Wood reflects on more than a century in Taber

Times Photo by Trevor Busch. HONOURED: Local centenarian, WWII veteran and 2025 Citizen of the Year Burns Wood makes a speech during the Taber and District Chamber of Commerce Dinner and Awards Night at STAR on 54th on Jan. 23. For a story on the awards.

By Trevor Busch
Taber Times
editor@tabertimes.com

Centenarian and local WWII veteran Burns Wood was honoured as the Taber and District Chamber of Commerce 2025 Citizen of the Year during a banquet at STAR on 54th on Jan. 23.

Wood alternated between talking about the history of the community and the many changes he has witnessed in his long and fruitful life, and a series of humourous anecdotes. Before long he had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand.

“The young man who came to help me fill my car said, ‘Do you know you’ve got an electric cord hanging out of the front of your car? I said, ‘Yeah, that’s to keep my motor warm in the cold weather,” said Burns.

“And he said, ‘Well, I see you’re from Alberta. Is that a state?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s sort of a state.’ He says, ‘Well, where is it?’ I said, ’It’s somewhere south of Alabama’.”

Wood said people need to look beyond the geographical cliches and realize just what Taber has to offer. “And another time I was in the LA Airport sitting there, and a man sat down beside me and said, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘Canada.’ ‘What part of Canada? Alberta? What part of Alberta?’ I said, ‘Taber, Alberta.’ He says, ‘Oh, I know, Taber corn.’ But there’s more to Taber than a cob of corn or a frozen field. When I was young, Taber was a coal mining town. The coal mining stopped. Then we went into natural gas. But at the same time as the coal miners were out of jobs, water from irrigation came into Taber.”

Coal mining made the early community relatively cosmopolitan, said Burns. “When it was a coal mining town, there were a lot of coal miners from different parts of the world. There was coal miners from North England and Ireland, Scotland and Wales.” Brotherly hijinks at the local beer parlour were frowned upon by Wood’s father.

“My older brother was a really good athlete, Gordon, and the Scotch team recruited him to play for them. He said there was only one responsibility: You had to come to an hour practice before each game. So that went on for a month or two, until dad found out that the one hour practice before the game was held in the Royal beer parlour, and that was the end of Gordon’s career in football.” There isn’t many people alive today who could talk about a grandfather who served in the Royal Navy during the Crimean War (1853-56) almost 175 years ago.

“My grandfather left England in 1850s – he’d been in the royal Royal Navy for about six straight years, and he was in the Navy where they had the Crimean War and also the Chinese wars, the Opium Wars. He migrated to the United States with a young wife, and after she had 12 children, she died at 42 so he decided to come to Canada because he said he wanted to live under ‘British justice’. And he built that idea into our family, and we’ve had this great love for this country ever since Grandfather Wood came to get ‘British justice’.”

The community’s ethnic character has seen many changes over the years. “Taber has changed,” said Wood. “Of course, we’ve seen changes in the population. We had the Taber Beet Growers and growing sugar beets was completely manual, so there’s a lot of manual labour, and most of that was the old miners, many of them from Central Europe.

During the war, the Canadian government decided that the Japanese people who lived on the coast should be relocated into central Canada, and many Japanese came here, and I’m especially grateful for that, because now I have great grandchildren with the name of Takahashi. And the Japanese really brought the potatoes culture to this district.”

Wood joked that his award was illegitimate as he isn’t officially a town citizen.

“My memory isn’t as good as it used to be 30 years ago or even last week, but nevertheless, we’ve had mixtures of people come, and we’re grateful for the Japanese and the Dutch people that have come, and we’ve all got along together, and most of us lived in the municipality. And I might add that you made one mistake today: I don’t live in town. How can I be a citizen if I don’t live in your town? I bought a farm in the bend area a few years ago, and a nicer group of neighbours I’ve never had.”

Taber has been a great community that has prospered over the years, said Wood. “It’s a pleasure to live in a community where the work we could depend on, the schools and the churches and the hospital. And even though many of us lived in the municipality around Taber, we always said we’re from Taber, so we should be thankful of our blessings that we’ve enjoyed the last 104 years.”

“The house that I was born in is still standing in the northeast part of town. I don’t know how many layers of stucco there have been in 100 years, but it’s still a little modest house.”

Wood finished up as he started, with a touch of the tongue-and-cheek. “I’m grateful to belong, to be a citizen of this town and a booster of everything that’s good. My son said to me, ‘Dad, be careful you don’t drop into one of your funeral sermons.’ But anyway, God bless you and thank you.”

Other honourees for the evening included Pinnacle Landscaping, Tree Care and Sod (Business of the Year), Taber Special Needs Society (Spirit of Taber), Taivin Supply Inc. (Customer Service Excellence) and Marten DeVlieger (Honorary Citizen of the Year).