ONE YEAR AGO
• Red Deer County made it official: wild boars had a price on their heads in these here parts. Well, on their ears actually. County council agreed to adopt the province’s wild boars pilot program. It placed a $50 a head bounty on the bristle-backed critters. To collect, farmers or hunters had to present a pair of ears to the county’s agricultural services board as proof that a particular wild boar was no more.
• Efforts to bring horse racing to Lacombe County were spurred ahead when a key development agreement was signed with the municipality. County council also approved two bylaw amendments necessary for the Alberta Downs horse racing track to go ahead at its 142-acre site at the corner of Hwy 2 and Hwy 12.
FIVE YEARS AGO
• A man who claimed to have explosives robbed the Delburne Community Savings branch with an undisclosed amount of cash. RCMP officers captured a suspect at a roadblock at Delburne Road and 30th Avenue in Red Deer.
• Mirror residents mourned for two children and their mother killed in a highway crash just before Christmas. Tracy Borup, 34, and her children, died when their pickup truck hit a cement truck 10 km east of Lacombe, causing the cement truck to roll on top of the pickup, flattening the cab.
10 YEARS AGO
• Local charities, prepared for as many as 1,000 people, fed about 200 adults and children in what was to be Red Deer’s largest ever free Christmas dinner. Organizers from the Red Deer Food Bank, the Alberta Lung Association and the Capri Convention Centre weren’t disappointed with the turnout, however.
• A Lacombe man took the ride of his life after skidding into the side of a train with his pickup. He was able to climb out of the mangled truck onto the side of the westbound train, which he later brought to a stop by accidentally derailing 13 cars.
25 YEARS AGO
• Confidence in Alberta’s recovery was no where better illustrated than in Red Deer. Healthy Christmas sales greeted many local retailers who were optimistic about 1985. Paul Fairbridge, manager of the Bower Place Shopping Centre, said December sales were expected to run between 10 and 12 per cent ahead of last year’s figures. Mr. Fairbridge said his mall’s November sales were up 14 per cent over 1983.
• The prevalence of cocaine in Red Deer was the highest in Alberta for cities of comparable size, according to a senior RCMP drug enforcement officer here. While most centres reported an increase in the use of the drug, more cocaine was reaching Red Deer than any other mid-sized city in the province, said Sgt. Cliff Aschenbrenner, head of Red Deer subdivision’s drug squad.
50 YEARS AGO
• Plans for a new senior-junior high school proposed for the city by the Red Deer separate school board were modified and approved by the department of education, according to official work received by the board from provincial authorities. Construction of the new high school was projected or the coming year at an estimated cost of more than $400,000, of which between $240,000 and $270,000 is expected to come from the provincial government in the form of a school construction grant.
• A resident of the Twilight Cottages for about six years, Mrs. Frank Stewart was chosen to cut the ribbon in a ceremony Friday afternoon which marked the opening of another unit of suites bringing the accommodation at the Kiwanis Twilight Cottages to 32 suites for 64 people. A small crowd of warmly-dressed residents of the cottages and the Twilight Lodge stood outside in the snow, as a group of city, municipal district, government, Ministerial Association, and organizational representatives attended the brief opening ceremony.
90 YEARS AGO
• The movement that had been under consideration since the signing of the armistice respecting a memorial to the heroes of the Central Alberta district, took concrete form at a large gathering of the Great War Veteran’s Association and representative citizens held in the City Hall. The Central Alberta district, bounded on the north by Ponoka, the south by Olds, and the Saskatchewan and British Columbia boundaries east and west respectively, produced both in numbers and type, a body of men unexcelled in any district in Canada, or for that matter, in the British Empire.
• The city of Red Deer distributed a Christmas Tree to every soldier’s family living in the city. Persons wishing to be supplied with a tree were requested to forward their names and addresses to A. G. Ayres, Acting Sec. Treasurer.
100 YEARS AGO
• R.C. Brumpton’s Big Handy Store was decorated for Christmas with a big revolving wheel, driven by an electric motor. “The children never tire of watching it,” the Advocate reported.
• A former member of the Red Deer fire department, Orton Snider, was seriously injured when he fell off a railway bridge while working near Stettler.