I visited Canada twice – the first time in 1997 as a competitor in the World Police and Fire Service Games, held in Calgary, when I represented the Great Britain team as a bone fide member of the Prison Service 10-pin bowling team returning home with a bronze medal, which would impact my life later. It was the trip of a lifetime.
We stayed on for the Calgary Stampede and visited the nearby Rocky Mountains and a ride in the Powder Mountain ski lift which is not for the faint hearted!
Movie star Jack Palance – best remembered for his many Western films – was the stampede parade marshal in 1997. As a tribute to our hosts, the entire Great Britain team wore white cowboy hats at the opening ceremony parade in the McMahon Stadium, before a crowd of over 58,000. As the Great Britain team came into the stadium, the crowd began to sing “swing low sweet chariot” and, when we passed the Canadian hosts, we doffed our hats in tribute.
Calgary entrepreneur Bill Herron saw the black silk cowboy outfits his wife Marjorie Herron was making for the couple and their two sons and thought white cowboy hats would be just the thing for the family to wear in the 1947 Calgary Stampede Parade. Unable to find anyone to make them in the U.S. Bill turned to Calgary hat-maker Morris Schumiatcher, whose company, Smithbilt, made working cowboy hats. Schumiatcher agreed to order enough white felt to make 144 hats if Bill guaranteed the sale of all the hats. He agreed, but a guarantee wasn’t necessary. The white hats were a hit and, in 1948, Morris made and sold 2,000 hats.
According to the Calgary Herald, in March 1997, Schumiatcher was approached by the stampede board in 1946 about ways to encourage Calgarians to wear cowboy hats during the stampede. The trend was for pastel hats but Schumiatcher decided to take the trend to its limit by making all the hats sparkling white. The Herrons bought four of the 18 hats made for the 1947 Stampede parade and the rest sold out in an afternoon.
While the two accounts differ in details, there’s little doubt that the Herron family’s choice of hats in that parade helped launch a Calgary fashion trend that persists today – if somewhat seasonally!
When Don Mackay became Mayor in 1949, he entrenched the hat as a Calgary symbol by offering the hat to visiting celebrities. The Smithbilts have been presented to such notables as Mikhail Gorbachev, Wayne Gretzky, Dalai Lama, Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr, as well to Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, and members of the British Royal family.
My second visit to Canada was in approx 2005. This time to Vancouver where I had hoped to interview an artist trained at the Hartlepool College of Art but it never transpired. I had to be satisfied with walking across the Lions Gate Bridge, playing a form of pitch and put in Stanley Park, when a racoon pinched my ball and ran off, and the highlight participation in the Vancouver to Whistler All British Car Rally, when sporting a Hartlepool United scarf and later in an England shirt.
The bronze medal brought me back to the UK from my island in the sun when I made another mistake as “another door opened” and I trustingly bowled in to manage the 10-pin bowling alley in Brenda Road.
Author: John
Author of Around The World In 80 Years