Honouring volunteers

Lord Roberts

Community centre volunteers put in long hours with little recognition, especially those who sit on the board of their local centre — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

That’s the idea behind an initiative to mount a plaque honouring all of Lord Roberts Community Centre’s past-presidents, launched earlier this year by John Graham and Ian Clark.

“The vision is to have a list of all the past presidents, as well as more pictured and information on the history of the club,” Graham said of the project. “You can’t mention every volunteer, but why not some of those who played a big role?”

Both Graham and Clark grew up in the South Osborne neighbourhood of Lord Roberts, and eventually sat on the board of directors — though never as president — of the community centre, which is located at 725 Kylemore Ave.

“It was my second home,” Clark said. “There’s nothing more important than our time, and these guys gave of their time for years. We thought we needed to honour these people.”

Graham and Clark put their heads together and did some digging in local archives, trying to come up with a comprehensive list of those who have led LRCC’s volunteer board of directors since the club was founded nearly 100 years ago, in 1934.

“We thought this is an awesome thing to have,” Blair McEvoy, current club president, said. “You see that at other community clubs, where you can see a timeline history of the club. We’re pretty excited.”

Despite the duo’s best efforts, there are still some gaps in the record, which they are trying to fill in so the club can honour them with a permanent display in the club’s lobby. According to Graham, 62 past-presidents have been identified over the 93 years the club has been running.

“We still have a bit of work to do,” he said.

“We lost a bunch of the history of the club in a fire (1988), so they’re trying to fill in the gaps of what had come before,” McEvoy noted.

They’re hoping members of the public will come forward with information to help complete the project.

Doug Loudon, 92, got involved with Lord Roberts C.C. back in the early 1960s. A railroad worker with CN Rail, he and his family lived across the back lane from the club. Graham and Clark played sports at the community centre with Loudon’s children.

“I’m the oldest living volunteer from that era. All the rest are dead,” Loudon said. “There was a fella, Ted Jones, who was the sports director here. He passed away very young. My boy was playing hockey, and they come over to the house — to get volunteers was very hard — and they asked if I would like to be sports director.

“I said I wouldn’t mind. ‘What does it involve?’ They said, ‘Aw, hell, nothing, hardly anything.’ It was an eight-hour job a day. And I was working nights at the railroad.”

Loudon acted as sports director for seven or eight years before taking on the role of club president, which he held for two terms in the early 1970s.

“We used to have fireworks displays here, in the ’70s,” Loudon said. “We were all amateurs, railroaders. We dug all the tubes into the ground. Half tipped over! Lots of memories.”

“(As a kid) I could look out my window on Berwick (Place), and Mr. Loudon and others were out there late at night, flooding the rink,” Clark said. “Volunteers are the ones who made all this happen and we want to honour them. We didn’t realize until later how fortunate we were.”

Noel Johnson lived across Kylemore Avenue from the club in the early 1980s. Like Loudon, he got involved as a volunteer because his kids were involved in activities at the club. He was president of the board in 1984-85, and still lives in the neighbourhood.

“I think I was first vice-president for a while, then treasurer for a few years, then president, and then past-president,” he said. “During our time is when we decided to extend the club and build it, and then of course we had the fire (in 1988). Then, we had a committee going to design it as it is today. We had an opening in 1990 and after that I don’t really remember much.”

“John and I often joke that the club kept us out of jail,” Clark said. “But it really was a focus of our lives, a second home.”

Anyone with information they wish to contribute to the project can contact LRCC manager Andrew Dalton at manager@lordrobertscc.ca or 204-452-9744.