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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