It’s been a quiet month in the High Country, our beautiful paradisiacal home just west of Calgary. We are so lucky to live here. About once a week, Della and Al Dickie remind us of that. As a hobby, they drive through the High Country and take hundreds of spectacular pictures. Then they select thirty or forty of the best to put in a slide show along with music to match the pictures. No advertisements, and no appeals for funding. They just love this area and want to preserve its beauty for all time. To see all of Della’s previous slideshows (but without the music), go to mountainphotos.ca and click on “Gallery.” Alternatively, click on “Videos” to see many of those presentations with the music. To be added to their distribution list, send a request to dldickie@persona.ca.
My last column briefly discussed identity theft and how easily we can all fall prey. There was not enough room to mention a free service that determines whether your e-mail address has been compromised. To try out this service, go to haveibeenpwned.com. There, you type in your e-mail address and it will tell you whether that address has been compromised.
On a reflective note, my wife (Else, from Denmark) and I recently celebrated our sixtieth wedding anniversary. When we first met, on Sunday evening, October 4, 1959 in Cambridge, England, she spoke no English, and I spoke no Danish. No problem: we both knew French. She spent most of her youth going to school near Paris, and my B.A. at the University of Buffalo was in French Literature. That was our common language until our marriage in Copenhagen, August 1960.
Fast forward about fifty years to Priddis and the evening of March 16, 2010, when Vera Colville and a few other members of a then-defunct High Country Rural Crime Watch Association, organized a meeting to revive the HCRCWA. They asked persons in attendance to nominate and vote on persons for positions on a new Board of Directors. Tom Laxton became our first president; Suzanne Oel, our vice-president; Sandy Bruce, our membership coordinator; and Joan Paterson, our secretary. Seventy-seven of those in attendance that evening paid $10 per family to join the revived Crime Watch, so our bank balance must have been about $770 on that evening. We still had to account for the signs we distributed to our new members. By the end of the month, our membership had risen to ninety-three, and two more members volunteered to serve the organization wherever needed. One was Donna Hanson, who subsequently became our treasurer, and I was the other, who subsequently became membership coordinator.
With less than a hundred members, life was relatively easy. We emulated the words of Summertime from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess where “the livin’ is easy.” I could take over roughly four jobs: (a) Keep track of the memberships; (b) Answer our telephone; (c) Keep members apprised of criminal activity in our area—news gathered from the RCMP and member reports. One of my first “news” items was from a member who reported an unknown person had twice driven dangerously on the road on which she lived, and she wanted residents to be watchful.
(d) My fourth job was for members who did not have internet access. For them, I recorded and phoned an audible version of each e-mail I had just sent to the other members.
Today, with our membership well over eight hundred families, several persons handle those tasks more efficiently than I could do alone. Elizabeth Davis, our membership coordinator, manages our membership data, now moved from a simple spreadsheet into a database. Dave Schroeder and I alternate writing this column each month for the High Country News. Several members of the board, usually Elizabeth Davis, Suzanne Oel, or Dave Schroeder, regularly send information to our members by e-mail. Dave Schroeder then records audible versions of those messages to phone to members without internet access. Dave also answers our telephone 24/7.
The development of the HCRCWA during past ten years has been exciting to follow, and for the next ten years will probably be just as stimulating. Now, at age eighty-five (and a half), I may not see the end of that development, but I hope I will. My problem is that I do not have the same energy as I had when I was just seventy-five years old. I asked Dave Schroeder whether he would be willing to take over writing this column alone each month, and he accepted the challenge. I am grateful.
So for the last time, I’ll sign off by saying “That’s the news from the High Country where all the women are beautiful, all the men are strong, and each child is a prodigy.”
John Robin (‘J.R.’) Allen
HCRCWA Member-at-large
jrapriddis@gmail.com
