One day, amidst familial kitchen-table banter, Keith Everitt spots a pheasant on his front lawn.
He points out the bird, hidden among the trees, to his son Clifford, telling him to grab the shotgun from the mudroom.
“So I go get the shotgun and I load it up,” recalls Clifford Everitt. “I’m sneaking across the front lawn and I get close enough. BOOM. Nothing.”
The pheasant doesn’t rustle a feather, so Clifford reloads. But before he even pulls the trigger, he knows.
“I shoot the second shot and nothing happens,” he says. “I turn around and look, they’re all laughing out the front window.”
The pheasant was stuffed. Clifford had fallen for one of his father’s infamous practical jokes.
Surrounded by family, Keith Everitt died peacefully in a Calgary hospital on Aug. 26 at the age of 92.
Born the day after April Fools’ in 1923, to William and Kathleen Everitt, former MLA and Sturgeon County councillor Keith Everitt was blessed with an infallible sense of humour.
Whether debating bills in the Alberta legislature – he once demonstrated the perverse system by which margarine was coloured yellow while defending the interests of his fellow dairy farmers – selling land as one of the county’s top realtors or spending time with his family in his Bon Accord home, no one was safe from his good-natured shenanigans and light-hearted sensibility.
“He always had a joke or two,” said Sturgeon County Coun. Jerry Kaup.
Once Kaup noticed a dent on Everitt’s car. Up by the driver’s window, the damage was too high to be caused by a collision with another vehicle.
“I asked how’d you get a dent up there?”
Wanting to scare off a coyote from his property, Everitt fired off a round from his shotgun. But a prior accident left him without the full use of his right arm. When he placed the butt of the gun against the car for support the recoil caused a dent in the door.
“He says ‘Thelma won’t let me take the shotgun out anymore, because she doesn’t want any more dents in her car,’” said Kaup. “That’s the way Keith was. He was a good sensible person when it came to the logical solutions to stuff, but he always had a light side.”
An able politician and firm believer in democracy, Everitt served his community for nearly three decades.
He first ran for provincial office in 1959, under the Social Credit Party of Alberta banner. Unseating the incumbent Liberal Arthur Soetaert, he represented the constituents of St. Albert for the next 12 years, securing re-election in 1963 and 1967.
Following his time in the provincial legislature, which came to an end in 1971 when Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives swept the Social Credit government out of office, Everitt turned to real estate and was named top salesman for Block Brothers. He was also a respected dairy farmer.
Everitt returned to public life in 1977, serving on the Sturgeon School Division's Board of Trustees until 1986 and as a county councillor from 1980 to 1992.
“He was a very hard worker,” said Clifford. “As a man he was larger than life. He was a big man – over six feet tall – and he had a very outgoing personality. As a father, he led by example; he was honest to the core. It’s one of the things us kids learned watching him: absolute integrity and honesty.”
Everitt was recognized for his engagement, receiving the Energize Recreation Volunteer Recognition Award from the provincial government in 1981.
He retired from the Sturgeon County community services board in 1997.
He is survived by his loving wife of 72 years, Thelma; six children, Barbara, Clifford, Daryl, Judy, Dwayne and Warren; and 67 grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held on Oct. 24 at 1 p.m., at Sturgeon Alliance Church in Gibbons.
