ICBA celebrates 50 years of serving open shop construction this year, and we are looking back every week at some of the significant moments, milestones, and people who helped ICBA become Canada’s largest construction association.
Today, with our 50th anniversary gala just nine days away, we wind the clock back to 1976 and look at an early ICBA convention.
The interviews and other original research on which the ICBA50 series is based were conducted by writer Kevin Hanson. We appreciate Kevin’s work capturing the people, events, and milestones that shaped ICBA’s first half-century.
ICBA’s second annual convention took place at the not-yet-fully-complete Sandman Inn in Vancouver, over two days in September 1976, with 125 people there. The venue was selected to celebrate the controversial role of open shop contractors in building it. This Georgia Street project was Rempel Bros. Concrete’s first venture into a large non-residential job in Vancouver, and in a foreshadowing of more intense pushback to come on future projects, it had drawn union pickets.
This convention received reports from six committees and the executive vice-president, on topics that included potential involvement in training and establishment of a group benefits program.
“There was so much goodwill and good feeling and optimism and camaraderie,” said Ken Funk. “There was a lot of good feelings out of that whole thing, a lot of solidarity, ‘yeah we can do it, we can do it’.”
One of the final orders of business was to elect Elmer Verigin as ICBA’s second president, and Ed Rempel as vice-president. They assumed leadership of an organization that – while very leanly resourced and sometimes falling short on the niceties of parliamentary procedure – was showing staying power.
This quilt, featuring many of our founding companies and made for the 1980 convention, was used as a table cloth for several 1980s ICBA gatherings.
A tradition began at this 1976 convention of holding annual auctions. Significant sums were often paid for a somewhat motley collection of auction items, and this revenue helped clear debts and keep the association financially afloat in its lean years. “Somebody from Victoria brought a picture of a black-and-white crow on a lawn and that damn thing sold for $300,” says Verigin.
One of the legacies of these auctions is a gold-plated brick that came from the Sandman Inn construction project, where that second convention was held. The “convention brick” was auctioned off every year up until the late 1980s for sums of up to $850. Other auction items were of even more dubious origin and value.
Christina Koechl recalls auctioning off one of Verigin’s shoes at a convention in Kamloops. “I didn’t realise that Elmer didn’t bring a second pair of shoes, and for two days the poor guy was walking around without a left shoe because I was hell bent we’re gonna auction this one off and get big money for it,” she says.
This led to retaliation in the form of a more intimate item of Christina’s clothing ending up on the auction block, although a quick $600 bid from Ewald Rempel preserved decorum. Fin Levick’s beard became an auction item one year, and he still possesses a number of his own auction purchases. “I’ve got a bathtub up in my courtyard, it’s a good fibreglass bathtub,” he said. “But I’ve never been able to pawn it off on anybody, and I think that thing cost me $1,500. But it was so much fun.”
“I guess it’s just the human spirit,” said Funk. “People of common purpose, people of common conviction and, you know, life isn’t just about seriousness, life is also about having fun and laughing and just enjoying being together. Because it was such a heavy cause, you needed some comic relief.”
For their contributions to ICBA, Elmer Verigin, Christina Koechl, Ed Rempel, Ewald Rempel, Ken Funk and Fin Levick were all awarded Life Membership over the years.
