Here's a taste of my favorite memories of living and working in Fairview for the last forty or so years. Each of the quilt squares has a name to trigger a memory. There's also a very much bigger quilt with 75 different memories of Fairview - stay tuned. And of course, as you read this, please take the opportunity to enjoy your own memories of Fairview. Or of your own home town.
One of the best pieces of advice I got as a quilter was to pick a favorite piece of fabric and use those colours because if you like they way they work in the fabric, they will work well together. This quilt is made up of a hundred or so different pieces of fabric, all sharing a colour with my focus fabric and almost all of them coming from my stash. So when I look at a Taste of Fairview, I also have memories of what other quilts these fabrics are part of. Enjoy.
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| 12 memories on the front |
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| 3 more on the back |
The Fairview Airport. In the spring of 1987, the town of Fairview had a disaster practice which involved the whole town working together. Who would do what? Where would the command center be? When and where would be a good place to have the “disaster”? Who would be the casualties? Months of meetings. The disaster was a school bus of high school students from St Thomas More School in a collision out at the airport (because it was a big enough area to stage the accident but not actually on a road). Everybody worked together and we even had a few frantic parents who tried to break into the hospital to find their children. J A few months later, when the major tornado happened in Edmonton, I recognized some of “our” disaster management gurus working on a real disaster and could see the many parts that we had practiced. 10 years later, I was helping with a PARTY program in Grimshaw and the volunteer student to come in by accident happened to be the daughter of the local doctor on call who was unaware of this until he walked into the trauma room to simulate resuscitating an accident victim. I still remember the shock on his face before he got back into role. In a small town the reality is that everybody is connected.
In 2018, my home changed from the house I raised my children in to an apartment in a different town. It’s a change that was a long time in coming and has turned out to be full of interesting experiences and offers of help and encouragement from many people. One of the first events I attended was the Fathers’ Day Fly In at the airport. The community has been abuzz for years with the idea that these “crazy Fairview farmers” had rescued an old plane up north, brought it home and were going to make it fly again. This was the first anniversary of its maiden flight. Almost everybody in town was out to get a chance to see the Canso up close and hundreds of pilots flew in for breakfast and a chance to show off their planes and gossip with friends. Everybody was more than willing to stop and chat, to answer questions about how you get hundreds of planes on the ground when there is no air traffic control. (The answer is that everybody had been planning for weeks what time they’d arrive and started talking to each other on the same radio frequency miles from the airport.) Check out www.savethecanso.com for pictures and the rest of the story.
I found it interesting to talk to one of the pilots for the Canso a few weeks later. He’d seen me at the fly in but hadn’t had a chance to say hi. As one of the pilots, he mentioned that he had just been approved for his license renewal (he is in his 70s), so knew that he could fly for the next year. “I know there will come I time when they say I can’t fly anymore, but every year they approve me, it is pretty life affirming”. This, for me, is the essence of my small town home. Everybody knows everybody else and you have interesting conversations where and when you least expect.
The arena and its neighbor
the curling rink. Coming from La Crete (where the curling rink was natural ice
in a quonset building and everybody was just learning to curl) it was a huge
surprise to come to a School Division bonspiel and actually have REAL curlers
who expected you to have all the gear and know the rules. Of course, the arena is where you spent your
winters watching your hockey players and figure skaters. One memory of the winter of 1995 stands
out. Our team (Grimshaw) of Tom Thumb
players had a core of 8 year olds who had skated together for four or so years
and then two tiny three year olds who could barely stand up on skates (snow
angels). That year, the coaches made the
rule that any player could score a goal, but couldn’t score a second goal until
everybody else on the team had scored as well, which certainly encouraged
passing and working together. This game,
everybody was working to get “99” into the right place in front of the goal and
to get the puck to him so he could score his first goal. And when the Fairview team figured out what
was going on, they started cheering him on and working to make the goal
happen. The whole arena cheered when he
finally got his goal. Life lessons for
both sides. My other memory is more
recent. I had seen Elvis Stoyko’s first
year of skating with Stars on Ice (the young upstart in a leather jacket out
performing Kurt Browning). Getting to watch him skate with the Fairview Silver
Blades was something I never expected to happen. And watching all the young
skaters (many of whom I knew) was just as exciting and brought back memories of
skating carnivals of the past.
Coffee shop. There’s always a coffee shop in town where
you go to visit and catch all the news/gossip.
Now, when I think coffee shop, it’s The Old Bistro (what else could it
be called) which also connects to The Bistro and the great meals we had
there.
