It was 50 years ago, and Canada was celebrating its Centennial Year. A young ambitious Drumheller Scout leader wanted to kick it off with some flare.
inSide Drumheller caught up with former Drumheller resident Brian Dropko. In 1967, he was about 18-years-old, the year that Canada was caught up in the year-long celebration to mark 100 years since confederation.
“It was Canada’s 100th birthday so we wanted to do something special,” he recounted. “So we thought, ‘let’s have one great big fire overlooking Drumheller up on the hill’ .”
A simple idea, after all, Scouts are known to be outdoorsy, so a bonfire fits into their wheelhouse well.”
He began to look for support, and he did receive it. The railway company in Drumheller was able to part with a collection of old railway ties.
“They donated, I don’t know how many railroad ties, so I started to stack them criss-cross to make a cabin type fire,” he explains.
To add fuel to fire, he then went around after Christmas gathering up people’s discarded Christmas trees and added them to the burn. Sparky’s garage, which was on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 2nd Street (PetroCanada Park) let him take a stack of used tires to add to the burn. He then went to see Jack Klein at Columbia Cleaners.
“They discarded the old cleaning fluid,” he said. “They gave us a whole bunch of five-gallon pails of it so we could douse the fire to get it going.”
They were also able to secure a quantity of road flares from the railway. “With these, we made the centennial symbol in the snow, it was sort of like a maple leaf shape,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve, the Scouts invited long time Mayor Eneas Toshach, who served from 1958-62 and 1965-71, to get it all started.
“I asked him to light my torch, and then I would light all my Scouts’ torches and we would parade across the bridge and up the hill towards the fire,” said Dropko.
The fire was on the hill on the north bank of the Red Deer River across from the old hospital.
After the fire, they continued to ring in the new year. “We marched down to the Scout Hall, - most of us lived there,” he laughs. “We stayed there overnight and had a party with pop and chips, in those days pizza wasn’t even around.”
That was just the kick off to the Centennial year for the active Scout Leader. He worked with Mayor Toshach to start possibly one of the first dinosaur footprint programs.
“I made a stencil about the size of the back of a pick-up truck out of metal. It was the footprint of a dinosaur. I said ‘you supply me with about 20 gallons of paint, I have an idea’, and he said okay.”
“When everyone was sleeping on a hot summer night, my brother and I started up where Highway 9 comes in from Calgary,” he recalls.
They laid down the stencil, swept the road and painted the first track. They went forward 20 paces and did the next, and continued.
“We went all the way on Railway Avenue, past the post office and the Whitehouse, across to the base of the hill heading out to Edmonton. It looked like a dinosaur walked through Drumheller.”
The Chamber of Commerce picked up the idea and kept it going for a few years.
The Scouts also marked the end of the centennial year. “We climbed up the hill again but this time not to light a fire, but at the sight of the fire, we dug a hole and buried the Canada Centennial flag, and we all signed it, like a time capsule and it is to be unearthed in 100 years. So there are another 50 years left until it will be unearthed if it’s ever found.”
