Growing up in Kelvington

1 Growing Up in Kelvington here’s no loafing on the farm, so there’s no loafing in a game.” As a kid, I heard those words from my dad a lot. When you grow up on a family farm like I did, you learn early on T that everyone is expected to pull their weight on the home front. Home for us was a grain and cattle farm that covered about a thousand acres when I was born, although we later expanded it to nine thousand acres. Our farm was in Kelvington, a tiny community of nine hundred people roughly 250 kilometres east of Saska- toon. You can’t get much more small-town or rural than Kelvington, Saskatchewan. We had everything that any small rural town needs: a grain elevator, bank, post office, credit union, department store, hospital, retirement home, town hall, and, like in every small town in Saskatchewan, a Chinese restaurant. The one we had in Kelving- ton was called Ning’s Café. In terms of things to do, the selection 3P_Clark_BleedingBlue_DN.indd 7 8/25/16 3:37 PM 8 WENDEL CLARK was a little more limited. We were big enough to have a motel and a hotel, although the motel was basically just a long strip of property just outside of town. The hotel was in town, and it had the one bar in Kelvington. There was also an auction market, a skating rink, a curling rink, and even a nine-hole golf course. The golf course was easy to find, as it was beside the water tower and the motel. Golf in small-town Saskatchewan was different than what most people are used to. Our course had sand greens—oiled sand, to be exact. So, when you were on the green, you had to make a path in the sand just to putt your ball. I golfed on the course often as a kid, and my grandfather later brought the first golf cart to Kelving- ton. One of the most exciting moments I can remember was when Kelvington hosted the Saskatchewan sand greens golf champion- ship. The tournament was held in different towns each year, and when Kelvington got its turn, believe me, it was a major deal and the whole community came out. That wasn’t all that hard, of course. Because we were such a small town, everyone knew everyone in Kelvington; we all moved in the same circles. We only had one pub- lic school and one high school, so growing up, I knew every kid in the surrounding area. My dad had been born in Kelvington in the middle of the Great Depression, and he spent his early life there. As a young man in the 1950s, he left town to play junior and minor pro hockey. He signed somewhere different every year, from Moose Jaw to Saskatoon to Philadelphia to Charlotte. Eventually, though, he headed back to Kelvington in his early twenties to work on the family farm. It was good timing, since my mom, who was from Springside, Saskatchewan—a town about 150 kilometres away that, if possible, was actually smaller than my hometown—had just moved to Kelvington to teach school. They met soon after Dad moved back, and it wasn’t long before they were married and starting a family. It isn’t very hard to see where I got my work ethic. My parents, each in their own way, were the people most responsible for shaping 3P_Clark_BleedingBlue_DN.indd 8 8/25/16 3:37 PM BLEEDING BLUE 9 me into the man I am today. But while my dad taught me a lot of the skills I would need to get to the NHL, it was my mom who showed me every day how important it is to get along with everyone and anyone around you. Mom made sure we had three square meals a day. I’m talking about a hot breakfast, lunch, and dinner, day in and day out. Steak and potatoes (with plenty of bread and butter) was my favourite meal. Of course, growing up on a cattle farm, I had to like that. But it helped that my mom was also a heck of a cook—I would have eaten anything she put in front of me. I would often look in the fridge and complain that there was nothing to eat. She could look in the fridge, and the next thing you knew, there’d be three different meals sitting on the table. She would be mixing and matching things, and everything would be delicious. She really could cook up a storm. But on a farm, nobody does just one thing. On top of taking care of all of us day to day, my mom was also the one who would run into town for spare parts if something on one of the farm imple- ments broke. That allowed Dad and the hired men to keep working away on one of the many jobs that inevitably needed their attention. There’s no question that the hardest-working person on our farm was my mom. She was the head chef, parts runner, and jane-of-all- trades. We hired men during the seeding and harvest seasons—the busiest periods of the year for us—to get the jobs done in time. One constant was Tim Johnson. He was like family to us growing up. Tim was with us every year, helping out on the farm—he even lived in a little bunkhouse on our property. Tim was only ten years older than me. He had dropped out of school and started working for my dad at sixteen, which made him the cool guy in town because he had some money. As a young kid, I really liked Tim because he fixed all the things that we broke before my dad got home! So, depending on what day of the year it was, my mom was cooking three meals for anywhere from five to fifteen people. And 3P_Clark_BleedingBlue_DN.indd 9 8/25/16 3:37 PM 10 WENDEL CLARK that doesn’t even count the snacks we might be having at nine or ten o’clock in the evening when we had to work all night or the desserts that we got after most meals. You don’t grow up on a farm without having good desserts, and they were my mom’s specialty. The only bad dessert that she made was Christmas pudding; I hate Christmas pudding. Growing up, I did the usual chores that any farm kid would do. On top of our grain farming, we also had a cow and calf operation. We had two hundred cows that we had to tend to every day. As kids, my brothers and I had to stand by the gates of the cow pen at feeding time and make sure none of them got out while my dad used the tractor to bring in bales of hay and feed for them. It would be minus-25 degrees Celsius outside, and we would be standing still, little kids guarding the entryway against the massive animals around us. Come spring, our big job was tree planting. In Saskatchewan, you created your farmyards by planting trees to mark the border. My dad’s philosophy was that by planting fresh trees every year, your yard would always be healthy. So, as the trees that my grandfather had planted fifty years earlier died off, we had to replace them with new saplings to keep the border from thinning out too much. We must have planted thousands of trees on our property over the years. We had two ways of getting the job done. Sometimes we would just dig a big hole and lay the tree in directly by hand. Other times we would put the trees into the ground using a potato planter. I or one of my brothers would sit on the back of the potato planter while the others towed it around with the tractor, and as the planter dug each hole, we’d drop the new tree into it. The days were long, but on a farm, even kids do whatever it takes to get the job done. Harvest time was when things were busiest. On the farm, if it wasn’t raining during the harvest, you would be working from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. for two weeks in a row. The hired men would pray for rain just so they could have a break. The long hours weren’t a choice, though. We had to work quickly to get the crops off the ground, 3P_Clark_BleedingBlue_DN.indd 10 8/25/16 3:37 PM BLEEDING BLUE 11 because we never knew how long our window of good weather would last. So, as long as the weather held, we would stay out in the fields. The only thing that would stop us was the dew. The combine didn’t work well if there was any moisture in the field, so dew on the crops meant the combine wouldn’t thrash well. And even if the dew settled in, it didn’t give us much of a break—we’d just have to work harder and faster once the crops were dry again. At seeding time, the schedule was a little different, but the days were just as long. My dad used to get up at four in the morning and start seeding until the hired men arrived at six. At that point, Dad would go have a nap, and then he’d be right back out there, working alongside the others.

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