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Round Up Staff
“What I look like and what I feel like are two different things,” said Sundre land magnate and lifetime resident Jack Morgan.
But truly, it would seem Morgan is concealing a fountain of youth somewhere on one of his many properties, because the man in a photo from nearly 50 years ago appears almost identical to the man standing before me now.
His spirit is strong, which would account (at least partially) for the tenacity of his longevity.
Morgan eases his tall frame into a plush blue recliner, and looks at me.
Adjusting to a comfortable seated position in his chair, he plants his socked feet – in brown leather moccasins - firmly on the recently-cleaned carpet.
His sparkling blue eyes catch the light streaming between the blinds of his living room window.
“So what do you want to know?” he asks.
Few would expect the barrage of memories contained inside the head of this kind-faced centenarian, but in his own words:
“You could ask me what I did two days ago, and I couldn't tell you what happened. But ask me about something that happened 50 years ago, and it comes back very vividly.”
He celebrated his one-hundredth birthday this past Friday with a party at the Sundre Hotel and Wranglers Tavern.
Quiet but deliberate determination seems to mark this man, evident in the astounding grasp he has on his own history.
“If you want to know anything about me, you'll have to know something about my family and how we got here,” Morgan's voice crackled over the phone line last Wednesday.
“It's quite a story.”
Morgan's family has a rich history in the Sundre area, a story that begins around 1850.
Morgan's grandfather was from England, and after marrying a girl in the early 1850s, he was recruited to teach school in a British settlement in Ghana.
His grandfather quickly became involved in the cane sugar business, buying himself a sugar plantation, and began raising his family, of which Jack's father, John, was the youngest.
“At the time, cane sugar had been commanding the market at 10 cents,” he explains.
But with the convention of beet sugar, the cane sugar business bottomed out, financially breaking his grandfather.
“My grandfather died on the old plantation in 1892,” said Morgan. “I suppose he must've been in his 50s, I don't know exactly.”
His grandmother then took their two girls back to England, where two of the three boys they had were studying.
John (Jack's father) was at post-secondary in Wales.
“The only one that was on the plantation at the time was Charlie,” said Morgan.
His Uncle Charlie remained behind in Ghana to clean up the plantation after the market fiasco ruined the business.
Charlie then travelled to Southern California to work and live with his aunt and uncle at their lumber mill, but eventually uncle Charlie went back to England.
“In those days, bicycles were the main mode of transportation,” he says, and chuckles.
Around 1898, Charlie heard about the Klondike gold rush, and made arrangements to travel to Canada to land at New West-Minster.
“And at the last moment, my father decides to come with him. They went by ship, and railway across Canada.”
When they arrived, they discovered that the government had put restrictions on those who wanted to take advantage of the gold rush.
“You had to have $1,200 worth of provisions to go to the Klondike, and they didn't have it.”
The Morgan brothers then caught a train to Hope, BC, and walked along the Dewdney Trail (Now Highway 3) until they got to Osoyoos, where they got a job and remained until 1899.
“In the spring of 1899, they heard of a land and homestead available for sale north of Calgary.”
The Morgan brothers decided they would purchase the land, which was in the Harmattan area.
“My Dad homesteaded in the north-west quarter of the section, and Charlie got the south-west quarter.”
Few people can say they've spent 50 years in one locale, but Morgan can say he's done that – twice.
Born in 1911, Morgan spent his entire life in the Sundre area.
His father purchased property in 1903 that is now known as “Red Deer River Ranches,” because he liked to hunt.
But Jack never fancied hunting.
“I didn't like killing animals,” he says.
But he loved farming.
“I was the eldest of the family, so I did a lot of the farming, because my dad was not a farmer, his background was not farming,” he says, smiling.
“In 1932, my mother bought for me a two-ton Ford truck to haul grain in the fall. At that time, I had the option of buying a truck with dual wheels, or a truck with single-wheels.”
Like his grandfather, John Morgan had five children as well, of whom Jack is the oldest.
