International Sports Hall of Fame and Olympic Museum

Home      About Us     Olympic Source      Educational Center     Ancient Olympics 1     Ancient Olympics 2     Olympic Hymn    

     Olympic Flame   1936 Olympics     My Olympics     Summer Olympics     Winter Olympics     The Gold Book     Torches & Medals   

Photo Gallery 1     Photo Gallery 2     Photo Gallery 3     Photo Gallery 4     Gift Gallery    Artifact Sales     Pin Trading     Museum Store

 

 

SINCE THE DIRECTOR OF THIS PUBLIC OLYMPIC MUSEUM IS GOING TO RETIRE AFTER SERVING FOR  30 YEARS, WE ARE LOOKING FOR AN ORGANIZATION, A MUSEUM, OR A GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT IS INTERESTED TO OBTAIN AN OLYMPIC COLLECTION OF OVER 20,000 ITEMS DATING FROM 1896 TO 2010, INCLUDING ALL MODERN SHOWCASES, AT AN UNBEATABLE PRICE. TO CONTACT US, USE OUR EMAIL ADDRESS OR TELEPHONE #. IF IT IS SOLD BY AN AGENCY, WE ARE WILLING TO PAY 5% WHEN SOLD.

 International Sports Hall of Fame & Olympic Museum and The Oregon Coast Sports Museum

 Our museum was opened on January first 1980, now over 30 years ago. It is a public museum about the Olympics with one of the largest Olympic collections worldwide.

On this website, Soccer is called Football, which it means throughout the entire world, other than in the United States where it is called Soccer.

As Executive Director of the International Sports Hall of Fame and Olympic Museum, our greetings and welcome to the website of the ISHFOM located in the United States, open to the public. We are located at one of the most beautiful spots of this country, facing the Pacific Ocean on the Central Oregon Coast, reached in one hour from Salem or two hours from Portland, Oregon and viewed on the Internet at all times worldwide. It was done for my friends in Europe and team members of the Football club I played for 12 years, River Plate of Buenos Aires and also team members of the 1948 and 1952 Argentine Olympic Team, as well as for friends and family that live in Europe and South America. The ISHFOM and I honors the Olympic Movement for the last 74 years of my life. We promoted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics from the day the museum opened in 1980, until the end of the Olympics and opened the first pin trading center in the United States to sell the LAOOC collector pins and sets.

The Olympic Games started to be part of my life, at age ten in 1936 when an uncle, a famous Austrian sports authority and secretary of the Austrian Olympic Committe, took me to the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin, and the first Torch Ceremony in Olympia, Greece. My next Olympics were 1948 London and 1952 Helsinki, both as participant. From 1956 on I traveled to the Summer and Winter Games with COA accreditation, living and marching with them at Opening and Closing Ceremonies, that changed when I got married in 1967 and our children were born and I went to the games again alone for a while. The Olympics, while they were on pure amateur status were great and I was lucky having met personally CIO Presidents Count Henri de Baillet-Latour in 1936, Pr. Avery Brundage in 1952 and being friends until his death in Germany. I knew Lord Killanin before he became president and IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch in who invited me and my wife to Lausanne and met also by coincidence when I was many years younger and River Plate was playing against club Espanyol in Madrid in the 1940's and General Francisco Franco the field came down to the field to greet us. The Olympics I remember from 1936 until 1984 were great and pin trading and collecting was fun, but when the games became commercial and fake pins were being reproduced with a sole purpose to make money, the Olympics became ugly for me, since I was not used to this. Even Avery Brundage was very disappointed of the abrupt change after he left, the IOC. Although Lord Killanin fared better, but when he got ill and decided to retire after 8 years and after President Samaranch took over in 1980 new rules brought by his good friend and partner Horst Dassler, owner of Adidas who quickly amassed billions of dollars, serving for anything President Samaranch and almost hundred IOC members wanted to buy, including Gold medals for some of the athletes. There are several true accounts available, that will open the eyes in books like "DISHONORED GAMES". "THE NEW LORDS OF THE RINGS" and "THE GREAT OLYMPIC SWINDLE", by Andrew Jennings and Associates.

