Donna Wilson: True stories, some names withheld to protect the guilty

Donna Wilson decamps from Paint Lake and Thompson to Sanford on the LaSalle River, 15 minutes southwest of Winnipeg, this Sunday, where her lovely parents, Dorothy and Jack Dyke, have lived for several years now. After more than six years at the helm, today marks her last official day as general manager of Quality Inn & Suites Thompson, although she gave up her office a couple of weeks ago for her longtime number one, assistant manager Destinee Perry, to move up to the big chair as general manager.  Both have been with the hotel since 2013.

Donna Wilson. She knows everyone in Thompson. True fact, or pretty darned close.

Now, you’ve probably heard a lot over the years about Donna’s decades of volunteerism and service on what sometimes seems like every community service not-for-profit board in Thompson, including her signature annual cancer-fighting event, Relay for Life every April, followed closely in recent years with her involvement in Thompson Playhouse, as president,  and sometimes in the director’s chair, after making her directorial debut in 2011 with Dixie Swim Club, and since 2009, her Old Fashioned Christmas Concert every December in R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre Her “Out & About” column, summed up pretty much in the name, has run occasionally in the Thompson Citizen since 2007.

For years, Donna, and her good friend, Wally Itson, who retired as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in 2014, and then wound up running Thompson Gas Bar Co-op, would emcee many community events together annually, as well as providing sideline coverage for Paul Andersen’s Shaw Cable TV coverage of the Nickel Days Parade in June and Santa Claus Parade in November.

“Growing up I hadn’t heard much of cancer other then my mom mentioning her friend Daphne who had died of it,” Wilson said in connection with her Relay for Life involvement on her Canadian Cancer Society personal web page in 2012. “Then that word came around again when my best friend Cindy’s mom was diagnosed. It was pretty traumatic for us. Cancer took over her life. Years later my mom lost another friend, Regina.” Started in 1985 by Dr. Gordy Klatt, a colorectal surgeon in Tacoma, Washington, Relay for Life was first held in Canada in 1999. Relay for Life made its debut in Thompson in 2001 and has been held since then annually, with the exception of 2008 when it was postponed for a year because of extensive renovations to the C.A. Nesbitt Arena.

But many local readers know these things. Some will also have noticed Donna very gradually scaled back on sitting on some of those board and other public gigs she would do in recent years, knowing moving day was only a few years off, and giving the various boards plenty of time to recruit. I also saw a somewhat quieter, more reflective Donna, after her younger brother, Eric, was paralyzed after falling off a roof in Palm Springs, California in February 2017. Eric survived, but it was far from a given he would at the time. Today, he has made an amazing recuperation through lots of hard work by himself and with dedicated therapists, the support of family and friends, and God’s abundant grace, but becoming a paraplegic is a life-changing event for Eric and his family and friends. And for Donna Wilson, her family is EVERYTHING. Has been since the day she first became my boss and soon friend way back on July 4, 2007, and long before no doubt. Since Eric’s accident, Donna has become a fierce advocate for wheelchair users; want to know why you should observe painted lines and signage in a parking lot? Donna will tell you, probably on her Facebook page, what it means to wheelchair users when drivers don’t. She’s all in.

Donna has been an outstanding boss for seven of my almost 12 years to date in Thompson at two different jobs, and a friend for the entire dozen years. Through whatever quirk of fate, I may have worked for Donna longer than any other employee in Thompson over the last dozen years when you total both the newspaper and hotel jobs. No one, and I mean no one, throws a Christmas staff party like Donna! And no one, but no one, I suspect, has stories like those of us who have worked in both the newspaper and hotel industries in Thompson. Most of which, of course, aren’t suitable to be re-told publicly. To protect the guilty.

Donna, as I have said publicly many times, is the best boss I have worked for. People work for people, not positions, at least if they stay long, just like they leave bosses, not jobs, although I have joked with Donna more than once at the hotel, please don’t move next-door to Minute Muffler on Moak Crescent because I’m not sure I’m up to working in a muffler shop. But I did work for Donna for more than three years as editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News when she was general manager (we started within weeks of each other in June and July 2007). I arrived knowing a lot about print journalism across the country, but next to nothing about Thompson. Donna was my remedy for that. She could unfailing predict in our meetings which story was going to explode when we published it, even if I thought it was innocuous, and which stories would fly OK, even if I thought they might be controversial. The amazing thing is she always had my back. If a hard story needed to be published in the public interest, we published it. Always. She never spiked stories even when she knew local advertisers were going to be sending her into damage control mode, ringing her phone off the hook first thing the morning the paper hit the street.