Morgan pauses, trying to recall the individual years and dates of his siblings' births.
“God, my memory is getting bad,” he says, furrowing his brow.
“You see, that's the problem when you get old.”
Then he proceeds to spout them off.
“Oldest brother, Geoffrey, was born in 1913, then my eldest sister Cybil in 1915, and a second sister, Clarice, in 1917. My youngest brother, David, was born in 1924.”
“I was the eldest, and I'm the only one left,” he says.
Morgan and his wife Winifred raised their four children, Donald, Donna, Joan, and Bill in Sundre, where he built his empire.
Working hard is a virtue not lost on Morgan, as he amazingly retired completely as of six years ago.
“I was 94 years old before I stopped working,” he says.
Morgan is a man who understands the value of friendship and collaboration when it came to his many projects.
“I had partners in much of the things I did.”
“We had this big farm in Saskatchewan that had 5,000 acres of wheat land. I ran that until I was going on 95. Then I had to quit.”
Indeed, Morgan did have many things running.
“I was very involved with a lot of things in Sundre,”
Although he was a part of Sundre's flying club, Morgan he says he's not sure he ever really liked airplanes.
“Airplanes got me from A to B. I had a lot of things running, and I had to get there.”
When he first got an airplane, Morgan says he had a friend named Charlie fly it for him.
“Charlie built his own airplane back in the 1930s,” he says.
“Up until the war came along, all there was in Sundre was two grocery stores, a creamery, a blacksmith shop, a service station, and a Chinese restaurant.”
“Sundre was always a hub because anybody that wanted to get East of Sundre had to go over that bridge,” he says.
“When the war came along, the demand for lumber was tremendous.”
Morgan had friends in construction that he used to haul lumber for.
“As soon as the war came along, these guys got jobs building barracks and hangars and God knows what,” he says.
“They'd phone up to me and ask if I could bring some lumber down. They'd say ‘Never mind the price, just get the lumber. When you come down, we'll make a deal.' So that's what I did.”
When he lived out at Harmattan, Morgan says he would have two or three trucks delivering lumber all over Southern Alberta for various reasons, including the war efforts.
“The only place that I could eat was at the Chinaman's, and he was slowly killing me.”
Being a problem solver, Morgan set himself to getting one of his contractors to build a coffee shop for him across the street from the service station that he owned.
“It's exactly where the coffee shop stands today,” said Morgan.
He then proceeded to rent the coffee shop to a couple he calls ‘Exactly the couple I was looking for,' who ran it for nearly three years.
Eventually the couple decided to build rentable rooms onto the coffee shop, at which point Morgan sold the coffee shop to them for $9,000.
“First thing I bought was the service station, I needed that for my trucks. The second thing I bought was the property across the road from the service station [where he built the coffee shop] for $4,000.”
All that was on the land across the road was a “shell of a building they had tried to put up.”
He was still hauling and selling lumber in conjunction with the war effort, but the lumber was never planed to the same size, he explains.
“They [the people he sold it to] were kicking right mad,” he says.
“I said, ‘we gotta go and buy a big planer and put it down south of Sundre,' we had some property down there,” he interjects. “And plane it to all one size.”
“That's how we began Sundre Lumber Company,” he says. “Which is that large operation down there now, Sundre Forest Products.”
Morgan began to be annoyed with the rocks on the roads in the summertime, so he suggested to his partners that they buy a gravel crusher.
“And that's when I started Sundre Contracting Company,” he says, adding that it is now run by the Harders.
Then he contracted a friend of his to build the first curling rink in Sundre.
“Everybody wanted to have a curling rink.”
He sighs and settles back in his chair.
“Any more questions?”
I have accumulated a small stack of papers at my feet, and I feel we have barely reached the first outlook on the mountain of memories this incredible man contains.
I ask if he has anything else he could possibly add.
“The only reason I think I'm here today is I was interested in people and my surroundings.”
