Community

One hundred and four.

Doesn’t it seem like everything is some sort of competition these days? Oh, I don’t mean regular competition stuff like hockey games and livestock judging at the Fair or seeing which neighbor can shovel the snow off their sidewalk first. I mean contests on TV where artists, for example, are challenged to paint something like, say, a Bob Ross mountain with happy little trees or somebody without clothes on and then they are “judged” by “experts” and prizes are given for the “best” painting.

One outstanding individual from Red Deer, who was to attain national importance, primarily with the United Church of Canada, was Mrs. Nita Dawson Thorne.

Everybody should have a clubhouse – especially when you’re a young rabblerousing reprobate. It could be a shed in the backyard, a tree house somewhere or an honest-to-goodness special place where only you and your friends can go and hang out. I was one lucky guy; I had a whole bunch of them.

Greetings Red Deer, and happy New Year! I, like many of you, cannot believe it is 2023 – to say last year flew by would be an understatement, but what a pleasure and honour it was to spend the year as your Mayor.

True story: this guy is at the doctor’s and during his examination the doctor leaves the room for a moment. So the guy steals a quick glance at his chart and there at the bottom the doctor had written: “SOB”. The guy is livid. The doc comes back into the room and the patient points at the SOB and grunts angrily, “Why are you calling me a son of a b**ch??” The doctor, suppressing a small smile answers calmly, “SOB is an acronym for “shortness of breath” which you mentioned earlier.

One of Red Deer’s most important early businesses, and one which exemplified the high quality of a lot of early construction in the community, was the firm of Baird and McKenzie.

By now, what with the pandemic lockdown and technology taking over the world I’m thinking that most of us have probably Zoomed whether we really wanted to or not. And by ‘Zoomed’ I mean I had a meeting on a computer or phone with one or more other people who appear with small faces on your screen like some non-celebrity game of Hollywood Squares.

Often there is more than one source for a quote, so I choose child psychologist Jean Piaget who said, “Play is the work of children”. If you work really hard at playing, you might compete in the Olympics or turn professional and get paid for playing. You might earn scholarships to play your way through a post-secondary education. You might eventually become a lawyer.

Some families are so important to the history of Red Deer that more than one place or street in our City is named after them. One example of this is the Piper family after whom Piper Drive, Piper Creek and Piper Mountain are named.