I started collecting Olympic artifacts at age ten while attending my first two Olympics of winter and Summer of 1936 in Germany that by now became a collection of about 20,000 items, dating from 1896 to the present and many duplicate items that are for sale. I am dedicating the website to my wife of 43 years and to our children and grandchildren, all of whom know very little about my youth, since they were not yet born for quite a long time when I was a young man living in Buenos Aires, including my wife who is much younger than I am. Thank for visiting these web pages and Photo Galleries, which we will constantly try to update and improve                      

 

  email to: enash327@yahoo.com or: olympicsource@hotmail.com

Mailing Address: P.O.Box 166, Depoe Bay, Oregon 97341

Museum Address: 110 NE Hwy 101, Depoe Bay, OR 97341

Telephone:  Summer: 541-765-2923   Winter: 702-346-1776

Hit Counter

            The International Sports Hall of Fame and Olympic Museum (ISHFOM) is strictly an Olympic Sports Museum and an Educational Center open to the public and is located on the Central Oregon Coast, where it shares the 3000 sq ft space with the Oregon Coast Sports Museum. It is the only one of that kind in the United States and features an Olympic artifact collection of over 20,000 items of all the Olympics of the modern era dating from 1896 to the present.  Being involved in the Olympics for seventy three years and attending most of them since 1936 and witnessing the very first torch lighting ceremony in Olympia at age ten, as well as researching the history of the ancient Olympics and viewing the sites of the ancient temples, it was my wish for many years, to establish a museum with my large collection of Olympic memorabilia, collected since I was ten years old in order to share it with the public and so the opportunity came in January 1980, when I had the opportunity to start the museum in Orange County, California, when I became a distributor of the official LAOOC pin licensee and help promote the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and Torch Relay and start the first pin trading center where we sold the original 1984 pins and pin sets, for which we were also design advisers and after the Olympics purchased all remaining pins and pin sets from the licensee, the last pins not mass produced, as it was later done for other Olympics in this country.

            The museum had an educational center that welcomed any person interested in Sports and Olympics. We made it priority to guide the young people that came to the museum in the right direction by emphasizing the virtues of competitive sports and most importantly abstain from the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco which I never touched and easily can destroy one's entire life. Being born into a family involved in Austrian Sports and Olympics, absence of computers and Television, Sports came natural to me and growing up in Austria, Bolivia and Argentina, constantly being active in sports was my priority and so were my studies and after disruption of my normal life when the Nazis threatened to take over Austria and leaving Vienna at age eleven, in 1955 and settled into a successful sports life, my life again took a sudden and abrupt change because of an incident of being honored by the nation's president and accepting honorary party membership, when he was ousted, I had to leave as well for the USA and New York,  where my parents resided and concentrate on other ways to make a living, since Football was not a paying sport in this country at the time. Having graduated in Sports Management and Administration did also not help at the time until years later with my young wife, when we built the only public International Olympic Museum in the United States in 1980 and promoted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and as always the Olympic Movement.

              ISHFOM pays homage to the sacred Olympic Flame and its symbolic Torch Relays of ancient and modern times, with displays of Olympic Torches, torchbearer uniforms, lamps used to transport the mother flame by land sea or air and other related items of past Olympic Torch Relays. ISHFOM has always promoted upcoming Olympics in cooperation with Olympic Organizing Committees by arranging special exhibits of upcoming Olympics and Torch Runs, which are attended by local and state officials and covered by the media and we will go on doing as long as we are able.  ISHFOM honors Gold Medal Winners of the entire world that have excelled during past Olympics, by placing commemorative plaques on the museum's "Wall of Champions" and displays other related items to honor these special Olympians which will always be remembered in our Hall of Fame and Olympic Museum.

              Eric Nash started collecting pins and Olympic memorabilia at age ten, when attending the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps and the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, as well as most other Olympics for the last 71 years and has experienced pin trading at its best, when it was a means of true exchange based on friendship, not material gains as it has turned out to be in the United States after 1984, when mass produced commercial pins of practically no collector's value were flooding the market and ruined the excitement and dedication that used to be pin trading the way I was used to in past times, besides that so called "dealers" have taken advantage by cheating the unaware public,  as it has happened in Nagano and in other Olympics before and since. We can only hope for a return of the old standards as it used to be until the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and mostly still is in Europe and other countries except for some NOC's that have joined with certain dealers for the greed to make big profits and charging exorbitant prices for pins that cost them one dollar. My advise at this time for worthwhile pin collecting are the Media and Television pins and the real NOC pins, that still come from the old honest countries that consider the Olympics as an ideal and not a means to money and big profits and using the Olympic Movement for it. The only other thing to be cautious about, is not to pick up fakes, which are also only made for profiteering and have absolutely no collector's value. 

One of the two Gift Stores of the Museum. This for Olympic items.

Entrance to the second floor Museum and the two Gift Stores

View of the Museum from the Sea Wall of the Pacific Ocean

The Oregon Coast Sports Museum, part of the ISHFOM

Side of the other Gift Store selling Disney Character Merchandise

 You may leave a message in this section

Your Name:

Your Email:

Your Comments


 

Hall Of Fame Magazine - Your Connection to Greatness