Sitting in the sun room of our home in Hedley, Ivan McClelland shared a deeply personal account of his relationship with Grant Warwick, player coach of the 1955 World Champion Penticton Vees. “When Grant arrived I was only 21, playing goalie for the Vees,” Ivan recalled. “I knew he had played in the NHL and could do amazing things on the ice. He had been named Rookie of the Year with the New York Rangers, played on an NHL All Star team and won numerous other awards. I was in total awe of him and didn’t speak to him, unless he spoke to me first. I also knew he had been sent down to the minors because of his troubling, free spirited lifestyle. While playing for New York, and also Montreal, he had sometimes disappeared into the city for days and no one knew where he was.”

Prior to his career in the NHL Warwick had been a gifted boxer, endowed with an exceptionally strong upper body. Ivan described him as tough minded, a player who could fight if he needed to. “In spite of his great talent, after about 11 years the people in control of hockey considered him damaged goods, washed up,” Ivan remembered. “They were glad to be rid of him, but I had seen what he could accomplish on the ice. When he became player coach of the Vees, he didn’t make speeches in the dressing room, he led by example. On the ice he dominated and in his first year with the team, he took us to the national championships, where we lost to Kitchener.”

Grant’s brothers, Billy and Dick, were also on the Vees roster. “Billy looked after Grant when he stepped outside the traces,” Ivan said. “He ensured Grant got home safely after a night of partying.”

In 1954 Grant seemed to get a hold of his life. There was no alcohol and his brilliance again became evident. That year he took the Vees to the National Championship where they defeated Sudbury. This qualified them to represent Canada in the World Hockey Championship in Germany the following year.

Canada’s hockey moguls now came to Grant and said, “You’ve got a bunch of inexperienced kids and over the hill pros. We’re going to give you 5 top NHL players, including Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau. Also, we want you to take out Ivan McLelland and put Harry Lumley in goal.” The pressure was intense, but Grant refused.

In retrospect, it’s evident a special relationship was developing between this veteran player coach and his young goalie. Unlike many net- minders, who wax hot and cold, Ivan had proved to be consistent in temperament and play. In the dressing room he was given a seat next to Grant. Possibly Warwick drew strength from his calm demeanor.

In Germany, at the World Championship the following year, sports writers criticized Warwick relentlessly for bringing “a weak team.” Remarkably, the Vees won the first four games, against teams Ivan considered more skilled and experienced.

For Warwick the pressure became overwhelming. After the fourth game he disappeared into the night. He spent the next day, Saturday, in his room recovering from intense partying. Not physically ready to play against the Soviets on Sunday, he did only a few shifts. Even so, the Vees routed the Soviets 5-0 and were crowned World Champions.

“Later, in the bus returning to Dusseldorf,” Ivan recalled, “Grant was sitting alone at the front. The players were celebrating at the rear. No one spoke to him.”

Ivan moved up to sit beside him. “I’m sorry I let you down, ” Grant said.

“We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you,” Ivan replied.

For Grant Warwick, it was the end of his hockey career. His life deteriorated and for about 10 years he lived on the streets of Edmonton. He remembered his goalie though. Every year at Christmas he phoned Ivan, still calling him “kid” as he always had.

Then his circumstances changed. In one Christmas call he said, “I found the Lord. I don’t go to church, but my life is totally changed. The Lord is giving me strength.” He was now helping others who were less fortunate.

In their final phone call, when Grant was about to die, Ivan said, “How are you approaching this?” Grant replied, “It’s going to be wonderful.” Then he surprised Ivan with the words, “I love you.”

“He was a good man,” Ivan said, “an imperfect hero.”

Living in Hedley, where we have no known cases of Covid 19, there seemed little reason to be concerned. That changed when Linda and I received an email last week from our friend Robert Billyard. At age 76, he had still been working at a company with 300 employees. “A lot of them were young and not worried about the virus,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Mission. “Those young bucks believe their bullet proof. At my age I knew I was vulnerable. I decided to retire a couple of months earlier than I had planned. I was too late.”

Robert is a big man endowed with a powerful physique. He and wife Jennifer met when they were participants in a cycling group. They have long been active in various sports, including swimming and kayaking. They seemed too healthy and vibrant to be taken down by the coronavirus.

In early April he began experiencing chills and fatigue and his behaviour was becoming eccentric. “I’m going to book a room at the Best Western,” he told Jennifer at dinner one evening. “I’m not feeling well.” A pragmatic, no nonsense lady, she kiboshed this idea. “I’m taking you to the Emergency right now,” she said.

