The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Gene Hass has seen some unusual collectables in his day, but even he wasn't sure what to think about the two pennants he had just been handed. Emblazoned across the worn fabric banners were a series of words and images, but 'Flin Flon' _ whatever the heck that was _ stood out. 'I thought it was just, I don't know, something made up,' says Hass, a sports memorabilia dealer who lives in Wisconsin. 'It was goofy to me.' Significance But as he would soon learn, the pennants carried great historical significance to a community hundreds of kilometres to the northwest. Dating back to 1962 or earlier, the pennants promote an early edition of the Flin Flon Trout Festival. Hass was at a national sports collectables show in Baltimore last year when a friend purchased a large batch of pennants. His friend had no interest in keeping the Flin Flon pennants, so he passed them off on Hass. 'He said, 'Here, Gene, I'm giving you this present. These are yours to keep' and it was a joke, you know,' Hass says. Hass couldn't imagine finding a buyer for the pennants, but he was never one to throw anything away. See 'Collector...' pg. 3 Continued from pg. 1 He later went online, where he discovered that Flin Flon is a place and the Trout Festival its famed summer celebration. Hass found a phone number for someone connected to the festival. He dialed it and left a message but never heard back. Later he tried a second number and found himself talking to Cyndy Woods, the bubbly chairperson of the festival's Canada Day parade. Hass, a true gentleman at 69, offered to mail the pennants at no cost. Woods gratefully accepted. 'I thought, what a nice thing to do,' says Woods. 'I was overwhelmed by the generosity of the man. 'It's one thing for someone to want to do something. It's another thing to actually go ahead and do it.' The pennants arrived in the mail last month, complete with a black and white photo of two unidentified people displaying them on their car windshield. The photo, taken in July of 1962, proved the pennants were more than 50 years old. They would have likely been produced in either 1962, 1961 or 1960, the first year of the festival. One pennant _ dark blue and cheese yellow in colour _ reads 'Flin Flon Canada Home of the Trout Festival' and features an image of Josiah Flintabattey Flonatin. But this Flinty is far different from the version made famous by the landmark statue, suggesting the pennant predates 1962, the year the statue was unveiled. This Flinty has a bushy mustache and narrow eyes. He has no glasses, and binoculars and a water canteen hang from his shoulders. The other pennant is green and white with the words 'Fantabulous Flin Flon Canada' stretching across. At its wide point is a shield logo for the Trout Festival that includes a trout, a pair of paddles, a tree and a landscape image depicting the two long-gone 'short stacks' formerly operated by Hudbay. For now Woods is holding onto the pennants, but she hopes they can eventually become part of an archive of Trout Festival items she would like to see established. She invites anyone else willing to donate festival memorabilia to contact her at 204-687-4576.
