During McBride’s 2014 Pioneer Days celebration, one of the big antique trucks that was due to be in the parade couldn’t get its engine started. Someone (probably Robert Frear) came up with the idea of having it towed down the Main Street parade route. They put the truck into neutral, and attached it to Robert’s 4-wheel drive wheelchair and Robert towed the truck in the parade. I thought it was just a stunt to make it look like it was being towed, but it was real.
I was saddened yesterday when I heard that Robert had died. He was a remarkable guy with vast amount of knowledge in just about every subject. When I was working for the BC Forest Service, Robert worked in the cubby hole next to mine. He was the head of our districts Scaling (measuring, evaluating, and weighing wood for billing). He was so good at his job that he was moved down to the Ministry of Forest’s Provincial Headquarters in Victoria to work in the Scaling Section there. While there he was even involved in the Canadian/ US Softwood Lumber Negotiations.
Robert had an encyclopedic memory and was always good for an interesting story about things that happened during his life; shady con-artists from the US coming to little isolated McBride with schemes to rip off the local “yahoos” and ending up getting scammed themselves, a local man who spent the night drinking with a friend, deciding at the break of dawn to take his airplane up for a spin, crashing it, and then left unhurt, walking back to town and going to work. Robert was full of such stories.
He was very community minded and spent much of his time collecting the history of our community. He set up a popular McBride history site on Facebook.
McBride has lost valuable asset.
You can view my paintings at: www.davidmarchant.ca
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