Tests revealed he had the virus. “They put me into an induced coma,” he recalled. “That was so my body wouldn’t fight the ventilator, and to prevent brain damage.” While in the coma he had vivid dreams, some terrifying. “In one dream I was taken hostage by a drug cartel,” he said. “I thought they planned to kill me so I was very nice to them. I gave them all kinds of reasons to let me live.”

He feels fortunate that Jennifer stayed in close contact with the medical team and with his daughters in Denmark. “It was a tough time for her. Gardening was her therapy.”

In late April a doctor told Jennifer Robert was no longer responding to treatment and not coming out of the coma as expected. The medical team started questioning whether he would survive. Also, they cautioned Jennifer that if he did wake he might suffer a heart attack or stroke. Robert had told Jennifer he never wanted to be placed in a facility for the aged and disabled.

She reluctantly signed a “do not resuscitate” order. “It was the loneliest day of my life,” she told him later. Desperate and not a quitter, Jennifer read him the riot act on Zoom. “We have too much on our bucket list,” she told him. “You can’t die yet.”

“When I did wake after 5 weeks in a coma,” Robert said, “I thought I was in a pub. I ordered a beer.” His body had deteriorated and he didn’t have strength to stand. Initially the nurses needed to feed him. Even now he is dealing with shortness of breath. Looking back on the experience, Robert said, “It’s pure hell when you’re in the midst of it. At my age I’m lucky to have survived. I feel that I cheated death.”

I wondered if the Covid experience had changed him. “I had been struggling with the age thing,” he replied. “Covid has helped me understand that we don’t fully appreciate life until we are close to death. Surviving the virus has made me more positive and grateful. It has also deepened Jenny and my relationship.”

He paused and seemed deep in thought, then continued. “I’d like to make more friends and go for coffee with them. I’m not strong enough yet for demanding physical activities. Jenny and I have done a lot of kayaking. Maybe I’ll get back to that. I used to play badminton, but that’s a young person’s sport. At my age, it’s too fast. I do feel rejuvenated though, younger than a year ago. Probably because I’m not working and my body is getting more rest. I’m not as strong as I was, but even so I feel like I’m winding back the clock.” His perspective on the Covid scare, and most things is surprisingly positive.

Jenny is ready for a more uplifting adventure next time. She put it pretty succinctly, telling him, “Robert, you’ve burned all your health credits. You can’t have another crisis for ten years.”

Hearing my friend’s account, I now understand that Covid 19 is more real and dangerous than I had thought. It leaves no room for complacency.

In a 2 hour telephone conversation, Elmer and Sherry Thiesen of Mission talked about their nearly 45 years in a marriage that could have pulled apart at the seams the day they said “I do”. They each came into the union with significant issues. When Elmer was 17, an ophthalmologist informed him, with unnecessary bluntness, he’d be blind in10 years. Sherry grew up in a dysfunctional home and needed to look to others for an understanding of what it meant to be a responsible wife and mother. Her dream was to be a teacher, but after her mother unexpectedly passed away, she left school after grade 11 to become the family’s primary caregiver.

Elmer managed to graduate from high school, “but I read very slowly and was always in the front row, trying to see the board.” He did obtain a drivers license, but the test was perfunctory and Elmer realized he really shouldn’t be driving. It was shortly after receiving the license that he was given the dire prognosis. The ophthalmologist also told him he should relinquish the prized license. Elmer returned home that day, extremely depressed. How could he ever hope to provide for a family if he couldn’t drive? For 4 days he pondered his dilemma, mostly staying in his room downstairs. Finally he went up and wordlessly handed the car keys to his father, possibly the hardest decision he’d made to that time. “Dad understood what this meant.”

After they began seriously dating, Elmer hitchhiked or walked many times from Abbotsford to Aldergrove to see Sherry. When a well meaning friend warned Sherry, “that guy is going blind,” she responded, “that’s ok. I already knew that.”

Elmer’s Mom played a key role in Sherry’s development. “When Elmer brought me to his home to meet the family, his mother immediately set the table for a meal. There was homemade soup, buns and bread. His Mom was especially kind and friendly to me. They were a Mennonite family and she soon began teaching me to prepare dishes popular in their culture. She also explained her faith in God. While Elmer was downstairs playing pool with his Dad, I was upstairs learning from her. I was very shy, but in their home I felt accepted and loved.

Elmer was only 22, and Sherry 21, when they got married in 1975. Both were willing and conscientious workers. Although Elmer’s vision was deteriorating, he was determined to work and found employment at a tire outlet in Burnaby. Sherry worked in the kitchen of the Vancouver General Hospital. After about a year, they realized they didn’t like city life and moved to Abbotsford. Here Elmer was hired by a local tire shop and Sherry worked at a donut outlet until the business was shut down. After 15 years at the tire shop, Elmer was let go due to his failing vision.

