A8 BREXIT GETS MESSY AS TURMOIL DEEPENS
B5
HEAVY DUTY SMOOTHIES
B9 A9
B1
NAFTA CHALLENGE MOVING FORWARD
PONOKA STAMPEDE RETURNS FOR 80TH YEAR
M O N D A Y
J U N E
2 7
BLUEGRASS PIONEER STANLEY DEAD AT 89
$1.00
2 0 1 6
www.reddeeradvocate.com
CENTRAL ALBERTA CO-OP
Longtime leader to retire BY BRENDA KOSSOWAN ADVOCATE STAFF
Photo by JEFF STOKOE/Advocate staff
Damien Fisher winds up as he throws in the weight for distance light weight event at the Red Deer Highland Games on Saturday at Titans Field. Fisher got the field record with a toss of 82.6 feet with the 28 lb. weight. See more photos on Page A6.
Wet weather doesn’t dampen spirits at Highland Games BY BRENDA KOSSOWAN ADVOCATE STAFF It’s all about managing the angles, says one of the heavy events athletes who joined Red Deer’s 69th-annual Highland Games at Titan Park on Saturday. A thin drizzle of rain fell from high clouds as Damien Fisher of Bellingham, Wash., Rob Young of Calgary and a handful of other tall, stout lads took their turns tossing various heavy items across the wet grass. Fisher set a new field record in the lightweight stone event, throwing a 28-pound weight 82 feet and six inches across the wet grass. Not quite as stocky as some of his fellow competitors, Fisher says his advantage is in having long arms and legs, which give him more leverage when he’s winding up for the throw. He then switched out to a different pair of shoes, modified with a heavy spike at each toe to stick into the grass and hold his feet still for the hammer toss. Very dangerous. Not the sort of thing you wear to a dance. Young’s mother, Lesley, said she was deathly afraid when her son, 2002 heavyweight champion on the University of Calgary wrestling team, developed an interest in the heavy events. Relaxing in a lawn chair as her son warmed up for the Hammer Throw, she recalled her trepidation as she watched him out in a field, tossing heavy weights over a bar that was well above his head as he practiced for the Weight for Height event. The program describes Weight for Height as the event that makes you hurt. “It’s about the same as throwing a small child over a Greyhound bus, but less likely to land you in jail — although it could land you in hospital,” it says. Massive at six-foot-four and more than 300 pounds (1.93 metres and 136.6 kg), Young had quit wrestling after suffering from concussion and joined the university’s track and field team. He discovered Highland Games later on as an ideal vent for his competitive drive. But don’t think the heavy events are limited to big, stout lads, said Masters (over 40) competitor
RED DEER WEATHER
INDEX NEWS A2,3,5,7,8 COMMENT A4 SPORTS B1-4
Sean Langford, on hand to judge the open competitions. There are women’s events, too — and they toss some of the same weights as the men — just not as far, where distance is the goal. The heaviest of all, the caber toss, is all about style. The caber — a long tapered pole — is to be grasped at its narrow end, and then tossed in a manner that will flip it end over end and in a straight line. Highland Games appear to have started hundreds of years ago as casual bets between rival farmers, with little or no relationship to actual field chores, said Young. Aside from the heavy events, Red Deer’s Highland Games run a broad spectrum of Scottish culture, including competitions for pipers, drummers, pipe bands and Highland dancers as well as a TugO-War and a shortbread competition. Chairperson Debbie Wallace said there are always a few headaches as competitors and vendors start arriving first thing in the morning, but a little rain didn’t hurt a bit. The dampness and chill actually made it feel just a bit more like Scotland, said Wallace. The weather did not deter participants, but Wallace was concerned that it would affect the number of people who came out to watch. To help attract the volunteers it needs to keep the show running, the games offers a share of its proceeds to local charities that want to make some money. This year’s crew is a group of people saving up to send a group of Grade 8 students from Red Deer on a science trip to Orlando, Fla. in 2017. Wallace’s husband, John — a direct descendant of Clan Wallace, said the games appear to date back roughly to the early 11th Century with competitions organized by Clan Canmore. Wallace said he had noticed after attending Highland Games elsewhere in the province that there were no clan tents set up at Red Deer, so he set about fixing that flaw with a number of clans setting up among the vendors in the concession area. Fittingly, finalists from local competitions wrap up their season this fall at the Canmore Highland Games, recognized as one of the Top 12 in Canada.
FOOD: B5 ADVICE: B10 COMICS B8
See PARKS on Page A8
LOTTERIES
Local Today
Tonight
Tuesday
Wednesday
Sunny
Clear
60% Showers
Sunny
SATURDAY 6/49: 4,5,6,8, 39, 42, BONUS: 30 Western 6/49: 21, 30, 39, 40, 45, 47, BONUS: 42
ENTERTAINMENT: B9 BUSINESS: A9-10
There was a time during nearly five decades with Co-op that Larry Parks — now general manager of the Central Alberta Co-op — was wearing his cars out, putting on 100,000 kilometres a year travelling from town to town. Now 62 and poised to retire, Parks recalls that it was still legal to hire 14-years-olds in the fall of 1968 when, as a Grade 9 student in Craik, Sask., he got a part-time job packing and delivering groceries for the local Co-op store. “At that time, there wasn’t a whole lot of jobs for a 14-year-old kid, so I was pretty lucky to get that job.” It would be the start of a career that would span a lifetime and carry Parks all over Alberta and Saskatchewan in various roles with local Co-op stores as well as with Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL), the company’s wholesale and manufacturing division. Parks’s plans to study pharmacy after high school were shelved when the Craik store offered him a full-time job. “I loved what I was doing, so I just stayed with it.” Still in his early 20s, Parks moved to Lemberg, Sask. in 1973 to take over as manager of the Co-op food store. With his bride, Enid at his side, he went from Lamberg to Melville in 1974 and from there to Ponoka, four years later to manage the hardware and furniture department. He and Enid continued to transfer every few years, heading for the “big city” of Regina in 1991, where he took on a travelling job as retail adviser with FCL. One hundred thousand kilometres and four Chevy Luminas later, he and Enid abandoned the city lights and headed back to the smaller town of Tisdale, home of Beeland Co-op and Brent Butt, creator of the CTV comedy series, Corner Gas. Although filmed in Rouleau, much of the goings on in Corner Gas are based on events that happened in Tisdale, and would be readily identified by anyone watching the show, says Parks. For example, the Corner Gas episode in which a customer who writes a bad cheque is publicly humiliated at the gas station is based on an incident that actually occurred in Tisdale, he said. Parks still chuckles at Tisdale’s town motto, based on its position in the heart of canola country. At the time he was there, local farmers were still growing rapeseed, the predecessor to canola. All that rapeseed had created a healthy environment for honey farmers, whose bees in turn provided reliable pollination for the massive fields of bright yellow flowers. For 60 years, therefore, Tisdale advertised itself to the world as the “Land of Rape and Honey,” says Parks. At least once a year, someone would complain to the Chamber of Commerce about the motto. Town leaders finally decided to drop the slogan and took down the signs in the fall of 2015. Parks’s career eventually brought him, Enid and their three children to Red Deer, where he and Enid plan to stay. Red Deer Co-op, established in 1937, was a much smaller operation from today when the Parks arrived in the late winter of 2002. Its operations included a shopping mall and gas bar in Lacombe as well as two food stores, a gas bar and a hardware and farm centre in Red Deer.
25
12°
24°
26°
SUNDAY Pick 3: 157 Extra: 3264749 Numbers are unofficial.
PLEASE
RECYCLE