Frank Slide memorial will be a sombre event

By Lethbridge Herald on April 29, 2023.

LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber
LETHBRIDGE HERALD

Today as many readers grab their morning coffee and read the Herald, I was planning to head west to Frank for a memorial ceremony remembering the victims of the Frank Slide on April 29, 1904.

But a battle with health issues this week has changed my mind; I’m still recovering and am concerned about making things worse.

It’s going to be a solemn occasion at the gravesite today and I’m sure at the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre afterwards where there will be speeches and dignitaries as well an opportunity for visitors to learn more about the disaster.

Branches of my mom’s family have lived in the Crowsnest Pass since the early 1900s so the Frank Slide has always been part of my life. I recently found a photograph of my older brother and I posing in front of a wooden sign at the slide dating back to 1963.

As kids we would often hike through the slide when we were staying either at my Hovan great-grandparents miners’ house at what was known as riverbottom or at Harry and Molly Beeber’s in Bellevue next to what was the library and before that a school where as a kid I remember two locals duking it out in a brutal fistfight that left one an absolute mess before an uncle intervened.

I still have fond memories of the smell of coal burning in the stove and the sound of the river rushing past that old riverbottom shack with its steep, narrow creaking stairway to the upper floor and huddling under heavy feather comforters in the cold of night. The outhouse is another matter.

My great uncle and aunt, Elias and Rose Hurtak, lived just off the edge of slide on what I still call the back road to Frank. As I learned Monday from Joey Ambrosi at the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, it’s actually Old Frank Road. Which makes sense.

Molly Beeber would sometimes take us for ice cream and we’d drive in her 1967 Dodge Dart past the gravesite on that road where the memorial service will be held. Hopefully the weather will be less gloomy and foreboding today than the last time I covered an event there many years ago.

The slide is a tragedy that cost the lives of more than 90 people and changed forever the landscape of the Pass after 110 million metric tonnes of rock crashed down from Turtle Mountain.

Turtle Mountain is the dominating physical feature of the Pass and one which I’m not only in awe over but also still leery about. As a kid visiting the Pass and hearing the roaring wind late at night outside whichever house we were staying in I always wondered if the mountain was going to give way again. 

Today would have been a chance to reconnect with my family’s past in the Pass. Before the ceremony begins, I was going to take a walk down Bellevue’s main street,  sit on the big rock above the property where Molly and Harry’s house once stood and reminisce about long-ago times. So many of us played on that rock for years that it seemed part of the yard. In old family photos, it’s always prominent.

I was going to take a photo of the old Royal Bank building to send to cousin Lesley Burrell whose dad Tom Lamont was the manager there for a brief time in the 1960s and I wanted to visit the Bellevue cemetery to say hello to long-departed family members.

It was also my plan to try accessing the old riverbottom place underneath the bridge to Hillcrest where we spent so much time in the 1960s and early ‘70s.

Molly Beeber was a volunteer for years at the interpretive centre and this week I chatted about her with David McIntyre, who along with his wife Monica Field, worked at the centre and knew her. Molly is still close to the centre – somewhere behind it, dad buried her ashes long ago in a spot he didn’t reveal to anyone. But I would have felt her presence if I’d actually gotten there today.

And I’m sure everyone will feel the presence of those who lost their lives in the slide, a tragedy that will never be forgotten and which in a real way reflects the resilience of the residents of the Crowsnest Pass who have endured and lived through so many disasters that have cost the lives of too many people.

The people of the Pass, I salute you.

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