Working hard in the heart of central Alberta

Bill Welikoklad has a long memory of watching the city of Red Deer grow. Born in Czechoslovakia, Bill emigrated to Canada at age 3, landing in Halifax and settling in the Red Deer area, When he was young, Red Deer was a town of about 3,000, a destination for local farmers like Bill and his family to deliver their goods.   

Recalling life in early Red Deer paints a picture of what the town looked like eighty years ago. A time when trains ran through the center of town, wagons filled the streets and farms stretched across the southwest side of the city in what is now Westpark.   

“In about 1945, I remember a trip into town,” Bill shares. “We’d lost one of our horses, but we had a good saddle horse, so we put him on the wagon. He was a very good horse and smooth – rode like a Cadillac when he got in the gallop. Dad had put him on the wagon with the team to go uptown, using just a straight bridle, which was harder to control than a split bit bridle. Well, the horse was gun shy, or I guess you could say train shy. I was coming around where Superstore is now, and the train blew the whistle and we bolted! I was about 10 years old, and that old steel wheeled wagon bounced so hard. I was bawling like a baby. They ran for a mile and a half, down 43rd Street [which is now Cronquist Drive] until 60th Avenue.”  

Aside from that memorable trip, taking goods into town was a regular part of the Welikoklads’ routine. “We had wagons that we rolled in every day to town, to deliver potatoes to the Club Café,” he remembers. “On a cold day, we would put a layer of straw on the bottom of the wagon, load in ten bags of potatoes and take them to the Club Café. My dad was kind of crippled up, so at 9 or 10 years old I’d haul all of these potatoes down to the basement of the restaurant.” The Welikoklads would also deliver wood to Red Deer. By the age of 10, Bill was hauling two loads a day into the city.  

And so it was that from these earliest days, Bill knew hard work. He worked hard on the farm as a boy, and he continued farming as a young man. He went on to work in construction and later in construction supply as the owner and operator of Executive Home Building Centre. When he and Irma married in 1959, Red Deer had changed a lot, but it was still a long way from the city it is today.   

“When we married, we moved onto the farm, into a little house that didn’t have running water,” remembers Irma. “We had cows in the barn that he would milk, and pigs in the yard that he would feed. It was a totally different life than it is now.”   

Irma worked hard on the farm as well, and at raising their children. “We were still in that little house when Kathleen was born, with no running water. When I worked the farm, I packed my baby across the field with all the cows in it, and Joe the bull who hated me.”  

Bill was always a go-getter. “When one thing didn’t work out, I went for the next. For the first ten years we were together, we put our noses to the grindstone. We didn’t do much travelling or anything else, so after those first ten years, we pretty well had it made,” he remembers.   

They built a larger house on the edge of town – one with running water. Life was a bit easier but, Bill notes, one still had to work hard to make a living. In 1966, Bill took on the role of foreman on the city’s newest development: Red Deer College.   

“I was the general foreman on the job, and we had 160 people working there at one time. There were 27 carpenters, and I was in charge of the whole thing. It was a very interesting project,” he remembers. The project was completed in 1967 and, that fall, Red Deer Junior College welcomed students on campus for the first time.   

“Bill always had a soft spot for the College, having been there from the ground up. And it’s so close to our home, we drive by it all the time,” says Irma. “We’re in a position to give, and so we choose to support Red Deer College and now Red Deer Polytechnic.”  

The Welikoklads have supported a number of initiatives at Red Deer Polytechnic, including the downtown campus expansion, where the Welikoklad Event Centre was named in recognition of their gift. In 2009, they established an endowment with their business, Executive Home Building Centre, to support five annual awards for Trades and Business students.  

For Bill, supporting scholarships is a direct way to acknowledge and reward the hard work that students put in, recognizing that not all families are in a position to support students in this way. “Students who are working hard and doing well should be rewarded for it,” he says. “We can afford to do that for our family, but other families can’t.”  

 “We know what that’s like,” adds Irma. “If you’re in a position to give, it’s nice to be able to do that.”   

The Welikoklads’ generosity also contributes to the continued growth of Red Deer and area, a community that they’ve watched expand exponentially over the last eighty years. Their support for our bid to become a degree-granting institution was rooted in their love of the community. They have a strong desire to see bright, ambitious young learners study in Red Deer and, hopefully, remain to raise their families, as three generations of Welikoklads have.