Red Deer had just under 2,400 people when Rondo Wood was born here on the very last day of 1939.
“We knew just about everyone in town,” recalled Rondo, the oldest daughter of the late award-winning Red Deer author Kerry Wood and his wife Marjorie.
As children, Rondo (named after a type of musical composition) and her younger siblings Heather and Gregory became as interested in the natural world as their parents were.
The whole family would pile into Kerry’s Austin motorcar on weekends and go on bird-watching trips to Pine Lake, she recalled.
Since the old Austin had a sunroof and her father had a penchant for standing up to look at whatever feathered critter flew by, Marjorie soon became the official family driver. “And she was a good driver, too,” Rondo added with a smile.
At home, the three Wood kids only had a temporary house pet — a rehabilitating robin named Cheep.
But outdoors, they would chase dragonflies, observe waterfowl, and seek water bugs and minnows. Rondo recalled they would always wear shorts under their skirts and trousers on these outings because the day would inevitably end on a shoreline, getting wet.
It was a lifestyle for rural kids — unusual for a city family, the 84-year-old admitted. “You could say we led an idyllic life…”
Their father, Order-of-Canada recipient Kerry Wood (who died in 1998), wrote 28 books and many pamphlets and articles about birds and animals, life in Central Alberta, and the region’s history.
Back in the day, “hundreds, even thousands of fans,” would stop by to meet him, while travelling between Edmonton or Calgary, recalled Rondo.
Perhaps because of their haircuts, Rondo was often mistaken for Doris Forbes, the little girl in the popular Mickey the Beaver stories. But that book “was before my time,” she would explain.
Kids today can still read about Mickey, the beaver raised by a little girl, as well as The Map-Maker, about explorer David Thompson, Samson’s Long Ride, about an Indigenous boy’s escape from a residential school, and other Wood books from their school libraries.
And this young audience is set to grow. Rondo is on board with a new project that entails Oriole Park School students in Grades 4 and 5 helping re-write four of Wood’s popular children’s books for young readers in Grades 1-3.
She hopes it will strengthen literacy and give today’s children a taste of an author’s life back in the early days, when writing, editing, even proof-reading, were often a one-person operation.
Kerry Wood was born in New York in 1907, and travelled to Canada, and eventually central Alberta, with his Scottish parents.
In 1923, his mother and father travelled west to see if they wanted to relocate to Victoria, B.C. Sixteen-year-old Kerry opted to continue living by himself in Red Deer, so he essentially spent two years as a survivalist, hunting game with a sling-shot and foraging for wild berries and mushrooms.
This time was later condensed and fictionalized in his tale Wild Winter.
Rondo heard Kerry had been left with some money to tide him over while his parents were gone, but he immediately spent it on a typewriter.
“He always had a Smith Corona,” recalled Rondo. “He wore them out. He went through 19 typewriters in his life.”
Wood (whose real name was Edgar Allardyce Wood), began writing under the pen name Kerry Wood while still a teenager, selling freelance stories to the Edmonton Bulletin, as well as some Calgary papers.
While on a sports assignment one day, he became smitten with a young basketball/hockey player named Marjorie.
Rondo explained her mom had an early introduction to sports: “Her three older brothers would stuff padding into her ski pants and put her in front of the hockey net as their goalie.”
In a sense, gregarious Marjorie was to continue playing goalie. After marrying the quieter Kerry, Marjorie became a “buffer” between him and his many fans, recalled Rondo, often stemming the tide of visitors to allow Kerry time to write.
As children, “we had to be quiet. In the winter, he would be typing back in the den, where mother’s sewing machine was… In the summer, he cleaned out the shed, painted, and put magazine pictures on the walls of landscapes and birds… he would type in there,” she added.
“He would treat it almost like a 9-5 job. At night, he would keep a pad and paper on his nightstand.”
Kerry, a strict dad who wouldn’t abide his children swearing, was also a talented woodworker, while Marjorie was a creative sewer, including making stuffed owls and other animals out of fabric scraps.
Rondo is the only one of the three children who stuck close to home as their parents aged. She moved back to Red Deer after wrapping up a long career in Edmonton as a sociologist and market researcher.
Heather — Rondo considers her the “genius in the family” — now lives in California and is an author in her own right having published Third Class Ticket about her travels in rural India.
Gregory, who worked at many jobs and lived in the U.S. after marrying the daughter of a Baptist minister, died of a health ailment about 25 years ago.
Rondo recalled their parents had relocated from downtown Red Deer to a house on Michener Hill, overlooking the city, while raising their family. After their kids grew up and moved away, they moved to an acreage east of the city, near the Joffre bridge, where they were truly surrounded by woodland and bird life.
“They were best friends for over 60 years.”
Today their names live on at the Kerry Wood Nature Centre and the Marjorie Wood Gallery.