In 1993 they bought a townhouse. Although by now Elmer had lost pretty much all vision and was on a government disability pension, he agreed to serve on council. The people apparently saw leadership ability in him and elected him to the position of chairman. Two other council members were also without sight. At the AGM, he said, “If you want to say something, don’t put up your hand. Three of us won’t see it.” He guided the strata to the best possible resolution of a lawsuit, and settled several other matters.

By now, they had brought 4 children into the world and Elmer’s pension wasn’t adequate. When they were offered a janitorial contract, they didn’t hesitate. “I have a spatial mind,” Elmer said. “I memorize where everything is in a room. That enables me to do vacuuming and other tasks. When we put in a bid to clean a medical building, the woman doing the hiring told us all our references described our work as impeccable. She gave us the contract.”

“It hasn’t all gone smoothly,” Elmer said. “One day when I was vacuuming in a doctor’s office, I bumped into a chair. It was not where I thought I had placed it. I began pulling it, but it seemed very heavy. Then a voice said, ‘I’m sorry. I just came back to make some notes.’” It was the doctor. “We don’t always expect things will work out right,” Sherry added. “We just keep moving forward” Love, resolve and resilience have held the marriage seams together.

(This blog is a reprint. It was first published in May, 2015)

When Linda and I walked into the former business office of 87 year old Rollo Ceccon in Princeton, he greeted us enthusiastically. Then,

with the energy and passion characteristic of the deeply committed, he urged us to join him at a photo gallery on 3 walls. There were pictures of him with dump trucks and other equipment dating back to before the middle of the past century. I understood quickly this man grasps the value of preserving a record for future generations.

“I was born in Treviso, Italy,” he said when we had seated ourselves at his desk. “In 1930 my mother and I joined my father in Canada. As I was growing up, my father impressed on me how good we have it here. If I complained he’d say ‘you should go to another country and see how people live there.’” As a father himself, Rollo would later give a similar message to his son and daughter.

He attended the Edmonton campus of Chicago Vocational

School, learning diesel and automotive mechanics. Not happy with his first job and the big mosquitoes at Uranium City, he quit and was hired by Minneapolis Honeywell Thermostats. Being young and strong willed, he said to his boss one day, “if I don’t get more pay, I’ll quit.” The boss said “there’s the door.” Rollo laughed when he told us, “I never did that again.”

In 1950 he bought his first truck, a 1944 3 ton Ford, and started in business. He became a fan of Ford trucks. “The other models broke down,” he said. “The 6 cylinder engines couldn’t hold the trucks back going down the hill from Copper Mountain and Blackburn. I bought 8 cylinder Fords.”

A serious accident on Nov. 10, 1954 shaped his thinking to

the present time. He was backing his dump truck to the edge of a 1,000 foot deep “glory hole.” The edge broke away. He and his truck tumbled down 250 feet. A rock outcropping prevented the truck from hurtling all the way to the bottom.

The man sent down to help rescue Rollo later told him, “I thought you were dead. Then blood spurting from your head wound hit me in the eye, so I knew your heart was pumping.” Three hours later the winch of a D6 Cat hoisted him to the surface. He had 6 broken vertebrae, several broken ribs and a broken leg. Wounds on his head required 120 stitches. He remained unconscious 2 weeks. “That day my father’s hair turned white in one hour.”

In the hospital he was placed in a body cast. After regaining consciousness the specialist said to him one day, “we’ve done all we can. The rest is up to you.” Rollo was determined to get out of the hospital. Now in a walking cast and using crutches, he signed himself out. Four months later, still in the cast and on crutches, he was back at work.

He leaned toward us from his side of the desk, as though about to say something of deep importance. “If I hadn’t had that accident,” he continued quietly, “I would never have understood how good I have it. People helped me a lot.”

Before the accident, he had started going into the Traveller’s Café. He became keenly interested in Blanche, a pretty young waitress. “It took a long time to persuade her to go to a movie,” he remembers.

Eventually she agreed to marry him and “we tied the knot on March 2, 1957. That day I threw away my crutches and started using a cane.”

Rollo’s business was flourishing. He bought dump trucks, a back hoe, a screening plant and other equipment. Blanche did the books.

When the Hope slide covered the # 3 Highway, his was the first company on the job. “One of my machines blew a line,” he said. “Phil Gaglardi, Minister of Highways, had just landed in a chopper. He told me to remove the line and he’d fly me to Chilliwack to get a new one.”

Until 2013 he still owned a front end loader. Without charge, he continued to clear snow for the Legion, firehall and arena. In 1973 the Princeton Chamber of Commerce named him “Citizen of the Year.” He was also honoured by the Lions Club for his “invaluable services and cooperation.”

Rollo’s last words to us were, “I’ve had a good life and it’s still good.”