs of new matched stones.  These are the stones we played and enjoyed so much this last season” (1941-42).  Conclusion:  We did not wait a season to receive replacement stones.  If the original order was lost they would have gone down in 1941.

2)     Dec 6, 1941 the minutes of the Board of Directors meeting state:  “R. Pearce reported that the new stones were in Detroit and would have been delivered today except for some technicality which will be cleared up the first of the week.” 

3)     Dec 3, 1941 a Scots Wha Hae article states:   “the new stones have arrived in Canada”. 

4)   May 21, 1941 the minutes of the Board of Director meeting:  “Moved and seconded that Robert Pierce, Percy Power and Nate Cornwall be authorized to purchase the new stones.”

There are 26 weeks between the authorization to purchase and the arrival of the stones.  With no e-mail; no fax machines; trans-Atlantic phone service in its infancy…we have to assume it took a few weeks to get the order from Detroit through the dealer in Canada to the factory in Scotland.  It also took a few weeks to ship the stones from Scotland through Halifax and across Canada to Windsor via train.

That leaves about 21 weeks to process the order – 147 days.  In the 1930s and 1940s, according to multiple sources, it would take 2-1/2 man-days to produce one stone from a block of granite.  That means about 250 man-days to produce our order.  At two stones per day, then making 100 stones in less than 147 says is about right.  Our conclusion is that the stones were shipped from Scotland between Oct 15^th and the 1^st of November, 1941.

According to www.uboat.net and www.sharkhunters.com there were 252 ships sunk by between June and November 1941, but only three ships travelling from the UK to Canada were sunk by German U-boats:

·       June 2, 1941 the Michael E.  Travelling from Belfast to Halifax.  Too early in our order process to be considered.

·     June 9, 1941 the Trevarrack.  Left Glasgow, stopped in Clyde on June 1^st and was headed to Montreal.  Again, this was too early in our timeline.

·       October 1, 1941 the oil tanker San Florentino.  It was sailing from Glasgow to Halifax to Curacao.  This is the only sunken ship that could have been carrying our stones.  But, it carried no cargo!!  It was stopping in Halifax only for fuel to continue its trip to Curacao to load up with oil.

·         In November 1941 there were no lost ships heading to Canada from Great Britain.

Conclusion:  There are no curling stones setting on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that could have belonged to The Detroit Curling Club.

On the other hand, it makes a great story to tell visitors, new members and especially reporters (they love to print it).  So, if you do not tell anyone that the story is a myth then I will not tell either.

Happy Scuba Diving, Angus

Guests Curling at The Detroit Curling Club

Some fun footage here...

Thanks to Mike M.

The Broom and The Bottle

Last week’s James Bond article generated two reader questions.  What is the wooden ‘bowling pin’ in the video used for?  When were push-brooms or brushes first used?

In many curling photographs from Europe we see the use of a tee-marker.  In Scotland they are called ‘bottles’.   In Switzerland they are called ‘dollies’.  Painting the circles is a comparatively recent custom. For a large part of the history of curling the curler played to a house which was only scored in the ice. It was difficult to see from the hack how the stones lay in relation to the tee.

 

The original way of reducing this difficulty was to mark the tee with a movable object, known as the 'tee-marker'. This was usually made of wood so that if a stone were to come into contact with it, it did nothing to affect the running of the stone. The marker had to be small in cross-section so that it took up as little room as possible and high so that it could be seen above any stones that were lying near it. What better shape for this device than a bottle? Hence in many places the 'tee-marker' was known as 'the bottle'.  We thank Bob Cowan for this information.  You can read more at his curling blog.

As for curling push brooms or brushes…We have seen photographs from the 1800s in Scotland that clearly show curlers using brushes.  “The Curler Companion” by W.H. Murray states:  “It was during the 1922 tour that the Scots introduced the long-handled push-brush to North America”.  During this tour of Canada and The USA the Scots visited The Detroit Curling Club in February 1923.  We have photographs and newspaper articles around The Club that show the brush in use by the Scots.

The picture below was taken at The Detroit Curling Club during the 1949 Scots Tour.  Note the HOG line marker on the wall…

From personal experience, it was during the mid-1980s that the brush became popular with USA and Canadian curlers.