Mind you, after I wrote a fairly hard-hitting editorial in October 2008 about Spirit Way and delays in Phase 2 of expanding the 27-foot wide rockface sculpture to see five more wolves mounted, making it an additional 80 feet wide, which would have meant the largest rockface sculpture in Canada, Donna limited my vacation starts to leaving after my editorials were in print. You see, Jeanette and I had conveniently enough hopped on a plane for a short vacation, as she was running in the Prince Edward County half-marathon in Southern Ontario, after the editorial was written but yet to be published in print (the paper didn’t go online until the following year in June 2009.) When the paper hit the streets, it was a case of, as the late singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon, once so appropriately put it, “Send lawyers, guns and money. The shit has hit the fan.”

Lesson learned: Never, ever criticize a volunteer effort in Thompson unless you are prepared to delay the start of your vacation.

“You are one stubborn man but we always managed to work it out and I’m so happy to have you as my friend” Donna wrote several weeks ago. “Donna wrote that you are stubborn,” Jeanette laughed, thinking it an amusing and not untrue statement. While I never changed my mind about the rockface editorial, and continue to stand by it almost 11 years later, I did come to have a bigger picture view of Spirit Way in general over the years, and in particular Volker Beckmann, who might well be considered kind of a stubborn guy himself at times. I would go onto write several editorials praising Volker as a “visionary,” and suggesting Thompson could use a few more visionaries like him. As recently as May 25, I wrote on Facebook, “While we don’t see eye-to-eye always, or agree on some issues, Volker is a much needed and often under-appreciated visionary (“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown”: Luke 4:16-30). Well-deserved recognition in the Manitoba Legislature from Thompson PC MLA Kelly Bindle, causing me to do what I might have otherwise thought unlikely; share a YouTube video from the Manitoba PC Caucus.”

Before I met her, Donna had done a good-length stint as a morning show host for Tom and Sue O’Brien over on Cree Road at what was then Arctic Radio CHTM-610 AM. She also ran Ducky Promotions, and later, Beautiful Plus Fashions, on Fox Bay.

Between leaving the paper in 2010 and becoming general manager again, but this time of a hotel, Donna indulged her love for all things Newfoundland and Labrador, her home country (oops … province) serving up her own signature dish of “Uptop Fries,” featuring French fries, topped with dressing, onions, bologna and gravy, at Nanny’s Diner-Baking Catering at Westwood Shopping Mall. “Back home in St. John’s my father used to always talk about being on the boat called the Uptop, so I named the dish after the boat,” said Wilson. She also once worked as a cook at the old Highway Inn here, and wrote her own cookbook, which she sold for charity in 2010 to help raise funds for A Port in the Storm in Winnipeg.

She operated Nanny’s between December 2011 and May 2013, when she was recruited by Dr. Alan Lagimodiere, a veterinarian, and since 2016 PC MLA for the provincial constituency of Selkirk, and Al’s wife Judy, to run the Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The Lagimodieres are among the Accommodations North ownership group which owns the Choice Hotels Quality Inn & Suites Thompson franchise.

Discretion is of paramount importance in the hotel business, so alas no juicy hotel stories to share here. Not that they don’t exist, just not here. Donna calls them our “headshaker” memories … like that time a guest stepped off the elevator at 5 a.m. and was … ah, yes, you can’t work together at a hotel and a newspaper and not have a few headshaker memories.

But newspapers are a bit different, as tell-all beasts, so I suppose one  brief remembrance of things past wouldn’t be too far out of line perhaps.

We needed one of our reporters one morning for a deadline story. He was a talented reporter, but he liked to stay very late at the paper most nights, obsessing over multiple drafts and rewrites of his stories before turning them in, making sure they were just right. More like a novelist then your typical first draft of history type journalist. This, of course, sometimes meant he was very sleepy. Too sleepy to make it into the office the next day for 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or even 10 a.m. Unable to raise him on the phone, we drove over to his apartment, and tossed pebbles at what we figured was his upper-floor window to rouse him, which we did eventually. This was a career first for me. In 25 years of journalism, I had never before tossed pebbles at a reporter’s window to rouse him or her from sleep. He indicated he’d be ready shortly, and buzzed us through the security door into the building. So far so good. Except in the lobby we somehow mixed the apartment numbers up, and wound up banging on the wrong door it turned out.  That’s odd we both thought. No answer. Surely he couldn’t have fallen back to sleep after just buzzing us in. And that would be right about the time the door slowly opened, and we were looking into a very darkened apartment. And a woman, unknown to me, standing in her doorway looking very sleepy and confused.

