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Heritage House Veterans Honoured

March 9th, 2015

Three veterans of the Second World War were honoured in a special ceremony at Points West Living Heritage House in Vegreville on February 9. Local MP Leon Benoit presented Alice Fodchuk, Daphne Havens and Edward Attick with commemorative pins and certificates of appreciation. Vegreville Mayor Myron Hayduk, Legion Branch Service Officer Rod Stewart, town councillors and lots of family and friends joined in the tribute. 

Alice Fodchuk (pictured) was just nineteen years old when she signed up for the RCAF-WD’s (Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division). “I considered it an adventure,” she says. She was sent to Ottawa for basic training, and it was only there she learned she would be assigned to serve as a dental assistant.

Three weeks of training in Toronto, and she was off to Claresholm Alberta to work alongside army dentists, handing instruments, processing X-rays, sterilizing equipment and doing bookkeeping. The base was a specialty flight training centre, and young men from across the British Commonwealth came to train in twin prop Anson planes.

As Alice recalls, “Only a quarter of the staff at the station were women,” and while that sounds like a recipe for fun, the reality for her and many others was heartbreaking. “I had a fiancé there who went off and got himself killed overseas.”

After the war Alice continued to work in dentistry, where she met and married a dental technician, who sadly died of a heart attack ten years into their marriage. She supported their four young daughters on her own, until she met and married Orest Fodchuk (see PWL article) in 1960.

She returned to school in Canada’s Centennial year, 1967, “when the cry went out to ‘Do something different’!” She chose become a teacher. “It was one of the hardest things I ever did,” she says, “I’d been out school for 25 years. But if you make up your mind, everything is possible.”

Daphne Havens was a “Land Girl” in Britain, working farms to keep agriculture production up while men served in the war (see previous PWL article on Daphne).

Edward Attick joined the Canadian Armed Forces on October 11, 1941 at the age of 16. He trained in England and served in the United Kingdom, the central Mediterranean and in Europe as a military dispatch rider. Travelling by motorcycle, he carried messages throughout the theatre of war, delivering information from officer to officer.

Photo: Alice Fodchuk is one of three Second World War veterans honoured at a ceremony at Points West Living Heritage House in Vegreville

Photos of all three PWL recipients are at Flickr: Heritage House Veterans Honoured

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