An Interpretation

Alex Mair: Edmonton's "Gentle Ben"
by Lawrence Herzog

His was a gentle voice, guided by a good natured spirit and animated by an insightful wit. Alex Mair was a storyteller who so adored Edmonton that he just couldn't help writing and talking about it.

When Alex started to tell a story, people stopped and listened. And it didn't matter how many times you had heard the story, you laughed every time because of the way Alex told it. He had a rare gift of finding the humour in everyday life.

That humour was legendary and so respectful of others that someone once called him "Gentle Ben." He counted the tales of Edmonton characters as his favourites. Like the story of Pete Derbyshire, mechanic for famous pioneer aviator Wilfrid "Wop" May who, by unlikely circumstance, ended up being the first to parachute from Wop's airplane. The way Alex told it, the fellow who was supposed to fly got sick and so Pete was it, leaping his way into the history books.

The Alex Mair story began at Edmonton's old Royal Alexandra Hospital, where he was born October 5th, 1926.The urge to write began in junior high, when he won a five dollar war savings certificate for a composition. He recalled talking over career possibilities with his parents. "So you want to be a writer," his father said. "But what are you going to do for a living?"

Mr. Mair figured his son should be an engineer and Alex apparently thought that was a good idea, too. He graduated from Victoria High and went on to the University of Alberta and attained a degree in Civil Engineering.

Alex spent a number of years trying to make the engineering thing work, but it never really got into his blood. Perhaps it was all those hours in the Edmonton sewers that made him figure there must be a more humourous way to make a living.

So he traded his slide rule for a typewriter - a gradual transition through the 1950s as he began submitting articles to magazines dealing with engineering matters.

In 1958, he began to present items to CBC Radio in Winnipeg and that was the beginning of a love affair with radio that spanned more than 40 years. He joined NAIT in 1967 and organized and helped launch the Radio and Television Arts program.

During the mid-1960s, he began appearing on CBC Radio Edmonton's morning show, offering humourous anecdotes. He was introduced as the "Mair of Edmonton," which Alex liked a great deal.

Even though his second career as a writer and broadcaster was taking off, he still took the occasional engineering job and he was the designer of the St. Paul flying saucer landing pad - the town's 1967 Centennial project. Alex once told me he feared that he would be remembered only for, as he called it, "that damned landing pad."

Alex Mair died suddenly on September 15, 2001 of internal bleeding and organ failure, he was just weeks short of his 75th birthday. In November 2003, the avenue that runs in front of the City of Edmonton Archives was officially named "Alex Mair Way," to honour one of the city's greatest historical storytellers of the last century.