The woman, of course, was not unknown to Donna Wilson. “I’m sorry,” Donna gasped. “We’ve got the wrong apartment.” Without missing a beat, the woman stepped out of the shadows into some hall light. “Would you both like to come in for a cup of tea, Donna?” the woman asked. Turns out she was a police matron for the RCMP holding cells, and had just recently gone to sleep after working an overnight shift. But she had known Donna for years, and thought maybe we were just drooping by, although Donna hadn’t known until that moment the woman lived there at the time. Or we wouldn’t be waking her up.

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I work in a university library where the view from my front entrance is often nickel miners playing late-night hockey: This is Northern Manitoba and this is how it works

While one of my favourite libraries when I was in grad school at Queen’s University in Kingston in the mid-1990s, was Massey Library at neighbouring Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), no doubt in part because of the sign that reminded patrons “SILENCE,” those days of happy memory, I suspect, are gone almost everywhere, with the exception maybe of some big-city reference libraries or reading rooms.

But even back then at Queen’s, more than two decades ago now, big changes for academic libraries were in the wind. The first time I ever used the World Wide Web (WWW) was in October 1994, as the brand-new Joseph S. Stauffer Library opened at Queen’s during my second year on campus. While I had used the Internet for e-mail since 1991 at Trent University’s Thomas J. Bata Library (on a server wonderfully called “Ivory,” I recall) the web and its HTML pages were going to be a whole other thing again. A very big thing.

This is before browsers such as Netscape Navigator, which wouldn’t be released until December 1994, and Internet Explorer (IE), released in August 1995. One of the few newspapers online in the fall of 1994 was Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News. Queen’s used the Mosaic browser, developed just two years earlier in 1992 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Queen’s library administrators, presciently anticipating demand for access to the web, made most of the computer stations that had WWW access, aside from some on the fourth floor, stand-up stations for use because they anticipated very heavy traffic and demand, and wanted to keep people moving along, rather than sitting for hours using a very new and still-scarce commodity 22 years ago.

Just like microfilm was in the 1930s at university libraries and microfiche in the 1960s.

In what some consider quaint deference to our book heritage, however, I usually insist on keeping the library open at night here on those infrequent evenings when the IT department shuts down our computers early for routine maintenance. I do this premised on the fact we still have the ability to manually sign-out books and books don’t require IT support to loan out (at least in the short term). We’re somewhat platform-agnostic when it comes to delivering information – so long as we can deliver it. Sometimes the route to books can be a bit circuitous. I remember a time when movies were made after the novel was written and usually consumed in that order by patrons. While the book may still be the original format most of the time, I had a patron come in earlier this week who had seen the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky, based on the alleged extraterrestrial encounter experienced by 22-year-old Travis Walton while working on a lumber crew in Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona on Nov. 5, 1975.

Somehow the movie had come up in a recent conversation the student had with an instructor at UCN, who suggested the movie might exaggerate in places Walton’s own 1978 book, called The Walton Experience. His novel advice: you’ve seen the movie, now read the book.

We have what may seem to some as a surprisingly strong juvenile section here at the University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeline Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus, and even some colouring paper and crayons for kids. Many of our students are single parents, who in order to study in the library, if they can’t find or afford childcare at night, have little choice but to bring their children with them.

We also have an ever increasing number of what we refer to as “community user” patrons, who are not students, but are often recent immigrants to Canada and Thompson from all over the world, who will visit the UCN library as a family. Sometimes there are teenage kids who are nearing the end of high school and studying hard to get into university next year or the year after. We work to accommodate everyone who wants to use the library, and while children can cause a bit of noise and even pull a book that catches their eye off lower shelves in the stacks occasionally, they’re probably not any more rambunctious as a group than nursing students who work incredibly hard here at UCN, but are known to be a bit noisy at times studying in groups while blowing off a bit of steam just before exams – like right now.

One thing I noticed when I first came to work in the library three academic years ago now was how respectful and appreciative UCN students are to have a new academic library on a still only three-year-old campus. They treat staff, the book collection and physical property and infrastructure of the library with a great deal of respect, and there is none of the sense of entitlement I saw among some Trent and Queen’s students when I was a student myself at those universities years ago. Vandalism and property damage in the UCN library here is almost unheard of. Same for rudeness. It’s almost like people individually and collectively realize what good fortune they have experienced to have a university and library like this here in remote Northern Manitoba, and take pride in the place. Parents committed enough to be working on their university degrees are usually reasonably responsible about their kids.

