Even more memorable moustaches

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This article was published 30/11/2024 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Karl Friesen’s moustache is an hourlong conversation starter.

“I’ve had it since I was 15,” the retired Bearskin Airlines executive said at a St. James Tim Hortons on Wednesday, with the end of November — and the men’s health campaign, Movember — nearing.

After running a list of Memorable Manitoban Moustaches on Wednesday and soliciting the public for nominations, Friesen’s ‘stache made the case that while Movember is about starting a conversation about mental and men’s health issues, a moustache is often a solid conversation starter, period.

Friesen was en route to Calgary to see about a horse after his 25-year-old former Assiniboia Downs thoroughbred was put down earlier this month.

“Clancy couldn’t eat anymore — bad teeth,” said Friesen, wearing a sea-blue chambray shirt with pearl buttons. Soon, the former pilot flew the Free Press down memory lane.

Friesen was raised poor in Edson, Alta., by a pianist mother and a devout Mennonite preacher and door-to-door salesman father. He became fascinated by transportation during sales road trips with his father, who sold flashlights, kitchen plates and prearranged funerals.

“Right about the time John Kennedy got assassinated, I put a lawnmower engine on a bicycle and rode it downtown. The cops stopped me, asked ‘Where’s your licence?’ and I said, ‘I don’t need a licence. It’s homemade.’ Cop said where’s the brakes? So I just put my feet down. He let me go home.”

At 18, he and his brother Alan, 16, paddled an aluminum canoe from Calgary to Winnipeg, covering 2,000 miles by water. “It took us a month,” says Friesen, who wrote up the trip for the Star Weekly magazine in 1968.

They didn’t paddle back. “We thought we’d have to sit there and wait — no cellphones back then — but 10 minutes after we docked on the Red River, my dad showed up. It wasn’t like we were co-ordinated.”

At 19, Friesen dabbled in stock-car racing and automotive repair. Then, the sky came calling.

“My first four airplane rides, I jumped out with a parachute on my back,” he says. In 1973, he became a pilot for Bearskin, which specialized in northern charter and medical flights.

By 1977, Friesen was a vice-president, and the company began its first scheduled route between Big Trout Lake and Sioux Lookout, where it was based. “We had about 400 people in our heyday,” says Friesen.

In 2010, the company was bought by Exchange Income Corp., for over $32 million, allowing Friesen to retire to a chalet in Sioux Lookout, where he lives with his family and perhaps a new horse in the coming days.

Ask a man about his moustache, and he might just tell you his life’s story.

 

David Keam

Before he dreamed up Best Sleep Centre, David Keam was yet to find his signature look, a buoyant moustache which earned him a leading six votes in the Free Press’s extensive search for Memorable Manitoba Moustaches (MMMs).

“I’ve got a gentleman on the phone and he wants to know when I grew my moustache,” the 62-year-old mattress salesman called out to his wife Thursday morning, pausing to listen. “She says I had it when I met her, 20 years old, but I shaved it off once and she said, ‘Never again.’”

Aside from his “You’ll Find Us” catchphrase, Keam’s moustache is his most identifiable feature. “It’s a bit of a trademark,” he laughs. “My moustache has been a part of me since any of us can remember.”

 

Tom Lindsey

Flin Flon’s longtime MLA has a moustache that means business. Born and raised on a farm in southern Saskatchewan, the New Democrat moved to Flin Flon in the 1970s to work as a labourer at the steel mill. Along the way, Lindsey adopted his bristly horseshoe ‘stache, which earned five nominations as an MMM.

So respectable is Lindsey’s facial hair that it merited mention in the fourth paragraph of the Free Press report of his appointment as the Speaker of the house last November.

“Lindsey and his trademark horseshoe moustache will be escorted to the Speaker’s chair by Premier Wab Kinew and deputy leader of the Opposition Kelvin Goertzen,” reporter Carol Sanders wrote.

 

Brother Jake Edwards

Born on the East Coast, Brother Jake Edwards made his name on Winnipeg airwaves in the late 1970s, behind the morning mic on 97.5 KISS.

According to a 1981 profile in the Free Press, Edwards drove a Corvette and a Kawasaki ZIR motorcycle, playing in a punk band called Brother Jake and Nitro, singing lead on a 1979 track called Disco’s in the Garbage.

With a voice like Howard Stern’s, Edwards appealed to a different audience than CKY’s Don Percy, CJOB’s Red Alix, or CFRW’s Don Reeves as a morning host, Paul Sullivan wrote.

“He plays 40 songs in his four-hour stint, most of it orgiastic electronic screaming rhythmic teenage tribal heavy metal rock and roll,” Sullivan added, noting “a luxurious moustache that takes up half (Edwards’) face.”

“All this and the rock band make Brother Jake the closest thing Winnipeg has to a teen cult figure,” Sullivan surmised.

Edwards’ name was submitted for MMM consideration by several 1980s teens, who probably remembered him from his “Wicked” Park Pontiac commercials.

Edwards left Winnipeg in 1989 to become program director of Toronto’s Q107 before returning to 97.5 CJKR in 1993. During a 17-year stint on Vancouver’s Rock 101, Edwards was named Canadian Radio Personality of the Year in 2001, later working at Vancouver’s TSN 1040. As of March 2024, he is a host on Vista Radio’s 91.7 ICON Radio, broadcast on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com