What’s in a Name?
The Gazette is looking at the history behind the names of places in St. Albert in light of the city’s move to rename the Grandin neighbourhood. Curious about a place’s name? Send it in to [email protected] so it can be examined in a future story.
Many a curler has shared a laugh and a pint with their friends upstairs in the Friendly Giant Lounge at the St. Albert Curling Club. On many of the walls around them are pictures and plaques bearing the face and name of the lounge’s namesake: Hector “Hec” Gervais, curling legend and namesake of Gervais Road.
Gervais is one of, if not the most, decorated curlers ever to come out of St. Albert. He dominated the sport in Canada from the 1950s to the 1970s, playing at least 250 games a season and filling more than a dozen boxes with trophies from his wins, the Saint John’s Edmonton Report said. He competed in four Briers, winning two, and won the inaugural Scotch Cup world championship in 1961.
One anonymous news reporter in 1957 described Gervais as “Mastodonic,” standing six-foot-three, weighing 268 pounds, and having “the strength of a blacksmith, the strategic attitude of an air force commander and the delicate rock-laying touch of an expert pickpocket.”
Gervais was a very large man with an even bigger personality, said Jackie Rae Greening, a longtime member of the St. Albert Curling Club who often played with and against Gervais.
“He was a fierce, fierce competitor on the ice, but off ice he was a gentle giant.”
Rocks and potatoes
Gervais grew up on his family’s 260-acre farm in St. Albert, which Greening said used to stand between where Canadian Tire and Fire Hall No. 2 are today. He quit school in Grade 8 to take over the farm and grow potatoes. Greening said her father often joked that anyone who wanted fresh potatoes from the Gervais farm had to look for them among all the weeds.
“I don’t know if he was the greatest potato farmer, but he was a hell of a curler and a hell of a character!” Greening said.
Gervais told the Saint John’s Edmonton Report that he first tried curling in 1949, playing on St. Albert’s first curling rink. His career really started taking off in 1955 when he joined a team in Edmonton that played on artificial ice. He shot to international fame in 1961 when he and his team won both the Brier and the world championship.
Curling in those days was a sport of big sweaters, corn brooms, and packed audiences, Greening said. Gervais brought an intense, fiery temper to the game that was rare in the sport and a delight to behold. Off the ice, he was the life of the party, singing along with the piano at the St. Albert Curling Club and making friends everywhere he went.
“It was like he was everybody’s best friend,” Greening said.
Curling Alberta notes Gervais revolutionized curling in the 1960s with his strategy of placing guards in front of the rings and sweeping his other rocks in behind them for protection.
Greening said Gervais also had an incredibly light touch with his throws, and used his knowledge of the ice surface and the skills of the sweepers to glide rocks exactly where they needed to go.
“He really brought strategy into the game.”
Lasting legacy
Gervais and his wife Helen raised five children on their potato farm over the decades, Curling Alberta notes. He also kept curling well into the 1990s, serving as manager of the Avonair Curling Club from 1988 until his sudden death in 1997.
Gervais’s curling escapades earned him a spot in the Canadian Curling Hall of Fame in 1975 and the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame in 1991. The Hec Gervais Academic & Scholarship Foundation established in his name has helped dozens of young curlers find success.
Greening said Gervais’s biggest legacy was the sense of sportsmanship he promoted — the idea that no matter what happened on the ice, everyone would head upstairs to the lounge afterwards to share a laugh and a beer.
“That legacy still lives on at the St. Albert Curling Club,” she said.
