“My aim is to get this world back on track. I don’t see so well anymore but I still have a vision,” says Ken Wardle.
Of late, Mr. Wardle has great concerns about where the world is heading. He wonders why, even when there has been so much news about carbon dioxide emissions and the problems it can cause, people, including Virdenites, haven’t changed their driving habits.
He has an automobile too, but uses an electric mobility scooter for travels out and about in Virden.
He notes that the rich and powerful are also part of the problem. “Another example would be, Guy La Fleur who used to play for the Montreal Canadiens, he passed away and they had a flypast. Why did they have a flypast? He’s not even alive. And they just had another flypast in Toronto at the CNE.”
Ken Wardle grew up just nine miles west of Virden in a simpler time. Following his high school education in Virden, he moved to Brandon.
At nearby Chater, he built a new home for his parents, his first building project. He was studying electronics at the time. Classes were over at 4 p.m. so later in the day Wardle and a fellow student would don work clothes and head out to the building project. “We started that house in March and we finished it in September.”
Wardle eventually moved west to Alberta, the land of opportunity where the building trade was booming. It was there he learned how to get the most out of employees and employers – through generosity and fair treatment.
He retired to Virden in 2007 where he has lent a helping hand to several Habitat for Humanity build. These brought him great satisfaction - particularly seeing a young woman and her child get into an affordable home of their own and continue as productive members of the community.
He says that since the Covid pandemic, there are more stressors on people, more fear or concern about getting the basic necessities of life and he says the world is unfair. Interpersonal communication has taken a hit in Wardle’s view.
“The epidemic took a lot of that away. They put those glass screens up and you had to wear a mask, so you weren’t communicating. You were, but not like this,” he says referring to our face-to-face interview.
“Build them up and help them on their way – Ken Wardle
“We’re not treating one another right. Just to walk down the street since the epidemic, I might meet 10 people and two or three might even look at me and say hello.”
The war in Ukraine also troubles him and thinking of the loss of life there triggers his own family memories. “There hasn’t been a war that has solved anything. My dad was in the First World War. He was on reconnaissance, picking up people that had already been killed. He never ever mentioned that he fired a pistol himself.
“He was in charge of a platoon… they were pushing the Germans back. This fellow in front of him had a hand grenade hit him in the leg and blew it … and he turned to Dad. (Dad was second in command.) And he said, ‘Here’s all the information you need about where we’re going. Take my watch and my ring and get in touch with my wife, because I know I’m not going to make it.’
“Within seven feet it could have been my dad. So, I had a hard time dealing with this one… Wars don’t solve anything.”
He was no stranger to conflicts, with his work in construction on huge projects and small ones, new builds and renovations. “I was in construction for years and years and I know all sides of this business,” but says that treating people right went a long way to working out difficulties. “Build them up and help them on their way.” That was Wardle’s philosophy as a business owner and as a construction crew foreman.
“I had a Portuguese crew when I was working in Calgary. This was back in the early ‘70s. and we were building the Christian Centre - it was huge, 180 x 60.” Wardle was approached by someone who asked if he could use an extra hand, a man from a communist country.
He was referring to a Cambodian man who had “lost his house, his little car, his store. He came to Canada with his wife, two kids, and $100 and was living with a relative in Canada.”
It turned out the man stood about 6’2” and weighed about 230lbs. Wardle chuckles because the crew was pouring concrete at the time. When he met him, he told the man that he had a job for him.
Wardle was pleased to play a part in helping this family: “Within six months the [Cambodian man] had a car. Within a year and a half, he had a house.”
Tragedy struck Wardle’s own family in Manitoba about the time that he was ready to retire to his home province.
“When I came back here in 2007, I’d lost a son in Minnedosa Lake. He was 43.” It was a sad homecoming, but Manitoba, Virden in particular, was home. It was here that he learned his first lessons and was inspired as a craftsman.
His father, Gordon Eugene, and his granddad Harvey had horses that they showed at the Brandon Winter Fair. “We had 22 that would fit in the barn.” It was a historic, three-story barn.
“My grandfather had built three-story barns in Ontario. When he came to Manitoba, the railroad ended at Brandon. So, there was him and another gentleman and they had two pigs and a cattle beast. In those days there was no road, no fences, so they just started heading west. He homesteaded the farm just about 10 miles southwest of Virden. But it was flat. That didn’t fit with what he wanted.”
He was looking for hilly terrain where a multi-story barn could be built into the hill.
“So he moved about three miles and he homesteaded again, but it was flat.” His grandfather moved again to the homestead where Ken was born, just nine miles from Virden on the north side of Road 257 where there is a steep bank.
In 1913 his grandfather built his Manitoba three-story barn, equipped with chutes to throw the feed down from the loft to the animal stalls below. Although the structure was taken down years later when none of the family continued farming, his grandfather’s barn is included in a book about barns.
As a Virden senior, Wardle has been a faithful blood donor, giving every time the clinic came to Virden, not so easy now since Canadian Blood Services no longer comes to Virden. He’s made 200 donations.
Ken Wardle is happiest when he’s finding ways to help out, such as painting the wooden border on the flower beds to match the trim on Princess Lodge, where he lives. He completed the job this fall.
