Cache Of Olympic Size Obscure Oregon Museum Home To World-Class Collection

If you go to the Oregon Coast Sports Museum, chances are it will be closed. You need an appointment to view one of the world’s largest collections of Olympic memorabilia.

The museum isn’t easy to find - a small door opens to the stairway to the second floor museum in a two-story pink building at the north end of town.

Inside, owners Eric and Heidi Nash have collected thousands of souvenir pins, torches and Olympic participation medals, two of them earned by Nash.

Nash, a white-haired 70-year-old Austrian native and former professional soccer player, has been building his collection since 1936, when he attended the Olympic Games in Berlin at age 10 and shook hands with Jesse Owens.

Nash says his collection probably is the most comprehensive in the world outside the International Olympic Committee museum in Switzerland. He is bitter that it’s overlooked in this small tourist town, even in an Olympic year.

“This is definitely an asset to any town,” he says. “It’s wasted here.”

When he opened the museum in 1994, he invited the governor, the Lincoln County commissioners and the mayor. Nobody came.

“Not one called and apologized that they couldn’t come,” he says.

For six months, the Nashes kept the museum open with regular hours. Perhaps 10 people came.

Now, visitors either call for appointments or find the museum open by chance. Admission is $5 for adults, free for children. Every customer gets an Olympic pin.

If he isn’t traveling around the world, adding to his collection, Nash will show the visitors around.

Case after case is filled with colored pins and badges. Nash explains how some were worn by athletes, some by the press, some by staff, some by committee members. He’s already filling a case with pins for this summer’s Atlanta Games.

“We’ll have a few cases full with Atlanta pins by the end of the Olympics, he says.

He points out torches carried by runners during the opening ceremonies and pre-Olympic torch runs in 1972 in Munich, 1980 in Moscow, 1984 in Los Angeles and 1988 in Seoul.

A tiny black flashlight with the words “Remember Sarajevo” is one of thousands that twinkled in a darkened stadium during the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer in memory of the war-torn city that hosted the games in a more peaceful time a decade earlier.

Two of Nash’s uncles represented Austria in the Olympics, one in ice hockey and one in skiing. His mother was an outstanding Austrian soccer player.

His family left Austria during World War II and moved to Bolivia. When Nash was 16, he joined a professional soccer team in Argentina.

“At 17, I drove a Mercedes,” he said.

While in Argentina, he was an alternate at the 1948 Olympics in London and 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.

The bronze participation medals he earned those two years are among his most treasured possessions.

Nash moved to the United States where he met Heidi and worked as a clothing designer, haberdasher and hotel gift shop operator. The last gift shop the Nashes operated was in a Disneyland-area hotel during the 1984 Olympics. The store stocked Olympic pins, and after the games the Nashes bought out the inventory.