Descendants of Charles Woolverton

Roy Wilkins Woolverton and Ellen Frances Hilliard

Husband Roy Wilkins Woolverton [4]
           Born: 2 May 1933 - Winnipeg, Division No. 11, Manitoba, Canada
     Christened: 
           Died: 27 May 2012 - Vancouver, Greater Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
 Cause of Death: Cancer
         Buried: 
         Father: John Wilkins Woolverton [5] (1912-1990) ¹
         Mother: Allison Hattie Willett [6] (1907-      )
       Marriage: 11 Oct 1957 - Burnaby, Greater Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, Canada^[MRIN:2]
Wife Ellen Frances Hilliard [3]
           Born: 4 Dec 1935 - Vancouver, Greater Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
     Christened: 
           Died: 17 Nov 2011 - Prince George, Fraser-Fort George Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
         Buried: 
Children
1 M Stewart Lorne Woolverton [1]
            AKA: Stew Woolverton
           Born: 13 Apr 1962 - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
     Christened: 
           Died: 
         Buried: 
         Spouse: Kathryn Ann Nichols [2] (1962-      )
           Marr: 4 Jul 1987 - Rosedale, Fraser Valley Regional District, British Columbia, Canada^[MRIN:1]
2 M Christopher Edwin Woolverton [30]
            AKA: Chris Woolverton
           Born: 12 Dec 1963 - Vancouver, Greater Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
     Christened: 
           Died: 
         Buried: 
         Spouse: Roslyn Goldstein [32] (1959-      )
           Marr: ^[MRIN:12]
3 M Alan Roy Woolverton [31]
            AKA: Lopez Woolverton
           Born: 24 Nov 1969 - Burnaby, Greater Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
     Christened: 
           Died: 
         Buried: 
         Spouse: Dina Marie MacDougall [35] (1966-      )
           Marr: ^[MRIN:13]
General Notes: Husband - Roy Wilkins Woolverton

