ONE YEAR AGO
• A Red Deer teenager who was hospitalized for almost four months following a savage attack on a downtown street returned home. Tanner Chaboyer, 14, left the Alberta Children’s Hospital with his family by his side. His father, James Chaboyer, spoke of the big adjustment the entire family faced as Tanner recovered from the grievous injuries he suffered when he was stabbed in the heart.
• Red Deer College president Ron Woodward called it quits after 10 years at the helm. Woodward, who had recently led the college through its largest-ever expansion, stayed on until his successor was hired sometime in 2009. College board chairman Herb Der said a resignation letter was “reluctantly” accepted.
FIVE YEARS AGO
• Gale-force winds knocked down trees and caused roofing damage to houses under construction in the Red Deer area.
Winds from the north/northwest reached speeds up to 83 km/h when a low pressure system rolled in from British Columbia.
• The Royal Purple of Castor shut down after 47 years. The five members voted unanimously to surrender their charter because they couldn’t attract younger members, and existing members were getting too old to organize activities.
10 YEARS AGO
• Capital Environmental Alberta’s inaugural food drive was the largest ever for the Red Deer Food Bank. The local garbage collection company left special bags on all its routes and collected many of them later, filled with food.
• Photo radar arrived in Red Deer. RCMP gave media and a select few drivers on 32nd Street (who were speeding) a demonstration of the new equipment — although none of the speeding drivers were ticketed.
• A bylaw to butt in on smokers’ rights to exhale on city property got first reading by city council. The bylaw would outlaw smoking in posted areas of the library, city hall, city rinks, the Dawe Centre, the arena, the Recreation Centre and other city property. Bylaw enforcement officers and commissionaires would issue tickets and citizens would be allowed to complain.
• Parking was the main topic of discussion at a public meeting on the Red Deer Regional Planning Commission’s downtown revitalization plan.
City planner Craig Curtis told about 65 people the planners hoped for a broad range of public opinion on suggestions to breathe new life into the city’s downtown core. But for most of those in the audience at the Red Deer Museum — a large number of whom were elderly — finding a parking spot in the city was the number one problem
50 YEARS AGO
• A wad of 100 one-dollar bills was extracted from the back pocket of one of the defense lawyers in the Supreme Court trial of Robert Cook in a demonstration of how a large sum of money could be carried without being too apparent to the eye. In his summary of the defence in the trial, Giffard Main, chief defense council, touched on the Crown’s contention that the accused could not have carried the sum of $4,300 in cash without it being noticeable.
Cook had claimed that he had that amount of money when he visited his parents in Stettler the evening before the alleged murder.
Asking his colleague, David MacNaughton to stand up, Mr. Main lifted the skirts of Mr. MacNaughton’s gown and removed a pack of 100 bills, half of them new and the other half used, from his back pocket. Mr. Main then placed the packet in the back pocket of the blue pants that Cook was wearing that evening. The bills showed no large bulge. His point was, Mr. Main said, that a man could carry around 200 bills of larger denominations, without them being particularly noticeable.
90 YEARS AGO
• The Nurses’ Home in Red Deer was closed on Friday, Dec. 6 but the Isolation Hospital was still open with Mrs. Parker still at work there. She proved a most capable and efficient nurse, unsparing of herself where there was work to be done, and there was certainly work to do, nursing, cooking, washing and disinfecting. Her great resourcefulness was specially apparent in the first few difficult days after the Hospital was opened.
100 YEARS AGO
• Three new members were elected to town council: H.H. Gaetz, S.N. Carscallen and F.W. Galbraith.
• The Advocate announced Santa was expected to arrive the following Saturday on the noon train from the north.