Skip to main content
facts & arguments

Shirley G. Wilson.

Mother. Businesswoman. Community activist. Piano player. Born March 27,1923 in Medicine Hat, Alta.; died Feb. 19, 2017, in Lethbridge, Alta., of a stroke at age 93.

Shirley Wilson was always Shirl the Pearl to us: A fitting nickname for a wise, generous and wonderful person. Her broad smile was always a prelude to a cheery, "Hel-lo!"

From the day she married her high-school sweetheart, Donald, to the moment of her death, Shirley dedicated her life to helping others. She firmly believed that getting involved was the measure of a caring, responsible citizen. In a letter to the editor published in The Lethbridge Herald, a friend wrote: "Shirley does not fit any stereotypes. She is so frank, original and full of energy, she makes an effective representative for all women."

Shirley grew up in Lethbridge, Alta. She attended Lethbridge Collegiate Institute and, at age 22, joined the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service, also called the Wrens after the similar British service, as a paymaster.

Shirley wed Donald in 1946 and became a housewife, then a mother of four boys and a girl: Robert, Alan, John, James and Kathy.

During the 1950s and '60s she kept house, did the accounts for Donald's clothing store for children, learned French from an exchange student she sponsored from Haiti and performed with the local Lethbridge Playgoers, an amateur theatre group. Her finest role was playing Miss Gooch in the musical, Mame. Her line, "I LIVED," brought down the house every night.

Once her children grew, Shirley, a keen tennis player, lobbed her interests into community service. She was a founding member of the YWCA, Lethbridge chapter. In 1971, she helped launch a civic recycling program – one of the first of its kind in southern Alberta. Impressed, the editor of The Lethbridge Herald asked her to write a weekly column.

Always unassuming, her occasional column was titled "Hoomie?" and pictured a woman in curlers asking, "Who Me?" It became a voice for Shirley's thoughts on pollution, the importance of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and other city issues as she urged her readers to be socially active.

In 1975, Shirley ran as the provincial Liberal candidate for Lethbridge East. In her campaign she encouraged voters to speak up and speak out, her warning slogan: "Silence gives assent."

In that race, she tasted defeat but not despair.

As part of her politics, Shirley opened a thrift store for women of fixed incomes and she volunteered in reading programs. Shirley was also an accomplished piano player, working with seniors' choirs and a junior women's choir, which won first prize in the Eisteddfod International Choir Festival in Wales in 1972.

When her husband retired, Shirley chose to keep working at his two stores. She did the books at his children's store and became the buyer-manager of his upscale ladies' wear shop, often modelling the merchandise, and continuing the success of each.

Suffering marked her life as did success: Shirley lost her daughter of 10 to spine cancer, and 40 years later, she mourned her youngest son, drowned at age 50 in a whitewater accident. But she worked through her grief, and once said: "I believe in the living."

She kept making jam from her prolific raspberry patch; and in her huge backyard hosted book launches, reunions and wedding receptions. For 50 years, Shirley would give a party on Christmas Eve for up to 100 guests; we'd sing carols with her at her grand piano, and you always heard the ring of her spectacular laugh over the crowd.

Gladys Redfern and her son Jon are lifelong friends of Shirley.

To submit a Lives Lived: lives@globeandmail.com

Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, visit tgam.ca/livesguide.

Interact with The Globe