The Dunvegan Bridge. An incredible view of the Peace River as you come into the valley. I remember being told years ago that for the road crews, the Dunvegan was always a priority, even if you had to creep backwards down the hill in your sanding truck so that you were sanding for yourself as you worked to clear the snow and ice off the steep and winding road. And wondering about the restriction of only one B train on the bridge at a time, and whether that meant my little car could also be on the bridge with those big long grain trucks heading to the elevator at Rycroft. Dunvegan is so much a part of my memories of Fairview that I insisted I needed to visit Dunvegan (Isle of Skye) even though the fellow from Edinburgh insisted that it “wasn’t the best castle we have in Scotland, and was poorly restored in the Victorian era”. 800 or so years old and still being lived in by the same family was pretty darned good to me.
Elevator. Of course in a small prairie town, it’s the
town elevators that grace the skyline.
With the loss of the railway, the elevators have also been coming
down. I think of two things when I think
of Fairview and elevators. There’s the
incredible sign on the wall in the hospital made of boards from the old
elevator by Earl Verbicky. The sign
recognizes donations to the Hospital Foundation and another one of many
examples of people in town seeing a need and making it happen. But I also think of Len Scarrow, head of
maintenance when the “new” hospital was being built. How to label the elevator buttons when the
hospital on the hill actually had three ground floors? Bottom, middle and top, of course. Not basement, ground and tower. Or 0, 1, 2.
White Railing Fence (the Health Unit). This is the fourth location of the Health Unit that I can remember and if you are trying to explain how to get to us, the small town directions are “turn left at the corner before you go into the parking lot at the hospital. Look for the white railing fence and that’s where the sidewalk is to our front door”. We’ve been here since the summer of 2010, but we still occasionally get people going to the wrong place. We moved from the main floor, and for years there was a sign on the old door (where administration is now) that said “the health unit isn’t here anymore, go back outside, down the road and turn right at the corner. Look for the white railing fence”. The best one was the gentleman phoning from where he thought the health unit was – the two story building across from the arena where the learning store is – and couldn’t believe we had moved from there in 1995!
My connections to the Health Unit go back to my first days visiting Fairview as the mental health therapist from Peace River, then bringing my children for immunizations and Tiny Teeth, then working casually for Home Care and Public Health, then back to Mental Health but having an office in the Health Unit. These memories are all wrapped up in the power of connections.
The library. I introduced my children to the library when they were preschoolers. As they were choosing books, I’d browse the shelves for things that looked interesting. Interlibrary loan before computers meant writing a request and having it come some weeks later. When tracpac came, a whole new world was opened up. I could browse every library in Alberta and request books from the comfort of my home, and then have the surprise and delight of wondering where the book was coming from. I remember a few years ago having a chat with one of the volunteers about the books (on quilting) that I was returning. He mentioned that he always took the books I returned over to the local seniors center to let the ladies check them out, and hoped I didn’t mind! Wow, without even knowing it, I was spreading the fun of my books. In 2014, while traveling in central Asia, I saw a book about the carpet coop I was visiting and made note of its name. When I got home, I searched tracpac and of course it was available. The best part was that it was actually in my home library. Why on earth a book written by a British volunteer about a carpet coop in Kiva, Uzbekistan was in a small northern Alberta library I will never know.
When I moved to Fairview, I asked to keep my library number because it felt that after 25 or more years it was part of me. Thank you. It’s just as much fun to get the message that I have books to pick up.
Pool and Fitness Center. The pool has been part of my life since the 1990s. My children took their first swimming lessons in the old outdoor pool, and then moved on to swim meets. The summer swim community is like a big family and you get to spend your summer weekends at the pools of Northern Alberta. It’s with joy that you watch your children and their friends as they learn and grow and accomplish great things. Grimshaw even had their meet here at the Fairview pool the year that the “it wasn’t a tornado” damaged the Grimshaw pool days before the meet. During this time, I became an official to help put on swim meets, then discovered that I loved being on deck watching anybody swim! Officiating at the World Masters Games in Edmonton in 2005 set me on a slightly different path – to travel to Australia to compete.
I took first tentative steps to become a Masters swimmer in February 2006 with my first morning lane swim at the “new” indoor pool. Next were group fitness classes at the gym and then my introduction to the fitness center. Briefly there was actually a masters swim club and practice swim meets in Alberta getting ready for my “trip of a life time” to compete at the Sydney World Masters Games in 2009.
My other memory of the new pool is how it came to be. A group of Fairview parents had started fundraising to make repairs to the arena where their sons played hockey. That done, they had some money left and looked around for what should be next. The pool also needed major repairs and I watched as there was discussion about fixing the old pool vs building a new one, and then the outrageous idea of building an indoor pool. Some people said it would never work… but of course everybody pulled together. I remember a rubber duck race down the Peace River, and you can see plaques of appreciation throughout the building.
