Kenneth Alfred Barnes

Kenneth Alfred Barnes died at age 89 on Jan. 27 in Sundre, Alta., after a long illness.

That’s the short story, but Ken wasn’t much for short stories. He liked long gab sessions with the coffee crew at Granny’s and A&W, long visits around a campfire, long trips behind the wheel of a truck, long turns in a game of dominos, and long looks at the acreage in Sundre where he and wife Annie retired.

Ken lived a long, full life. His family and friends knew him as Kenny, hon, dad, the old fella, gramps, grampy, pappio and Stovepipe, which was his C.B. handle back in the day. He was proud of the moniker, enough to have it emblazoned on the front of the rickety old Ford F150 that he drove until it ran out of miles and he went looking for another bargain basement buggy to buy.

That was his Scottish ancestry showing its Tartan. He looked at that rusty old truck, and several other vehicles before and after it, as a bought-and-paid-for means of getting from A to B. His thriftiness also made him a garage sale junkie. The man could scarcely summon the will to drive past one, because who doesn’t need a half dozen sheets of styrofoam, a pull-along wooden duck toy and another wiener stick?

Over the years, he filled a garage or three with discount hand tools, nuts and bolts, knick-knacks, toys and building materials. It gave him joy to walk away from a G sale with a little something in his hands and a lot left in his jeans. And it may have been a perfectly reasonable response to a fairly spartan upbringing.

Ken was born on May 12, 1935 in South Burnaby, B.C., the fifth of six Barnes boys; a rag-tag bunch forever getting into mischief and learning all they could at the Neville Street school of hard knocks.

Ken survived rheumatic fever as a youngster and that might have helped turn him into a feisty fellow; constantly picking fights that his older brothers would inevitably have to finish.

By the time he was a teenager, education was no longer top of mind. Ken finished grade eight before making a decision that would define the rest of his life; he got a job. And then another. And another.

He started as a whistle punk in a logging camp on Vancouver Island; no place for the faint of heart. But he survived. In the West Kootenay region of B.C. he worked on a crew running power lines over the mountains. Again, not easy labour, but he got it done.

Eventually he became a trucker, and the longer the workday, the better he liked it. He drove in Vancouver for Inter-City Cartage; in Castlegar, B.C. for Public Freightways, McGauley Ready-Mix, Skyway Distributors and Kalesnikoff Brothers; in Calgary for Bogardus Wilson, the City of Calgary, Al Harms Trucking and Burnco; in Edmonton for Martin Brower, and finally in Sundre for Doug Ross.

Ken worked long days over five decades, but when folks needed a hand, he was their first call, because they knew he’d be there. Helping out was his love language. He arrived in a battered pickup to help his kids move house and home several times. He moved cousin Judy from Vancouver to Lunenberg, N.S., a cross-Canada trip that combined his skill as a long-haul trucker and a willingness to go the extra mile. He fixed furnaces and built fences, repaired lawn mowers and chainsaws.

And when he took a break, he liked few moments better than those spent with a beer or coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Coffee kept his motor running. He quaffed the first cup of the day before the rest of the household stirred. And if he was midway through the second and there still weren’t any signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the house, the cowboy boots that completed his every day ensemble would make just a little more noise than usual on the kitchen floor.

He was eventually forced to stop smoking, as the abdominal aortic aneurysm he survived in December 2017 heralded some serious lifestyle changes. He had already made it through two hip surgeries and the removal of a gall bladder, and dealt with diabetes late in life as well.

Through it all, he kept on truckin’ with the help of Annie, his partner, care-giver and conscience. They met in Vancouver, raised a family in Castlegar and Calgary, and celebrated their 60th anniversary in October 2023 by renewing their wedding vows.

Annie wore a dress, Ken wore his dress plaid. And if a man can be defined by a single article of clothing, Ken was Canadian tuxedo. The outfit usually included jeans anchored by suspenders, and almost always was topped by a trucker’s hat — the dirtier the better.

It was long rumoured that Ken’s legs never actually felt the rays of the sun. He did visit Hawaii, Mexico and Arizona, once each, and that was that. He found comfort on the B.C. coast, in Castlegar, in Calgary and mostly in Sundre, where he and Annie basked in the peace and quiet, hosting family gatherings and getting to know the deer, moose and ducks that crossed their property.

Ken was an animal lover, a voracious reader, a picture puzzle and word search fanatic, and a history buff, his interest focused mostly on the towns and villages, saw mills and mines of B.C. Back in the 1960s and 70s, many a weekend was spent combing dump sites in ghost towns like Sandon for old bottles and cans that inevitably wound up lining the shelves of his garage, filled with the nuts, bolts, and what-nots he was going to need one day. Many of them are still there, having survived moves from Castlegar to Calgary and then Sundre.

One day soon, when the family decides to hold a garage sale, it will be loaded with the kind of stuff he could not resist, all of it in his favourite price range.

Ken is lovingly remembered by wife, Annie; son, Dan (Therese); and daughters, Carol and Pauline (Dan); grandchildren, Hannah, Sam, Jake, Erin, Zach, Jarrett, Alex and Mike; and great-grandchildren, Jack, Halle, Adelynn and Amelia. He was predeceased by his parents, Thomas and Ruth; son, Ken; brothers, Allen, Ian, Glen, Dick and Verne; half-sister, Jean and half-brother, Lloyd.

A celebration of Ken’s life will be held in Sundre in the spring, when the roads are better.