ONE YEAR AGO
• The Town of Sylvan Lake cracked down on bars that have ignored orders to build screens around outdoor patios to stop patrons passing drinks out to the street. Lakeshore Drive businesses had until the May long weekend to put up the screens and making various other fire and building code changes. But little had been done, complained town councillors.
• An eight-person Central Alberta rescue team returned home without being able to lend their expertise to Chinese searchers in the earthquake-ravaged country. After waiting a week on an island near Hong Kong for visas, the local members of Red Search and Rescue reluctantly made the decision to come back to Canada.
FIVE YEARS AGO
• Red Deer City Councillor Vesna Higham announced she was expecting her fifth child. It was the first time a sitting city councillor had become pregnant. Higham, 42, declined to run for a second term.
• The David Thompson Health Region issued a boil water warning for the Hamlet of Mirror. Lacombe County officials discovered that a pump in the local water treatment plant had failed. It took almost no time to get the pump running again, but the county still had to flush the lines.
10 YEARS AGO
• Red Deer youths started lining up 15 hours before the doors opened to get front-row seats at the 12:01 a.m. showing of The Phantom Menace, first in the new series of Star Wars prequels. The movie met with high praise from most of the moviegoers, although some called for the head of animated character Jar Jar Binks.
• Victor Doerksen, MLA for Red Deer South, called for his government to use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to opt out of a Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to same-sex marriages.
• Temperatures reaching 25 C made Red Deer’s first ever marathon and half-marathon a gruelling test for the 555 participants. About 220 ran the full 42.2 km.
25 YEARS AGO
• Red Deer residents will be able to do almost all their banking in their own home or offices — if they have a home computer. The Continental Bank of Canada which opened a branch here, planned to introduce computer banking in the city. The system allowed clients to conduct all their banking except withdrawing cash from wherever they had access to a telephone. The system, which the bank call “interaction banking” is the first of its kind in Canada.
• It took an eagle eye to spot Red Deer in the film Finder’s Keepers, shot in part, in Red Deer. Unless you watched closely, you would not recognize the CP Rail Station, disguised as Ogden, Utah, in the movie which played at the Park Plaza downtown. The comedy about a missing $5 million and a train chase across the United States, saw a day of filming at the CP Station. But in the shooting here, it boiled down to about six scenes lasting all of two minutes.
50 YEARS AGO
• Clouds of dust blanketed Red Deer and District on Thursday as unsatisfactory and unreasonable spring weather continued with strong winds and no rain. The worst dust conditions in many years were also reported from Saskatchewan and Southern Alberta.
90 YEARS AGO
• At a meeting of the Retail Merchants’ Association on Friday evening it was decided to have the Wednesday half-holiday include June as in former years, and to close the stores Wednesday at noon. Quite a discussion took place as to measures to be taken to improve the roads, and the executive will follow up the scheme of organization for better roads.
100 YEARS AGO
• A young Lacombe farmer was sentenced to 21 months in jail for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. The girl had already delivered a baby by the time the matter went to court.
• The Great West Lumber Co. started a night shift but was reported to be short of workers. Nearly 100 men were to be employed at the plant during the summer.