When the club began it was a men’s club. Then in the 1940’s or 50’s the women joined forces to start their own club and had a separate budget from the men. The women’s budget carried the club because they did all the fundraising and lunches to raise money and the men drank and curled and used up their own funds. In 1981 the men and women’s clubs joined forces and the men knew it was a great move.
The original building was hemlock boards slapped together with a tin roof and the roof was so low that if you raised your broom to cheer you would hit it! The building was not insulated and in the thick of winter there would be a lot of frost on the wall, and they often curled in spring in an inch of water on the ice from melting.
The club was not licensed to serve alcohol, and Pam McDivitt who joined the club in 1981, fondly remembers curling with the ladies on Wednesday afternoons. She would tie a rope to the crash bar of the exterior door and wrap it to her chair to prevent anyone entering while the ladies enjoyed after curling beverages.
Curling in Bala began in 1910 with founding members, Oscar McDivitt, Albert Weismiller, Rouse Horn and Alf Mortimer Sr. playing on the ice of Lake Muskoka in Bala Bay. Alf Mortimer would carry 2 curling rocks from Mortimer’s Point all the way to Bala Bay in those days.
The Bala Curling Club was formed in 1913 and built a structure on the site of an old ice house on Grey St, and the parking lot was a former road. When they dug for the floor for the original building they hit a lot of sawdust in the base.