FTM BIRT: RIN MH:IF6
DEAT: RIN MH:IF2478

Thank you for joining us to share memories of my father Roy's life. We'd like to see all of you more frequently; given the circumstances, this is not quite the way we'd intended. On behalf of my brothers, Chris and Al, our wives, Kathy, Roz and Dina, and our children, Andy, Naomi, Austin, Jesse and Rose, welcome.
Roy Wilkins Woolverton was born May 2, 1933; the older son of John Wilkins Woolverton and Allison Hattie Willet in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His brother John followed a year later. Dad spoke of life on his grandparent's farm near Treherne, although I would say he was definitely not a farm boy. They lived in various locations in southern Manitoba, including Winnipeg, Treherne, and Monominto.
My grandfather Jack was an Air Force carpenter, so the family moved from base to base as demands warranted. This meant stints in Rivers, Manitoba, Calgary, and finally Sea Island in Richmond. Dad signed up for ROTP, entered UBC in first year sciences heading for an Engineering degree, and joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. The best-laid plans…
Dad transferred after his first year into Geology. Through the Young People's Union of the United Church, he met a vivacious blonde girl named Ellen Hilliard, and they became an item. They got married in 1957, and after Dad graduated from UBC with a BSc in Geology in 1960, he worked for Noranda Exploration in Tofino on Vancouver Island, and in the Eastern Townships in Quebec. In 1961 Noranda moved him to Smithers, and that's when he began his long-term love of northern BC.
My brother Chris and I were born in Vancouver, but our family lived in Smithers until 1967, when we moved to greater Vancouver so the two of us could attend school. Dad had progressed up the food chain at Noranda as far as he was comfortable, and so he set out in a new direction and created his own company: Evergreen Explorations. This still meant that he was out working in the field, as he loved to do, but home was a stable location in the new house that he and Mom had bought in Burnaby. It also meant that we went back to the Smithers area every summer with him when field season started. In 1969, two years after they bought the house, my brother Al was born, and my father got his PEng.
Life with my Dad was a bit different for us than for most of our peers. Work for an exploration geologist consisted of Field Season and Office Season, which for small boys meant that Dad “disappeared” for 4-6 months and then came back and went to the office for the rest of the year. It also meant that as a small business owner, that there weren't many days that were taken off, so while your friends were going to Hawaii, California or Mexico for vacations, you were off to Babine Lake for two months of bugs, rain, more bugs, moose, still more bugs, deer, even more bugs, and a bit of fishing. Just doesn't sound quite as glamorous as Disneyland, Waikiki Beach or Acapulco, does it?
Dad ran Evergreen first out of an office on Broadway, and then out of our basement for several years after we had all grown up and moved out, so there was always some pretty unusual stuff in the house, by the standards of the day. Lots of samples from the places he'd been to, geophysical equipment, core boxes, enough camping gear for the 8th Army, office equipment (hey, who else had an IBM Selectric and a Xerox machine in their basement?), a huge wall map of BC, and all kinds of weird and unusual things.
When my parents moved out of their house on Halifax Street, the basement office went with them, first to their house on Parkcrest Drive, and then to Port Clements when they moved to Graham Island in the Queen Charlottes (or Haida Gwaii, if you will).
As he moved into his 60's Dad wasn't working so much; after Mom got cancer, he did occasional consulting work, but it was more of a thing to be talked about than done. When they moved permanently to Port Clements, he became officially retired, despite the occasional protestation to the contrary. In Port, Dad ran for village council once (unfortunately, without success), and served on both the Emergency Committee, and the Economic Development Committee.
Retirement for Dad was more a gradual transition from part-time puttering to full-time. He was a Life Member of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia (AMEBC), and he looked forward to the big Cordilleran Round-up (and the accompanying free old-timers lunch) every year. He discovered that he could trade stocks (one of his hobbies) online, so he became interested enough in computers to do that. Of course, this also meant more frequent phone calls for us, starting with Mom saying “hi, your Dad has a computer question for you,” and normally ending about 20 minutes after the issue was fixed and the state of the world economy was decried. Again.
As a cancer outpatient, Mom was afforded semi-annual trips to Vancouver for checkups. This meant that our kids got to spend time with Grandma and Grandpa; something that was a bit of a challenge with the cost and logistics of getting to and from their place otherwise.
When Mom got sick again, and she was airlifted to Prince George, Dad went with her, rarely leaving her bedside. After she passed in November, he went home, and we got a lot more phone calls than we'd received previously. Dad talked about what he planned to do, and what his goals for the future were; one of which was to be able to see his oldest grandchild (Andy) graduate from high school.
Unfortunately, he didn't get to do that. On May 18th we got a call that Dad had been found on the floor in his trailer by one of his friends who had gone to check up on him. He was taken to the hospital in Masset, and then airlifted to St. Paul's in Vancouver with seizures. CAT scans showed that he had 3 inoperable tumours in his head. Staff there moved him to Palliative care, and he passed away on May 27th.
Dad was a complicated guy. It's not possible to describe him or his personality in a short answer. As a younger man, he was extremely serious; as an older man, he smiled much more readily, especially if his grandchildren or daughters-in-law were around. He was not a very outgoing person, and tended to avoid large gatherings, but was extremely loyal to the friends he made. He could be very generous, and quite cynical at the same time. Some things that help illustrate this complexity:
Dad never let a lack of experience or knowledge get in the way of his do-it-yourself outlook. As a result, my brothers and I spent a lot of extra-curricular hours learning that frequently, mortar was the strongest part of old cinder blocks, that even with lots of rebar, frequent tamping and leveling, and a surveyor's eye, it was still possible to make a crooked concrete retaining wall, and to make it take nearly as long to build as a much larger version that runs across part of northern China. But I digress…
There are a number of occasions where you just don't argue with a man with a university education and an engineer's stamp, and heaven help you if you suggest a more efficient way to accomplish whatever project was underway at the time. Unless of course, you are blonde and your name is Kathy. Because there were no girls in our family, Dad had a real soft spot for our girlfriends and eventual spouses. So much so, that we found that if we wanted to convince him of something that he didn't want to do, we'd put Kathy up to sweet-talking him into whatever it was, frequently with successful results. I think this helped her later on with her own contract negotiations…
