Lest We Forget: Remembrance Day in Lethbridge County

By Stan Ashbee
Sunny South News

Remembrance Day ceremonies will be held throughout Canada and in many communities in southern Alberta and within Lethbridge County including Barons, Nobleford, Coalhurst, Picture Butte and Coaldale.
Colin Risk is the treasurer of the Barons Legion Branch 160.
“Every year we have a guest speaker. This year, we’ve got four cadets coming from RCACC in Fort Macleod and they’re going to give us a slideshow. They did a visit to the cemeteries over in Normandy in France,” he noted.
Doors are open at 10:30 a.m. this Friday at the Barons Legion. The service begins at 11 a.m.
“What we do is, we have a guest speaker after all the wreath laying and all the rest of it,” he said, adding there’s a lunch afterwards.
Risk said the Legion’s motto is, “Lest We Forget.” — “We can’t forget the people that sacrificed everything, so we can carry on with our lives in a normal fashion. I think everybody has to remember that. Remembrance is everything,” he said.
Risk added the Barons Legion also takes part in the annual poster contest at Nobleford Central School.
“Nobleford used to have their own Legion but they don’t anymore. We’ve kind of taken that over a little bit and do those things for them,” he said.
The Village of Nobleford’s Remembrance Day ceremony will be held at 10:30 a.m. at the Legion Cenotaph in Centennial Park. Coffee at 9:45 a.m. at the Nobleford Seniors’ Centre on King Street.
Picture Butte High School (PBHS), along with Dorothy Dalgliesh School and Huntsville School from Iron Springs, will be holding a Remembrance Day service Thursday in the PBHS gym at 11 a.m. and will conclude at the Cenotaph.
Picture Butte’s Remembrance Day Service will be held Friday at the Elks Hall at 10 a.m. with a Cenotaph service at 11 a.m. Fellowship to follow and refreshments.
Gerda Grisnich sits on the Picture Butte Remembrance Day Committee. She said the ceremony will be exactly like it always has been in the past.
“We follow the Legion protocol. We don’t have a Legion here in Picture Butte anymore but we do want to follow that protocol,” she said. The ceremony will include an address, which is always by a clergy from town and special music from a group of gentlemen from the area who sing old war songs.
“It’s very simple but it’s always very well-attended and we appreciate all the people that do make time to come,” she noted, adding her dad was also in the war. “He was a young boy in Holland during WWII and they suffered the hardships.”
Henry Heinen, she said, is a committee member and is instrumental in the Remembrance Day ceremonies.
“He’s always the MC. He’s been to Holland numerous times with the veterans.”
In Coalhurst, a ceremony will be held at the Community Centre at 10:30 a.m. Following the ceremony, guests will go outside to the Cenotaph.
The event is supported by the Lethbridge Fire Pipe Band.

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