Above: Attendees view one of the cars in the Morinville Legion Branch No. 176’s Second Annual Memorial Car Show and Shine on Saturday, July 22. – Stephen Dafoe Photo
by Stephen Dafoe
The Morinville Legion Branch No. 176 held its Second Annual Memorial Car Show and Shine on Saturday, July 22. Approximately 20 vehicles were displayed in front of the Legion on 101 Street for car and truck enthusiasts.
Organizer and Morinville Legion Branch No. 176 member Mike Adams said that each year, the Legion chooses a fallen soldier.
“Last year, we chose [Corporal] Nick Bulger, who died in Afghanistan in 2009,” Adams explained. “This year, we chose [Corporal] Ainsworth Dyer, who died in a friendly-fire incident in 2002. It is to memorialize the veteran and who they were to us and their community.”
One of the vehicles on display at the Memorial Car Show was a Bentley, driven up for the event from Mexico by Dyer’s best friend, Jason Campbell.
Campbell said he met first met Dyer in Wainright.
“We went out that night and had some beers. It was either we were going to scrap it out or be best buddies. Thankfully we were best buddies because we would have wrecked the bar,” Campbell said. “He was a big dude and a strong man. Probably one of the strongest guys I was ever in a gym with.”
Although Campbell said he doesn’t need an excuse to drive his 2008 Bentley, which he bought last year in Toronto with 50,000 kilometres, the real reason for the journey up from Mexico was to honour his friend’s memory.
“Hopefully, he’d do the same for me, which I’m sure he would have,” Campbell said.
Of the roughly 20 cars out in the summer sun as part of the memorial car show was a local vehicle that originally travelled from a far distance.
Marlon Rakowski brought his Treasure Seeker, a 2002 Nissan Atlas fire truck, to the show.
Rakowski said he bought the decommissioned Japanese fire truck about six months ago.
“They took all the stuff off and sent it on down here,” Rakowski said. “I came across a guy who bought it and couldn’t keep it because he was getting into a mortgage.”
The July 22 car show was Rakowski’s second with the fire truck. He took the bright red vehicle to the NAPA Show and Shine during Morinville Festival Days in June.
But the Atlas is not just for sitting on the side of the road on display. Rakowski, who is active in the treasure-hunting community with his daughter Aurora, uses the truck to load all of their gear in it on their adventures seeking treasure.
“I was looking at one of the small white ones, and when this came across that we could haul the whole family in here and make noise with it, and it had room for our stuff. We can go metal detecting, magnet-fishing, rip around. We even just drive around and clean up the town – trash, bottles. You got to do your part. If you are going to take treasure out of the ground, you might as well take trash. Leave it nicer than you found it.”
Rakowski’s fire truck took third place in the truck category at the show.
Another bright vehicle at the Memorial Show and Shine was Gerald Whitter’s 1971 GMS Sierra 1500, which came from Western GM in a bright pink colour.
Whitter is the original owner, having bought the half-tonne on June 8, 1971. “I just liked the colour,” Whitter said, noting that he recently redid the truck in that original colour.
The unusual hue was a custom colour in that model year, only available to Canadian dealers. The inside of Whitter’s truck indicates it was supposed to have been blue. Some descriptions of the rarely-coloured truck indicate the GM colour was called Coral Ice.
Gallery of some of the cars at the show.
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