BCYCNA member Edgar Dunning honoured in legislature last week

The sharp-minded Edgar still has a his quick wit and life-long love of music.

Edgar Dunning was named a Hal Rogers Fellow by Kin Canada Saturday. Dunning was honoured by the Kinsmen Club of Ladner-Tsawwassen with An Evening with Edgar. Dunning helped found the local club back in 1935.

Also, this grand old gent, who becomes a centenarian on Jan. 7, 2010, continues to pound out a weekly newspaper column for the Delta Optimist. He’s been writing it for 58 years.

Oh, not to mention that Edgar replaced his typewriter 10 years ago with a desktop computer for writing and filing the column, that he’s a long-time former owner and publisher of the Optimist, which his father founded in 1922, and that he still drives his own car?

More to the point, his many years of extracurricular community service have earned him the right to be called “Mr. Delta” — and that’s why there was a special dinner for him held on September 12.

Aptly titled “An Evening With Edgar,” it was organized by the Kinsmen Club of Ladner and Tsawwassen. In fact, a great deal of what Dunning has done for Delta over these many years was accomplished through the Kinsmen. Heck, he helped found its local chapter in 1936 and, as Kinsmen Club secretary Stuart Holmes says, “as far as we know Edgar is the only living founder of Kinsmen clubs in Canada.”

And that’s why representatives of the Kinsmen’s national and regional executives joined a wide cross-section of other Delta community groups last night.

This honour followed a special recognition of Edgar in the B.C. legislature last week by Delta South MLA Vicki Huntington.

“Most towns have archives for their historical record,” Huntington said. “In Delta, we have Edgar Dunning.”

Of course much of what Edgar has seen has been through his eyes as a community newspaper reporter and publisher.

Born in Elbow, Sask., he arrived in Ladner as a 12-year-old, where his father, a printer, founded the Delta Optimist in 1922. The newspaper was first housed in the Delta Hotel’s former saloon and Edgar recalls helping set type — by hand.

Alas, as Edgar recalls with a chuckle, dad apparently had an eye for the ladies. Consequently, dad quickly departed and Edgar’s mother, Gertrude Agnes Dunning, took over the Optimist in 1923 and ran it successfully until selling it to Edgar in 1940.

“Some people give Ma Murray [owner of the Bridge River-Lillooet News] credit for being the first woman newspaper pioneer in B.C., but my mother had her beat by quite a few years,” Edgar says. “But on buying it, I became publisher, editor, printer, a reporter, the janitor and just about everything else,” he adds.

However, aside from running the Optimist and its small staff until selling it in stages by 1980, Dunning was also instrumental in founding a number of other now well-established Delta organizations, including the Delta Museum and Archives Society and the Delta Concert Band Society.

And as the walls in his Ladner apartment attest, Edgar has received many awards and life-time memberships over the years.

Last weekend they simply added a little more icing onto Mr. Delta’s life.