Happy 108th Birthday to Esmond Allcock of Kerrobert, Saskatchewan
He Facetimes with his son from his iPad every morning, carefully tracks the weather stations on TV, and subscribes to monthly editions of the Reader’s Digest. Esmond Allcock is 108 years old and the oldest man in Canada.
January 26th marked Allcock’s 108th birthday, and his home community of Kerrobert, SK, celebrated with cake and his favorite meal of steak, carrots, and fruit. Wayne Mock, the town’s Mayor, also attended the celebration and proclaimed January 26 as “Esmond Allcock Day.”
“So many people have asked me how I managed to live so long,” Allcock remarked in a recent interview. “And I’d have to say I really don’t know, except that I got a second chance at life.” Allcock was referring to his meeting and eventual marriage to his late wife, Helen, who he described as the “most wonderful person I ever knew.”
Allcock clearly recalled the first moment he met her. “I was at a dance, and I was standing on the one side of the room, and I looked up to see this sweet, very pretty girl dancing and laughing at the other side. I couldn’t stop looking at her. I finally said to the fellow beside me, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’ and I hadn’t even met her yet!”
Allcock was 29 at the time and had seen quite a bit of North America during the hard years of the Great Depression. Helen was 21, and a farm girl from the Luseland area. Despite the eight years difference in their ages, the courtship blossomed into a long and happy marriage of 72 years. “I never stopped loving her, and our love never waned,” Allcock said with a far-away look in his eyes. “I don’t think we even quarreled, if we did, it didn’t affect us much. I always felt like the lucky one.”
With over a century of memories, Allcock has vivid recollections of some of the most trying times Canada faced. “I was four years old when WWI broke out and Canada joined the war. My mother was in the kitchen and I was playing nearby when the door opened and my uncle came in wearing a uniform. Mother was obviously upset, and I remember him holding my mother’s arms and saying ‘oh Essie, you worry too much, I’ll be back in less than a month,’ — that’s when we all thought it would all blow over you see. My uncle did come back, but it was over 5 and ½ years later. He was a stretcher-bearer, he was never wounded, but he went through a lot.”
Esmond was 19 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and was in his early 20s when western Canada felt the shivers of drought. “Those were some hard times I’ll tell you. Sometimes I found a job, sometimes I didn’t, and when I did have a job, it didn’t pay much, once job I had was for 47¢ a day. On that job I did so well I got a raise to 87¢ a day.” Allcock moved where work could be found, sometimes it was in B.C., in sawmills, sometimes it was in the East, selling washing machines, or along the Minnesota border, as a horse wrangler.
“Delivering the washing machines, and then fixing them when they broke down was a good job — paid well. Then I was sent to repossess a machine, cuz the lady wasn’t making payments; well I got to the house and found that she was making her living with the machine. Well, there was no way I was takin’ that away from her, so I just drove back to the depot and quit right there.”
Too young to fight in WWI, Allcock then described himself as “too old” to fight in WWII when it broke out in 1940. “I hit the reserves, a sort of local militia, and I was in the cavalry division, not sure why as we didn’t use horses much in that war at all.”
Allcock went on to farm and raise a family of six children. Allcock now enjoys watching every Blue Jays game and keeping up with all the current events. His life advice can be neatly summed up by the words he said to one of his sons, “Always keep your word, and if you don’t think you can keep it, then don’t you be giving it.”
Feature Image Source: Submitted by Jaime Frydenlund
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