Lowell and Rose Hubbard spent the full decade of the 1970’s
in Kipling and this community was always near and dear to their hearts. Mom’s
family had farmed here in the 1920’s and 30’s so it was a bit of a home coming
for Mom when Dad accepted the position as the Minister of the United Church of
Canada’s Kipling/Windthorst Pastoral Charge in the spring of 1970. Dad, Mom and
the three youngest of their nine children, Gordon, Perry and Shelly moved into
the Manse house in Kipling on a scorching hot July 1st day in 1970.
As
coincidence would have it, when Dad and Mom came to Kipling for the job
interview and the acceptance of the position, the head of the Official Church
Board was D. A. (Alex) Cunningham who happened to live in a big house located
at 617 Main Street
in Kipling. While Dad and D.A. went to the church to meet with the other board
members Mom and Mrs. Cunningham, May, stayed back at the house visiting and May
and D.A. hosted a celebratory supper for Dad and Mom at their residence later
that evening. Debbie and I have lived in that exact house for the past
twenty-one years!
Mom passed on to me the
correspondence letters between Dad and D.A. that led to Dad and Mom’s decision
to accept the Kipling/Windthorst Pastoral Charge offer and I still have Dad’s
copy of the contract that he and the church members signed in the spring of
1970.
Dad
ministered here until the fall of 1980 and during that decade they made many
life-long friends and they continued to visit and stay in touch with the
community until their deaths, Dad on June 21st, 1990 and Mom on June
21st, 2013. Yes, that’s right, the very same day of the year, their
favourite day of the year, by the way…the first day of summer!
Over the
years, after they left Kipling in 1980, returning to Kipling was easy for them
as brother Gordie married a Kipling girl, Val Bousfield, and Gord was Kipling’s
Town Administrator for a number of years in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Our
sister Margo married Kipling boy, Mark Krecsy, and they lived in Kipling for a
number of years of years, too, in the 80’s and 90’s. I married a Windthorst
girl, Debbie Lewis, and we moved back to Kipling in 1985 and have been here
ever since allowing Mom and Dad to keep their ties to the community that they
loved with many, many visits here.
As our
ninety-three-year-old mother’s health began to fail in the late spring of 2013
she called her children to her home in Medicine Hat, where she had been
residing for the previous twenty years, and requested that her children and
their children and their children, some seventy-plus, (and growing yearly), direct
decedents meet annually for a family reunion. We readily obliged and,
appropriately, Kipling was the chosen site for the very first Lowell and Rose
Hubbard Family Reunion, (without Dad or Mom), on August 15th, 16th
and 17th 2014.
So sixty-one members of the family converged
on the Town of Kipling
this past weekend and we had a blast. Many of the people have been here many
times and some hadn’t been here for years so it was really special for them to
see what a great little community we have and how much it has changed and grown
over past forty-four years.
“Family is not an important thing.
It’s everything.”- Michael J. Fox (1961-).
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