Former city councillor and longtime community supporter Anne Martin is being remembered as a true pillar of the community who will be hard if not impossible to replace.
"As my wife said this morning, it's hard to think of Prince George without her," said former University of Northern British Columbia president Charles Jago on Monday.
Martin, who died Saturday at the age of 80, played significant roles in a long list of community causes - the Child Development Centre, the David Douglas Botanical Garden, the the Two Rivers Art Gallery, the University of Northern British Columbia, Communities in Bloom, Winterlights and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra among them.
She was also a city council member for nine years.
Of them all, helping to launch the Child Development Centre was the biggest of Martin's many contributions in the opinion of longtime friend Valerie Giles.
Martin was the CDC's executive director from 1967, when it was known as the Prince George Cerebral Palsy Association and was located in a portable classroom at the corner of Winnipeg Street and Ninth Avenue.
By the time Martin retired from the job 20 years later, it was housed in a much larger building on Strathcona Avenue, covering 11,000 square feet when a new wing was added in 1984.
It has since grown to 17,000 square feet and now serves more than 1,000 children per year.
"It has made such an impact not just on this city but on this region because there were no services to help children," Giles said. "Most of them were children who suffered from cerebral palsy but it has now expanded so much since then and it includes all developmental delay problems, whether they were emotional or physical or cognitive. And they not only help this city but they go to the outlying areas of this region."
Horst Sander, who was the CDC's second president described her as persistent.
"Anne had one skill - she could put the arm on almost anybody who came into town," said Sander, who also sat with her on the UNBC board of governors.
By 1990, Martin had retired from the CDC but remained as busy as ever and was elected to city council for the first of three terms. John Backhouse, who was mayor from 1986 to 1996, called working with Martin a "wonderful experience."
"She had an incredible capacity for work and also impeccable integrity," Backhouse said. "She had the community at heart in everything she did and so, as a member of council and one of my colleagues, it was very easy to work with her.
"I've said it to a number of people - every time I asked her as one of the councillors, I knew once she said yes, it was literally the job would be done," Backhouse said.
Colin Kinsley, who was also first elected to city council in 1990 and went on to be mayor for 12 years after Backhouse, said Martin was articulate, always did her homework and was very caring about the community.
"I'm always economic development and sell, sell, sell but we have to have a complete and whole community and that's the kind of contribution she made," Kinsley said.
While on council, Martin also became one of the first members of the UNBC board of governors where she was the vice chair for four years. Jago remembers Martin for her sense of humour.
"She was one of the board members who was on a strategic planning committee in my early years at UNBC and when we went to present the final plan to the senate and the board, she set part of it to music, and she sang it at board and I sang it at senate," Jago said.
"Even with really important and serious things, she had a way of making light and having fun and just a wonderful, playful spirit."
A shift to the right in voters' mood meant Martin lost her place on council in 1999 but she remained involved in the community and would continue to be seen making presentations to city council on various causes and issues.
An avid gardener, Martin became heavily involved in city beautification through such initiatives as Communities in Bloom, Winterlights and the David Douglas Botanical Gardens as well as council's Winter City committee.
"For some people their career in public life ends when the public position ends," remarked Martin's eldest son, Peter. "And for mom, I think she was honoured to have the positions that she had but they were only a means to an end, they weren't an end for themselves."
Martin (nee Graham) was born in January 1932 in London, England to a ship's captain and a piano teacher and grew up in the Cornwall area to the south. She was deeply inspired by one of the few women who sat in the British parliament at the time and was of a social class that saw her participate in debutantes' balls in her late teens.
She wanted to become a physician but after some setbacks settled for being a physiotherapist and, in the late 1950s, moved to Canada where she had intended to work with a friend in Calgary. However, by the time she arrived, her friend had got married and was moving back to England.
Martin worked in Montreal and then North Bay, Ontario before deciding to set out for the west coast where, with the help of her mother and her old lab partner's mother, she got a job at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria.
It was also through those connections that she met Bob Martin, the man who would soon be her husband.
"Dad picked her up to take her out to the family farm in Sooke and it was within about three weeks that they decided to get married," said Peter who added it was the type of marriage that would have been unheard of in England.
"My mom is the daughter of a ship's captain and my father at the time was a welder in the shipyards," Peter said. "And in England at that particular time there is no way that those two people from different backgrounds would have got married, not at all, but they did in Canada."
In 1965, with their two young sons Peter and John in tow, they moved to Prince George where Bob had got a job as a welding instructor at the Prince George Vocational School, now College of New Caledonia.
His father had long volunteered with the John Howard Society and by the late 1960s, early 1970s, his parents became involved in the New Democratic Party and Bob would eventually be elected to city council.
"[My mother] became a citizen of Canada in 1976 so she could vote for my father," Peter said. "She was a landed immigrant up to that point and she thought it was rather silly that she could do everything to try to get dad onto city council but she couldn't actually vote for him."
In recent years, the Martins were perhaps best known for hosting plenty of social engagements on their property on PG Pulp Mill Road overlooking the Nechako River. Anne's flair for gardening was in evidence.
"She really enjoyed herself in her gardening, I think that was the happiest place she could actually be," Peter said.
Less known was her devotion to St. Michael's Anglican Church where she was instrumental in a fundraising drive to buy a new organ and wrote a history of the Anglican Church in the Central Interior.
"She was not a public person in the sense of needing to be in the limelight but she was a person who nonetheless cast a very long shadow," Reverend Peter Zimmer said.
Martin's contributions did not go unacknowledged. In 2003, she was named the Prince George Community Foundations Citizen of the Year and in 2010, she was named a Freeman of the City of Prince George, the highest honour the city can bestow on a citizen. A Queen's Diamond Jubilee medal, the Caring Canadian Award and a B.C. Community Achievement Award are also among the awards she's received.
A celebration of her life willl take place at St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church on Saturday, Nov. 17 at 3 p.m. In lieu of flowers, those who wish may make donations to the Prince George Community Foundation in her name.
