Joanne Birnie

In Memory of Joanne Birnie, by Duane Crandall


In the summer of 1956 my parents and sister and I moved from Alberta to the Invermere area where my folks had a small sawmill business. The local Marshall Wells hardware store was the main supplier of tools and other supplies that were used around a mill. I don’t know why a kid of ten would have known the people who worked in the store but I seemed to. The business was owned by two fellows of my parent’s generation, Charlie Osterloh and Marvin Tunnacliffe. And one of the employees was a nice guy, fairly young, single, a bit quiet but very friendly. His name was Glenn Birnie. 

September came and school started. I didn’t know a soul except the kids from Wilmer, the little berg north of Invermere where we lived. The principal was new to me, but I got to know him. My own classroom teacher was new to me as well, but of course it doesn’t take long to get to know your own teacher. I was in Grade 5 and the building we were in housed only Grade 5 and 6. Grades 1 to 4 were in another, larger building with several classes and teachers. Since Grade Fivers had all their classes in the same room with the same teacher, I didn’t get to know the teachers from the other building. Except one, the Grade 3 teacher. Her name was Miss Bradford. Miss Joanne Bradford.

The schools in those days served hot lunches to the kids for 50 cents. There was a kitchen and a cook in our gym and, of course, there had to be a teacher there to keep all us rug rats in line. We were supposed to stay in the gym while we were eating, but one day I was caught in the hall eating chocolate cake by this very teacher, Miss Bradford. Was I ever in trouble! It involved a brief conversation, a one-way dialogue, and when it was over I knew who was boss, and I knew it wasn’t me!

And I have remembered her ever since. 

When I say I have remembered her, after telling the hallway story above, you could think that I remember her as an old grouch. Not at all. First of all, she wasn’t old, I believe that she was only about twenty-one at the time. I remember her during those years as being full of spunk, full of life and always a challenge in a conversation. She always had something of value to say.
I had a lot more to do with her that year after our cake encounter. As the school year got underway the students were divided up into four groups for intramural sports, games that we played at lunch hour to keep us busy and out of trouble. It was called a ‘house league.’ Each group or ‘house’ was named after wildlife, so there were the Panthers, Wolves, Lions and Gorillas. I was in the Wolf house and Joanne was our sponsor. Our first meeting was in her classroom, the Grade 3 room, and I can remember sitting there thinking how much fun it must be to be in her class. As it turned out I was elected captain of the Wolves and Joanne and I steered our house to a second place finish in a race that was much more important to the kids in that school than the Stanley Cup finals or the World Series.

Our school also had something that most schools didn’t have. We had majorettes. Now I wasn’t one, majorettes were girls. They were girls who twirled batons and marched in perfect symmetry. There were six in the group and they provided a special touch of class as they marched in parades in their matching uniforms and in perfect time.
But those girls didn’t become majorettes in 1956 by watching television. There wasn’t any television in 1956. They didn’t become majorettes by picking up a book in the library. There wasn’t a library either, except for about 200 books in a dusty corner of the school board office.
Those girls became majorettes because somebody organized them and taught them how to twirl their batons and how to march. There would have been practices to organize, uniforms to get made, parents to coordinate for driving, performances to give, all of the things that have to be done to make a kids’ group work. For the majorettes in Invermere in those years, that person was Joanne. 

What is it that makes a person willing to take on roles of leadership and mentoring in a school or community?

I think in Joanne’s case it began with her earliest beginnings. She grew up in Kimberley in the 1940’s and ’50’s, and Kimberley, perhaps especially in those years, was a town that had more community spirit than most. Located next door to Cranbrook, and always kind of in its shadow, Kimberley put itself on the map in many different ways. In Joanne’s infancy, Kimberley’s hockey team, the Kimberley Dynamiters (a men’s team, not to be confused with the Junior ‘B’ team they have now by the same name), won both the Allan Cup in 1936 and a World Championship in 1937. She wouldn’t have been at their games at the time, but their success would have brought a swagger, a confidence to the town that would have lingered for many years. There would have been a ‘we can do anything we want to do’ feeling that many towns don’t have. Kimberley hosted the North American ski jump championships in 1958. It has hosted handicapped ski racing for years, the only place that has that I know of that has. I never heard of accordion championships until I heard of them in Kimberley. In later years it hosted the B.C. Festival of the Arts. And that was the fabric of the community that Joanne Bradford grew up in. Kimberley not only developed community spirit, it exported it in the lives of people who went on to live in other towns and cities and, I believe, developed young people who were willing to contribute in so many different ways, including sponsoring a girls’ group of majorettes. 

As that school year and the next rolled along it became common knowledge that Glenn Birnie and our Miss Bradford had become sweet and before long she was Mrs. Birnie. And that was the beginning of a nearly six-decade adventure with Glenn and her family and the hardware industry.
Glenn and Joanne moved to Golden in 1960 and started Glenn’s Hardware in the eastern half of the building which was, for years, the Moon Cafe, and now houses Higher Ground.
They outgrew that building so they bought property and built the first phase of the store next to today’s Bargain Store and followed that with a new store and building supply and eventually a change in ownership to son and daughter-in-law, Doug and Susan. 

Joanne was a homemaker with a young family during many of those years, with Glenn running the business, but whenever a spouse is in business, both spouses are in business, and I am sure that Joanne was never far from the store. 

So the Birnie family has lost Joanne and they knew her in her greatest roles, that of wife, mother and grandmother. But they will not be the only ones who will miss her and as I think about it, it seems to me that time itself creates a certain kind of bond. I knew Joanne for sixty years. She was a fun person to know, and with her passing some of the light has gone out for all of us who knew her.

The Celebration of Life for Joanne was held on September 2 at 1 pm in the Golden Seniors Centre.