Ralphine Locke straddled a remarkable line throughout her life.
On one side of the line were her deep roots in Alberta’s history. On the other side was her vision that the celebration of our history provided a road map for the future. In the middle of that lay an unabiding love of place and people.
Ralphine, one of Banff’s favourite daughters, died peacefully Friday (March 7) at her home in Banff. She was born in a log cabin on the edge of Lake Louise on Aug. 10, 1925, possibly making her the first child to be born there, but certainly the first person of European descent.
Her father, Ralph Harvey, was superintendent of Brewster Transport of Lake Louise and her mother, Bessie Brewster, was a nurse, whose mother was sister to Elizabeth McDougall (Boyd), the first white woman to live in southern Alberta at one of the province’s first settlements, Morleyville, founded by Elizabeth’s husband, John Chantler McDougall in 1873.
Ralphine also knew Tom Wilson, the first person of European descent to see Lake Louise, a man she referred to as Uncle Tom.
Her grandfather, meanwhile, was James Irvine Brewster, the first Brewster to arrive in the Rockies in 1881. He later settled near Bowden, Alta., but his brother John established a dairy in Banff in 1886. John’s sons, Bill and Jim, would found Brewster Transport.
Ralphine’s cousin – also her grade school teacher – was none other than Eleanor Luxton, whose father Norman founded the Banff Crag & Canyon and the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum.
These are the people who built Banff and southern Alberta, for that matter, and their stories were an integral part of Ralphine’s memories and her connection to this place.
“(James Brewster) was on the Great Plains when there were still buffalo herds and the woman he married, whose name was Boyd, came up the Missouri in a river boat and had to stop for a buffalo herd before they could get off at Fort Benton,” said Ralphine’s son, Harvey.
“So for my mom, the stories of the West when it was still wild, and not just on the plains, were very vivid, orally transmitted memories of her family and she knew the people who had those experiences. For people to be able to meet someone who knew these characters of the Bow Valley we know about through history was really interesting for people,” he said, adding his mother was also on the first commercial ski trip to Sunshine with her uncle, Jim Brewster.
“Her mother road a horse in the very first (Calgary) Stampede parade in 1912 and my mother was the oldest pioneer lady in the Stampede centennial parade. That stuff mattered a lot to my mother and it was very real to her. It wasn’t something she learned from books, although she was an avid reader; she knew the people.”
Ralphine lived at Lake Louise in the summers and Banff in the winters. She left Banff during the Second World War, serving as an air traffic controller in North Bay, Ont. She moved to Montreal after the war, working in the payroll department at the Canadian Pacific Railway while her husband Gerald Locke attended McGill University.
They moved to Calgary after Gerald graduated. While in Calgary, Ralphine worked for the Glenbow Museum as its development director.
She finally returned home to Banff in 2003, where she quickly proved herself as a committed member of the community, serving as a volunteer with the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, the Banff Heritage Corp. and the Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation, among others. Ralphine was also a driving force behind the ELHF initiative to bring bison back to the Rockies.
Reading from a statement on behalf of the Banff Heritage Corp., Banff mayor Karen Sorensen said during the Monday (March 10) council meeting, “Ralphine has been one of our most important connections to the early days of Banff and was forever happy to share her stories and knowledge. An admirable figure in our town, Ralphine will forever be remembered for her deep love for our community, it’s wonderful heritage and her profound desire and commitments to see it preserved, protected, and celebrated.”
But according to her daughter, Chris, that was only one of Ralphine’s many sides.
“She really cared about history. She wanted history to be remembered and the importance of it and what it signified, the human condition, the human connection and what it meant,” said Chris, adding her mother had a remarkable ability to accept people and a belief that everyone mattered.
“She was a good listener,” she said, “and she was genuinely interested in what you had to say. She wanted to remember you and form a relationship with everybody she met. She always would seek out the person who was alone and talk to them. That was part of her strategy to make everybody feel good. She really tried to, and this is a facet of her religious upbringing; try to love the person.
“She took that upon herself to make it her life’s work to help people. To make them feel better. That was important to her.”
Ralphine was also a life-long learner with a passion for books, writing and anything new.
“The interesting thing about her,” Chris said, “is she grew as a person all the time. She never got to a point of this is who I am like it or lump it. She never did that. She was always growing. Always trying to be a better person. Always trying to do something new. Growing as a person was huge for her. She embraced using a computer in her 70s and was good at it.
“This idea, keep learning and keep growing, that was a big thing for her. She liked new things. She liked to embrace new ideas and talents. She was never afraid to take something on.”
Her passion for history, her sense of compassion, love and acceptance of people and willingness to learn and grow, all of it combined to make her one of Banff’s most-memorable and popular residents.
And, as a result, an easy and obvious choice as one of the recipients of the Banff Community Foundation’s in the inaugural SHINE awards (Share. Help. Inspire. Nurture. Enrich) in 2012.
Lorraine Widmer-Carson, executive director of the Banff Community Foundation, said Ralphine would regularly call her up and say, ‘I think it is time to go for coffee.’
“There was never an agenda, she was simply so curious to stay up to date with what was going on in the community and she deeply valued the work on the community foundation,” said Widmer-Carson.
“She was a huge moral compass for Banff. She was a bellwether for is this right or wrong, is this possible or impossible? She was a tremendous, loving, giving, kind, caring, smart, witty, with-it, committed to community person. Committed to her family, committed to her faith. She was a moral compass for us. She was a gauge for us,” said Widmer-Carson.
“She was a force. She was huge. A little pebble with big ripples.”
A memorial service will be held at the Whyte Museum on March 29 at 4 p.m.
“It’s not just our family’s loss, but it seems to be the community’s loss as well and we’ve been overwhelmed by how much expression of that that we have had,” said Harvey. “She was such a small person. She didn’t have a big personality, but a big presence.”
