It was May 1989 when St. Albert residents learned that a tanning salon wasn’t always a tanning salon. Members of the chamber of commerce had an inkling there was something fishy going on at St. Albert Health and Tanning Studio at Mission Ridge Mall when they showed up to welcome the new business to the city and the owner answered the door in a bath towel, saying her clothes were in the wash. When women called to make appointments, they were told there were no spots available but when men called, they could always get in. The RCMP, at the end of a five-month investigation, confirmed what the studio’s neighbours already suspected and charged owner Linda Mari Bawn of Edmonton with keeping a common bawdy house. She was also charged with possession of a narcotic and pleaded not guilty to both charges, with a trial scheduled that September.
The following May saw Deputy Prime Minister Don Mazankowski visit the city at the height of the furore over the new GST, when he spoke at the community hall. Protesters greeted him, carrying signs calling for the tax to be repealed. Mazankowski, in his speech, subsequently referred to the protesters as “nattering nabobs of discontent.” But the real discontent was in a St. Albert courtroom where Robert Rundle principal and former alderman Ronald Throndson pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident in favour of the original charge of refusing a breathalyser test. Given he had a previous impaired driving conviction five years earlier, Throndson’s licence was revoked for two years and he was fined $1,500. “What will teach you a lesson, sir? Do you have to kill someone first?” the judge asked him angrily. Meanwhile, citing “the city’s lack of leadership on the issue,” the St. Albert Environmental Action Group announced it would voluntarily start offering curbside recycling to residents. Only 50 people showed up at the first meeting.
The courtrooms were the centre of attention again in May 1991 when Richard E. Ross from St. Albert — the first person in Canada ever charged with impaired driving while operating an electric wheelchair — appeared to learn the charges were being dropped. Ross had been arrested on St. Albert Trail early one morning after someone complained about his wheelchair weaving across traffic lanes. Instead Ross, who used the wheelchair after suffering a heart attack four years previous, pleaded guilty to being a public nuisance. Judge Norman Mackie was less than impressed that Ross had been charged in the first place. “I know the definition of a motor vehicle in the law. But the law is not an ass.”
One year later, St. Albert was the scene of another national first when it came to persons with disabilities. This time it was Paralympic wheelchair weightlifter Jack McCann, who had tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol at a meet prior to the upcoming 1992 Paralympic Games in Barcelona. McCann successfully appealed his two-year suspension after arguing there were procedural irregularities in the testing of his urine. The ban was immediately lifted. An Edmonton fisherman lifted something pretty heavy too — a 20-pound northern pike from Lacombe Lake. There weren’t supposed to be any pike living there, only 1,500 trout that had been introduced three years earlier. A spokesman for Alberta Fish and Wildlife speculated someone had probably dumped a small pike in the lake years earlier, where it had been left to feast undeterred on the smaller trout. The same spokesperson urged the city to drain the lake to search for other predators. Soon it was another body of water that was getting all the attention. After several years of success, the St. Albert Cosmopolitan Club was forced to cancel its annual Sturgeon River cleanup due to low water levels and unsafe levels of bacteria near the Perron Street Bridge. In years previous, scuba divers had patrolled parts of the river, hauling out shopping carts and other large items.
In May 1993 there was a conspiracy afoot that drew both former mayor Richard Fowler and Ken Allred into a civil trial. The Despins family, which owned three acres of land on Garnett Drive, accused Fowler of helping to approve an environmental restriction on 1.45 acres of the land with the purpose, the Despins alleged, of creating Grandin Pond. The restrictions made the land impossible to develop or sell and the bank eventually foreclosed on the entire property, which the city purchased from a mortgage company in 1987. Fowler and Allred were both called to give testimony in the lawsuit.
May 1995 saw one major change to the St. Albert Gazette itself. Having circulated for decades as a broadsheet-style newspaper, the paper redesigned its Wednesday paper as a tabloid, similar to the Saturday Gazette. The reason was the cost of newsprint, which had greatly soared that year. But the Gazette would not have the last big story of that year — St. Albert resident Michael Anton Michels received a new trial from the Court of Queen’s Bench after he had been originally convicted of nudity in a public place when he was found jogging through Red Willow Park wearing nothing but socks, shoes, sunglasses and a smile. The Queen’s Bench judge ruled the Crown had not sufficiently proven Michel’s nudity had “offended against public decency,” or that he had been complete nude.
Weeks later, police received two separate reports of a naked man running through Red Willow Park, wearing only shoes and socks. Despite a patrol of the area, the RCMP came up empty-handed.
Peter Boer is an editor at the Gazette.