Porch (wee old lady house to Miss Phoenix) In 2019, I fell in love with this wee old two story house with a barn roof that had been badly used by renters for years but had (according to my contractor) “good bones”. I described her to friends as being like one of those older street ladies with all their possessions in a shopping cart. Over the last year, she’s risen from the ashes like a Phoenix. For me, there was a lot of cleaning inside and out, and a week or so of doing the painting then the fun of moving in. But the best part was standing back and watching as Nathan and his crew used their knowledge and creativity to accomplish way more that I thought was possible.
Out of curiosity, I started asking about the history of this house. The last five years remain a mystery (a succession of renters and an absent owner), but in typical small town fashion, people have given me pieces of the story. Parties with a local RCMP officer, A man I knew as the butcher at IGA who had built the garage, the second story and major renovations in 1987 by a college carpentry instructor, an acquaintance who stopped by to say hi one morning and mentioned her aunt had lived here and who she had rented from, a lovely chat with that person who told me about her mum who had bought the house in the 1960s and remembered who had lived here before that (rented or owned, not sure), and talking to the sister in law of the couple who had been those renters, who remembered who had built the original 300 sq foot house, likely with no running water or electricity, in 1956. The power of small town memory.
Sequins and Stuff (Nan’s Fabric Shop). I first visited Nan’s in the early spring of 2002. I’d started quilting and was looking for fabric for a small wall quilt and she gave lots of suggestions and advice. Then I decided to make a full sized bed quilt without much of an idea what it was going to look like. Not long after, there was a quilting class that looked like fun – how to use different threads and stuff – which sent me down the art quilting pathway and I’ve never looked back. Like many great small town shops, you can find a bit of everything, including some unexpected treats that you can’t get in bigger city shops. Nan has moved three or four times and the store has changed names, but it will always be “Nan’s”.
Skylight (remembering Marion Cox). I first met Marion Cox in the fall of 1980, when it was suggested that I introduce myself to the College nurse because she would be helpful to a new to the community Mental Health Therapist. Marion was truly that nurse who believed her job was to care for the community. I would drop by most weeks to say hi, have a tea and listen to her stories. Coming from La Crete, I thought that I was quite the adventurous one until Marion explained how she got from northern England to Fairview by way of a couple of years working as a nurse in Alice Springs in the late 1940s. The first few times she referred a student to “the new therapist” and sang my praises, I felt like I really needed to work hard to meet her expectations.
I chose this block to remember Marion because of our early meetings. Shortly after we met, her office/clinic moved into the new Administration Building along the back hall. I remember her pride in showing me her new space, and explaining how she had had a lot of say over what was necessary – a lovely spacious working space. The best part was the skylight above her desk which allowed daylight to come in from two stories above. “I told them that there was no way I could work without natural light and that my clients absolutely would benefit from it as well”.
Supermarket (Boyt’s) I remember growing up in Calgary and watching Green Acres, with Sam Drucker’s general store, and thinking that that was made up for TV. But one of the things I learned when moving to a small town is that of course there is always that one store that has everything. I love to go into Boyt’s with a bit of time to spare, do a bit of browsing and discover there is something that I forgot I needed! An interesting fact I only learned recently is that the Health Unit actually started out in the same building that is now Boyt’s, moving to the new Fairview Hospital when it opened in 1977.
Take the train. As was the case for many of the small northern Alberta towns, the railway is what created Fairview. If not for the train, we’d all be living four miles south at Waterhole where there was a source of water. My memory of the train was driving with it on my morning trip to work from Grimshaw - keeping pace with it for a time, counting the cars, checking out the graffiti on the grain cars and noticing what else the train might be carrying. The rails might be gone, but if you look closely you can still see evidence of it along the old right of way.
Town Office. When I first traveled to Fairview in the 1980s, I was invited to be part of the interagency group which met in the town’s board room. In what I came to learn was the typical Fairview way of solving problems, a group of public health nurses and teachers decided that they would get everybody together to develop programs (and figure out funding opportunities) to meet town needs. Fairview was one of the first small towns to get funding for preventive programs (FCSS), started the Party Program, funded the school counselor positions, advocated for school teams (which spilled over to schools throughout the area, and many other programs. This attitude of see a need and work to get it met continues to this day in Fairview.
The Waterfront (walking the trails) In Alberta, the waterfront is the lake, or the river. Fairview is blessed with Cummings Lake on its northern edge, with a series of reservoirs and walking trails to make the area accessible to all. As I walk the trails, I smile to think of all those forward thinking folks who created this gem. The sign reminding of the decision to pipe water from the Peace River to have a guaranteed source of water, then hold it in the series of pond like reservoirs that encourage the wild life. The rock in the middle of one of the fairways with the story of how it got there. Paving of the paths to make them more accessible. Volunteers creating the cross country tracks. Memorials to local people. The birdhouses put up by a local volunteer.