Dad had very strongly-held views, which most of you got to hear about at one point or another. This led to a number of very interesting discussions about politics, religion, economics, career choices, media, science, and the human condition in both historical and current contexts around our dinner table. Some of these views softened over time and with exposure to folks with different backgrounds, but others were still guaranteed to get you a loud reaction, occasionally accompanied by what our Mom referred to as purple air. Purple air was where you learned all those words that you're not supposed to know in Elementary School, aren't supposed to use when you're in High School, and definitely aren't supposed to use anywhere near mothers, grandparents, or the general vicinity of religious institutions. It also frequently accompanied occasions when stuff just wasn't quite working and needed a bit of verbal encouragement.
When we were quite younger, and our Mom was pregnant with my youngest brother Al, our family went on a rare Sunday drive to Alta Lake, and stopped by Fitzsimmons Creek for a picnic lunch. Keep in mind that this was before there was such a thing as Whistler, and that will give you an idea of how long ago this actually was. Mom wasn't feeling too well, and Grandpa Jack, being the tease that he was, had splashed her a couple of times with nice, cold glacier water from the creek. After a couple of protestations, and some more pushing the envelope with more splashes, Dad had had enough, and Grandpa was picked up and unceremoniously dropped into the creek, wounding his dignity and soaking his tobacco…
In 1973, as per usual, we joined Dad for the summer, spending two months camping in one form or another a substantial distance from any other inhabited location. In this case, it was beside a small lake about 120 km from the nearest wide spot in the road. Camp wasn't bad, despite every bug in Northern BC trying to bite pieces out of you, and a seemingly endless supply of dirty dishes for Chris and I to wash. We had access to the lake, a canoe, fishing rods, and a large white malamute who didn't want to stay white - what else could a couple of kids ask for? One night we heard some noise where noise wasn't supposed to be, and a look outside confirmed that there was a a black bear helping himself to the contents of our kitchen tent. As folks who do a lot of camping know, this is not exactly a good situation, so Dad decided that the bear would have to go. Being a man of action, he stopped long enough to put his boots on, and trudged off into the night to face our largest land predator armed with a .303 rifle, a muddy malamute, and wearing only his hiking boots and a very cheesy pair of boxer shorts. The net result was some more crashing and banging, a lot of barking, some more purple air and finally, a couple of shots, as the bear didn't want to leave. Ugly Boxer Shorts 1, Bear 0.
Business ventures (motel, plane) - feeling that the mining industry wasn't quite as stable a source of income as it could have been, Dad decided with a couple of partners to buy up their old stomping grounds in Smithers, the Lakeside Motel. It seemed like a good idea at the time - lakefront property, with a spectacular view of Hudson Bay Mtn. and its glacier, and as close to the airport as you could be…unfortunately, too good to be true, as bringing the establishment up to code at the time would have cost as much as the property had. A couple years later, the partners said to heck with it, and sold it for residential lots. Shortly after this venture, Dad acted on his longtime desire to finish off his pilot's license, and purchased (again with partners) CF-PGS, a Cessna 180 with floats, which Mom immediately christened “Please Go Slowly.” Because Dad's eyesight wasn't quite up to standards for a commercial pilot, Nechako Airways had to be piloted by another partner. There were issues with landing rights and with getting a charter license, and once again, another “seemed like a good idea at the time” went down the drain. Dad was not a very formal person, so a number of his business dealing s were done with handshakes. Not all were successful.
Procrastination - Dad was a true visionary. At least in the sense that there were frequently big plans about what was going to be done with the house/yard/business… There was also a constant subtext about his experience in the mining industry, which normally consisted of an exasperated “one of these days I'm going to write a book about this industry.” Unfortunately, we've yet to uncover a manuscript, so everybody's safe. For now…
Most of you know were familiar with my Dad and his chair. It was kind of like Archie Bunker's chair, in that it sat in a prominent location in the living room of our house, and it was always Dad's chair. It had to be extremely comfortable, because he could frequently be found asleep in it, especially behind a newspaper. The Sun worked better than other papers, because as a broadsheet, if you opened it up you could really hide well behind it. As Dad was not a quiet sleeper, it was pretty easy to tell when he started snoring - it frequently sounded like somebody starting up a chainsaw. As kids, we liked living on the edge a bit, so one of the things we did was to wait until Dad fell asleep in his chair behind his newspaper, and sneak up to him and hit the fold of the paper hard enough to make a loud noise and wake him up. Usually if you timed it right, you could be halfway down either the hallway or the stairs before the purple air started, and he wouldn't be able to identify which one of us was the culprit. Actually, Dad could fall asleep just about anywhere, and as our kids will attest to, did so frequently on our couches. He would sit down and watch the news and fall asleep, and then wake up as soon as the kids tried to change the channel on the TV. We still don't know how he did this…
In a time frame where the expression doesn't seem to mean a lot any more, Dad was a fairly well-read guy. He would subscribe to the Sun and then to the Province, but he also got the Financial Post, the Northern Miner, and a number of other industry periodicals. Recreational reading included Scientific American and the Economist, and he enjoyed being informed about what was happening in the world. He didn't learn how to use a computer until after he had retired, but was able to suss out most of what he needed to know to keep himself connected to the internet. He didn't do much reading for fun; he just wasn't that kind of guy. He enjoyed watching the news to keep informed; despite the efforts of the rest of us, he wasn't that interested in sports, although he would tolerate a game if any of us were watching, and occasionally if we were playing. It was more about the company than the game.
Despite the gruff exterior he liked to portray, Mom always claimed that Dad was a real softie under the surface. You could tell this if you asked him about his grandkids; you could tell that he really loved all of them, and his face would light up when he talked to them on the phone, or heard about their accomplishments, or even if any of them just gave him a hug or a kiss. There are never too many of those moments. One of the biggest thrills he got that was a birthday party that Chris planned for Austin; there was normal birthday stuff, and then a trip off to hunt for agates and fossils. Grandpa was definitely in his element for this, and he enjoyed the trip immensely.
Dad shared his birthday with my sister-in-law, Roz, and the Hudson's Bay Company. The latter fact we never failed to remind him of by comparing his age to the company's. “Just you wait” he'd say…
Dad and I didn't always get along very well. It actually took us several years after I moved out to reconcile our very strong differences, and I'm not sure we were actually comfortable in each other's company until after my own kids were born. When Mom passed away, he sent me a note that essentially read: “I know I'm not very good at showing my feelings or expressing gratitude to people, but I just wanted to say thanks. Love, Dad.” That note expressed a lot about him and his feelings. We all love and miss you, Dad.

General Notes: Wife - Ellen Frances Hilliard

FTM BIRT: RIN MH:IF4
DEAT: RIN MH:IF5

Notes: Marriage

FTM
MARR: RIN MH:FF2

Sources

1 Deaths (1872-1991) Index. Reg. Number:
1990-09-009386

Microfilm #:
B17144 (GSU # 1709292). BC Archives,