“I keep telling everybody I’m as old as the cutbanks, was born in Prince George and came home in a canoe,” Shirley Gratton, Prince George pioneer and iconic volunteer, said.
“My kids say I’m not really as old as the cutbanks,” Gratton said after a moment of reflection. “But I might be some day!”
Gratton is launching her memoir called Berries, Baseball and Baskets that she said was six years in the making but her children argue the point and they should know as they’ve admittedly been nagging her for way longer than that to finish it.
Gratton’s official book launch takes place at Books & Co., 1685 Third Avenue, Dec. 3 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
But she will be selling the book at the Festival of Trees, too, which is another Prince George event she helps out with every year.
The book will be at the Seniors Brunch and the Tea at the Festival of Trees on Nov. 30 and will be available in the gift shop as well throughout the event that ends on Dec. 4.
Her writing method was a bit of a hodge podge when it comes to chronological order because she wrote it like she remembered it.
“When you think of one thing that happened then you think of another thing that reminded you of the first thing,” Gratton explained. “I had help putting it all back together.”
There are 22 chapters that include her love of berry picking from when she was a child to this day, her volunteerism with baseball that saw a 35-year-long history for the love of the sport and her work in the Communities in Bloom program for 20 years that saw the Highway 97 Adopt-A-Basket project on the by-pass to help beautify the cityscape and that’s just a few. There’s so many more.
For her volunteering efforts over the last 70+ years, Gratton has received more than 45 awards including the city’s highest honour of the Freedom of the City award in July 2013. Being a city councillor for several terms, Gratton knew the privileges that came with the honour and one piqued her interest. With the award came permission to graze your cow on the lawn of City Hall. A month later there was Shirley in her Western hat with a cow on the City Hall lawn to help promote the PGX, which she volunteered with for decades. She was also a big part of the Prince George Hydro Power Pioneers and the Huble Homestead/Giscome Portage Heritage Society to mention a few more of her volunteer efforts.
So the book covers everything from her early days, her volunteering time, being a city councilor, retirement and her fondest memories of Prince George.
“There’s even about 20 recipes in the book,” Gratton said.
She thinks readers will be most interested in the early days as she talks about how her father came to Prince George by scow because the train only went as far as McBride back in the early 1900s.
“A Baptist minister had convinced my dad that Prince George would be a good place for him to go for his arthritis and to grow fruit trees and the following year it was 40 below and four feet of snow,” Gratton laughed.
“Every family member has something they liked best in the book,” she added as her daughters piped in on the speaker-phone conversation we were having to make other suggestions.
Be sure to look for Shirley Gratton at the Festival of Trees from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 and at Books & Co. during her book launch Dec. 3 form 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
