Canmore Mines - 30 year Anniversary: Saturday July 11, 2009

Canmore Leader - 8 July, 2009 -

The Miners’ Day parade will run Main Street this
Saturday for its 11th year. Following close on the heels of the Canada Day parade, some might see the parade as a smaller, and so lesser event. It’s not.
“The fact is that it is real,” Jon Bjorgum, one of the five who started the parade, said ...
...When Bjorgum returned to Canmore, as a member of the museum board, he helped to collect a number of the “old-timers, or good-timers” and sat down to do something to celebrate July 13, 1979: the day the mines closed in Canmore.
It was the 20th anniversary of the day that year and the idea was to do something special to recognize the importance to the town of the day when 120 families lost their jobs and the town had to reinvent its future.
Bjorgum advertised his idea of making family names signs in the paper, but only got 15 respsonses. With his sons, Bjorgum made signs for those interested, and on the day of the parade another 25 or so showed up.
“We may have had 40, but the next year it doubled, and then it doubled and I think we’ve had more than 250 family representatives,” he said. “People walk with great pride with their names.”
Although the parade began modestly, and Bjorgum said it is a “smalltown parade,” it has grown from its simple beginning with 110 people (plus representatives from the RCMP and fire department). In its first year, Town councillors came and set up a barbecue for hot dogs in the parking lot behind the library where parade goers could gather. “Now many families have made it their family reunion time,” Bjorgum said. “I’ve been here 35 years or so, but these guys, their families immigrated to Canada and took mining jobs . . . this is what our town is really about, these people who came with the railroad and then as a result came to Canmore Mines.”
Wayne Hubman worked underground for 17 years. He has taken part in every Miners’ Day parade since it started 11 years ago.
“I really think it’s a great honour,” he said. “When Canmore Mines shut down in 1979, I think the population of Canmore was . . . I don’t think it was even 3,000. We’re over 15,000 now on the weekend. Those 12,000 people that moved in, they didn’t even know there was a coal mine here.”
The coal in town could also produce more energy when burned than the coal found elsewhere. While the trains that stretched the country ran on wood even when they crossed the prairie, it would be fair to say that Canmore coal helped the trains get over the Rockies as they pushed west.
“The reason the coal was so good here . . . was because of the pressure of the mountains on top,” Hubman said. Hubman started in the mine when he was 18, packing timber in the mines, but his work in the mine extended well past their closing, Hubman did the underground mine mitigation for Three Sisters when they were putting in the Stewart Creek Golf Course. He was one of about 20 who stayed on a year after the mine was shut down, as a company man, Hubman was given the task of dismantling the mine and ensuring its security.
As much as Canmore is a part of Canada’s railway history, Hubman, or any mining family could be recognized as a part of Canmore’s history. “I was born here, I was born here in 1944, my grandfather got here in 1920, my cousins were born here, my sons are fourth generation,” Hubman said.
Canmore was a stew-pot of the world, Hubman said “Everybody pretty well got along, there were a couple of disagreements now and then, yeah, but that happens everywhere.”
“Life was really, really good here,” Hubman said. “Actually, life is still pretty good here, it’s a little bit busier and noisier, but I still enjoy it here.”
Bjorgum said that 11 years ago some of the initial reaction was that of concern from the community: the parade was too close to the Stampede or too close to the Canada Day parade, they said.
“The sincerity and intensity of people — the pride of people — made it so very clear that it was not too close to the Calgary Stampede it was not too close to Canada Day, because this is something that is entirely local.”
This year’s Miners’ Day parade is July 11 at 12 p.m.