All Catherine Ford’s life she has loved the Stampede — even when her grandfather took her to the poultry exhibition
Today is Kids’ Day at the Stampede. It’s also the 75th anniversary of the day I will never forget — a day that gifted me with the optimism and sense of being lucky that has been a part of my psyche even in moments of fear, sadness and regret.
That day I held the winning ticket on the two-wheeled, blue CCM bicycle during the daytime kids’ Grandstand Show.
I will never forget my father bundling his four-year-old daughter in his arms and carrying me down the long flight of stairs to the stage.
I won’t forget the heat from the tar paper burning through my sandals, or the wave of horror that gripped me when alderman Don Mackay, who would become Calgary’s mayor that fall, gently tried to take my pudgy hands from the handlebars. I gripped even tighter, thereby setting in motion the lifelong idea that adults, rules and law were not always right.
But I was overpowered by the concerted efforts of dad and the alderman, who tried to pacify me by saying it was a boy’s bike and needed to be exchanged for a girl’s. The next few days were spent harbouring distrust until the bike actually appeared at our door.
Amazing how one incident in an entire lifetime can cement a personality.
Those of you who have been with me on this long journey will recognize I have written about that bicycle more than once. The why is simple: when some incident has a profound effect on your life, you will keep harking back to the moment.
All my life I have loved the Stampede — even when my grandfather took me to the poultry exhibition. (He was particularly fond of Rhode Island Reds which, if I had been paying attention instead of considering poultry to be only food, I would today know what these creatures were.) But why would my grandfather, a sober and serious district Court judge, want to look at chickens?
Here’s where research pays off. While I remember that particular bird, when I checked Clinton J. Ford’s written history of his farming family, prepared for an Ontario historical society in 1961, he wrote: “Once upon a time, and it lasted a good long while, I became an enthusiast in the raising of Barred Plymouth Rock chickens. It was an all-powering, or rather overpowering, urge. For years I raised them in my backyard and so became a member and president of the Calgary Poultry Association, and later was instrumental in organizing and became president of the Poultry Association of Alberta.
“No doubt some of this enthusiasm came with me from the farm in Ontario. (As one of nine children) I remember that I fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, looked for the hidden nests and also hid some of the eggs in the hay-mow for Easter.”
I quote him at length because in his words and attitudes, he taught me that getting “too big for your britches” and “lording” it over other people, rich or poor, was a sin. Grandfather embodied William Shakespeare’s adage: “No legacy is so rich as honesty.”
And just in case anyone thinks these lessons were being taught out in the country on a farm, they were not. That backyard still exists, in the heart of Mount Royal, home to some of the snootiest panjandrums in Calgary.
This taught me that people overly impressed with their own wealth and status sometimes could use these lessons taught by the man who would become Chief Justice of Alberta and the Northwest Territories.
I spent my childhood going on all the midway rides with my father and, later, as a teenager going with various boyfriends who would — usually vainly — try to win a plush toy for me. I may have lived across the country at times, but the Stampede spirit never left.
My late first husband was an equal enthusiast and my current husband, having been born and raised in Calgary, still is.
And all these years later, the fifth generation of our family is learning about the wonderful adventure in make-believe, cowboy reality, First Nations’ legacy and fun for all ages at the annual Calgary Stampede. Yahoo!
Catherine Ford is a regular Herald columnist.