Certainly our student demographic profile is not too much like the 19-year-old single-kids-living-away from-home-and-their-parents-for-the-first-time norm we presented when my cohort went off to university 40 years ago in 1976. Maintaining a general atmosphere of quiet most times is a reasonable expectation I have, but quiet is not quite synonymous with silence.

Besides, here in the North there is very much a sense of live and left live. I may work in the only library in Canada where I look to the right when I step outside our front entrance into our common foyer with the Vale Regional Community Centre (VRCC), and see the boys from the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6166 hockey teams, who are nickel miners at Vale, playing for the aptly-named “Refinery Rats” or “T-1 Timberdogs” at the C.A. Nesbitt Arena, which is adjacent to the university.

The rink is a few hundred yards away to the east down the foyer, through a set of glass-topped arena doors, so it has be a pretty amazing slap shot to hear the puck hit the boards, but you can routinely see the guys skating from that distance.

To date, I have never had to either eject a patron, or call security, due to unruly behaviour or noise problems. Could happen, I suppose, but common sense and courtesy have prevailed to date.

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Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 will run its 40th indoor games April 24: Annual event for Thompson’s elementary schoolchildren began in January 1975

Photos courtesy of Jeanette Kimball

Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 and Sir Albert LaFontaine Assembly #1739, composed of fourth degree sir knights from Thompson, Flin Flon and The Pas, will run their 40th indoor games in 41 years – since its debut in 1975 – April 24 for elementary school students in Thompson in the C.A. Nesbitt Arena at the Thompson Regional Community Centre (TRCC).

Hundreds of students will compete with a schedule that begins at 8 a.m. Friday and wraps up with an awards ceremony at 9:45 p.m. Daytime events take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.   Evening events are from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The annual K of C indoor games here incidentally have included two future Olympians. The Westwood Elementary School Vikings, which has been a powerhouse at the indoor track meet in recent years, took the overall title last year on May 9 for the most combined points at the event. The Vikings finished first in five of seven event categories last year to finish with the most points for the 12th consecutive  year, winding up with 259 points, 121 more than the second-place Deerwood Elementary School Dragons, who were runners-up for the fourth consecutive time. The top five teams finished in the same order last year as in 2013, with the Riverside Rams winding up in third place with 130 points overall, the Burntwood Bobcats fourth with 105, and the Juniper Jaguars fifth with 55 points. The only difference last year from 2013 was that La Voie du Nord finished sixth with 11 points and the Wapanohk Wolves were seventh with a total of four points.

The first Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 indoor games was held Jan. 18, 1975 and the cost of the original plywood track was $7,500. The Knights of Columbus had promised to sponsor the indoor event a year earlier. For the inaugral event in 1975, the knights brought in some notable track and field stars to launch it, including 27-year-old Abby Hoffman, the Canadian record holder in the women’s 800-metre event.  Hoffman competed in four Olympic Games for Canada in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976; four Pan American Games and two Commonwealth Games and was Canada’s flag-bearer at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Ann-Marie Davis, the Manitoba record holder for the 800 and 1,500-metre events, and Bruce Pirnie, the 309-pound Canadian shot put champion, who also competed in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games, were also on hand in Thompson on that January day in 1975 for the first such track and field meet in Northern Manitoba sponsored by Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961.

Pirnie, born in Boston, had already won a silver medal in 1973 at the Pacific Conference Games in Toronto and bronze medal the following year at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand and would go on 10 months after his visit to Thompson to his biggest victory, winning a gold medal at the Pan American Games in Mexico City in October 1975. Today, Pirnie, now 72, is the throws coach for the University of Manitoba Bisons.

All told, about 22,100 plywood sheets were used at the Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 indoor games between 1975 and 2009, the last year they were used. More than 15,000 local students have taken part in the annual track meet since 1975. Above and beyond thousands of volunteer hours contributed by local knights, they have spent more than $200,000 in cash on the indoor games over the last 40 years. Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 was chartered with 59 members on May 6, 1967 and reaches its 48th anniversary next month. The Knights of Columbus is a Catholic fraternal benefit organization headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut. Its origins date back to an Oct. 2, 1881 meeting organized by Father Michael J. McGivney, the assistant pastor at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, who founded the order. Today, the Knights of Columbus is the world’s foremost Catholic fraternal benefit society. The order’s founding principles are charity, unity and fraternity. Patriotism is the added later principle that marks fourth degree knights.

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