LEWISTON — The International Snowgoers Convention debuted in Lewiston in 1925, a year after its host, Le Montagnard club, was formed. It was the nation’s first snowshoe social club and was to be the largest of 17 such clubs in Lewiston.
Ninety years later, Le Montagnard and several other Lewiston snowshoe clubs have disappeared, making this weekend’s 2015 International Snowshoe Convention the last of its kind, organizers said Tuesday.
“It’s very sad, but it’s all we can do, which is why we want to make this one a good one and go out with a bang,” organizer Arlene Tierney of Lewiston said.
Tierney is a member of Le Passe-Temps club of Lewiston and this is the third convention she has organized.
The convention and its accompanying events will be held Friday through Sunday, Feb. 6-8 at the Ramada Inn in Lewiston. Opening ceremonies and the coronation ball at which a king and queen will be chosen are to begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday.
Snowshoe races will be held at Lewiston High School on Saturday beginning at 9 a.m. for walking events. Regular racing begins at 1 p.m. That will be followed at 6:30 p.m. by a parade around the Ramada. Awards and trophies are to be handed out Sunday following an 11 a.m. banquet.
“After that, it’s closing time and we’re all half-dead,” Tierney said. It takes them a year to organize the convention.
As of Tuesday, 181 members of snowshoe clubs from Maine, New York and New Hampshire, as well as six clubs from Canada had signed up for the convention, Tierney said.
In the past, thousands of people from across the U.S. and Canada would take trains, buses and whatever they could to Lewiston for the convention, which boasted two-hour parades through town, huge man-made ice castles and snowshoe races galore, Steve Gallant of Rumford said.
Gallant, 77, has been president for more than four decades of Le Paresseux club in Rumford. It is now the largest Maine snowshoe club. It formed in 1928 and has between 300 and 400 members. That club is taking 45 members to the convention.
“We’re still going, not as strong, but still going,” he said of Le Paresseux. “At one time, there were 17 clubs in Lewiston. There were 40 to 50 men’s clubs in the nation and 40 to 50 women’s clubs and three clubs in Rumford.”
He recalled people from Rumford trying to get to one convention in Canada by paying 50 cents each to ride in the back of an old truck to Bethel to catch a train. Conventioneers would “stay up all night and party on the train going from car to car from Portland to Montreal or Ottawa or Quebec City.”
Gallant said he has been crowned convention king three times and that it’s based on the amount of money one raises to help cover convention costs.
But members are getting older and younger people don’t want to participate, Gallant said. “Years ago, we used to have thousands of people coming and now we’re down to about 200. We used to have 80 to 90 drum corps and now we probably only have one drum corps left.”
Additionally, Canadian employers are preventing younger club members from taking time off work to attend conventions, Tierney said. “Canada is very strict with its workers and they can’t get off work now to come.”
Other events also cut in on convention time, which alternated annually between the U.S. and Quebec.
“We used to have the convention at the end of January, and then when the Super Bowl came up, a lot of them didn’t want to come, so we grabbed the first weekend in February,” Tierney said. “You’ve got to please them all.”
Because Lewiston had about two dozen snowshoe clubs at one time, the clubs frequently hosted conventions that featured parades, band concerts, drum corps, snowshoe competitions and more activities, Gallant said.
“We used to have a lot of races and now we have hardly any,” Tierney said. Saturday’s races include walks that are called “Forced Marches” and running on snowshoes.
She said the biggest club in New York used to bring 20 to 30 racers, but now only has 11. Rumford’s club, which sometimes had 12 to 14 racers, now has three.
“We’ll be lucky if we have 50 racers,” Tierney said. “We used to have over 100 racers when we had all these clubs.”
Tierney said the oldest snowshoe racer, Bob Gamache of the Alpine club in Manchester, N.H., is coming to compete. Tierney and Gallant said Gamache is in his 70s and started snowshoe racing at the age of 14.
Gallant, who raced when he was younger, recalled three Le Paresseux racers, Bob Parise Jr., Gunner Bradbury and Edmund Hachie. He said Hachie held a snowshoe racing record for years, then became a priest. When Hachie died, he was the priest at St. Phillip’s Church in Auburn.
Because of his snowshoe prowess and athletic ability, Hachie was inducted into the Maine Sports Hall of Fame under the Snowshoe Movement, Gallant said.
He can recall when snowshoe athletes jumped hurdles while wearing heavy snowshoes in some races.
Tierney said the very first International Snowshoe Convention was held in 1907 in Montreal. When it was held in Lewiston by Le Montagnard, which built a chalet at No Name Pond where ice blocks were cut to make sculptures, Tierney said, the parade of 2,000 to 3,000 club members left Kennedy Park and went to the Lewiston Armory.
One ice castle would be built in a square on Main Street, another in Kennedy Park and the last one at Le Montagnard’s chalet.
She recalled one year when Roland Tanguay, president of Le Montagnard, had to use dry ice to keep the ice castle from melting.
“The parades (in Lewiston) would last for hours,” Tierney said. “By the time the first group got to wherever it was going, the last ones were just starting.”
Gallant said parade participants years ago would line up in eight divisions from 99 to 100 clubs.
“The biggest one I ever went to was in Quebec City and they had two parades, one on Saturday night and one on Sunday, and people went to church on Sunday, and by the time the parades ended, the last Mass was over,” Gallant said.
As for convention banquets, Gallant recalled one time in Montreal when they had 1,700 people seated at a banquet.
Gallant said he has been busy this week setting up memorabilia displays at the Ramada, including a quilt that took Le Paresseux member Antoinette Metivier of Rumford 45 years to make. She married Dominic Gagne and lived to be 103.
“Each snowshoe club has its own colors and she made 96 squares of the colors of clubs,” he said. Each club also had its own uniforms using its colors, which were wool shirts, knickers and a sash. Nowadays the uniforms are nylon. Gallant will have some of the old uniforms on display with old snowshoes.
“Nineteen-fifty was the last year they wore knickers,” Gallant said.
He said he wants to keep something of the convention going, if possible.
“You meet a lot of people and you make a lot of friends,” he said. “Like, if I want to go to Ottawa, all I have to do is call one and they’ll pick you up when you get up there and invite you into their house. One year, we took two buses because we had so many people and they invited the whole bus load into their house.”
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