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Wiebe, Rudy Henry
Person · 1934-

Rudy Henry Wiebe OC (born 4 October 1934) is a Canadian author and professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Alberta since 1992. Rudy Wiebe was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in the year 2000.

Wiebe was born at Speedwell, near Fairholme, Saskatchewan, in what would later become his family's chicken barn. For thirteen years he lived in an isolated community of about 250 people, as part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian west. He did not speak English until age six since Mennonites at that time customarily spoke Low German at home and standard German in church. He attended the small school three miles from his farm and the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church. In 1947, he moved with his family to Coaldale, Alberta.

He received his B.A. in 1956 from the University of Alberta and then studied under a Rotary International Fellowship at the University of Tübingen in West Germany, near Stuttgart. In Germany, he studied literature and theology and travelled to England, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. In 1962, he received a Bachelor of Theology degree from Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg, now Canadian Mennonite University.

While in Winnipeg, he worked as the editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald, a position he was asked to leave after the publication of his controversial debut novel Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), the book that heralded a wave of Mennonite literature in the decades that followed.

Wiebe taught at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana from 1963 to 1967, and taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for many decades after that.

In addition to Peace Shall Destroy Many, Wiebe's novels include First and Vital Candle (1966), The Blue Mountains of China (1970), The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), The Scorched-wood People (1977), The Mad Trapper (1980), My Lovely Enemy (1983), A Discovery of Strangers (1994), Sweeter Than All the World (2001), and Come Back (2014). He has also published collections of short stories, essays, and children's books. In 2006 he published a volume of memoirs about his childhood, entitled Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. His work has explored the traditions and struggles of people in the Prairie provinces, both settlers, often Mennonite, and First Nations people.

Wiebe won the Governor General's Award for Fiction twice, for The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994). Thomas King says of The Temptations of Big Bear that "Wiebe captures the pathos and the emotion of Native people at a certain point in their history and he does it well ... Wiebe points out to us that Canada has not come to terms with Native peoples, that there is unfinished business to attend to." Wiebe was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1986. In 2000 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2003 Wiebe was a member of the jury for the Giller Prize.

Wickett, Oscar Harris
Person

Oscar Harris Wickett, 1902-1986, was born in Winnipeg and trained as an ornamental plasterer. He worked on several buildings in Winnipeg and across the prairies, including the Banff Springs Hotel, 1927-1929, and in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan and Calgary, Alberta. From the 1930s to the 1960s he farmed near Selkirk, Manitoba, followed by work at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre and later for Manitoba Hydro. He married Cora Kerr Douglas (Manahan) in 1941. She had one child, Donna.

White, M.E.
Person

M.E. White lived in Calgary, Alberta.

White, Francis
Person

Francis "Frank" White, 1844-1924, was born in Birmingham, England, and emigrated to Canada with his family in 1860. He worked for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in Quebec for several years. He married Christina Ross and they had three children, Frank, William, and Jessie (Munro). Christina died when the children were young. In 1882 he was hired as treasurer of the Cochrane Ranche Company. He worked at the Cochrane Ranche at Big Hills (now Cochrane, Alberta) for a year, then became manager of the ranch when it moved southwest of Fort Macleod in 1883. He resigned at the end of 1884. In 1885 he married Annie Anderson, 1853-1941, and they had one son, Harold, 1888-1949. Frank started a sheep ranch west of Big Hill in 1885. By 1890 the Merino Ranch ran ca. 5000 head of sheep. In 1901 the ranch was sold to C.W. Fisher and the Whites moved to Fernie, British Columbia where Frank was land commissioner for the Crows Nest Pass Coal Company.

Whiddington, Henry Morgan
Person · 1877-1949

Henry Morgan Whiddington (1877-1949) and his younger brother William A. Whiddington (1881-1954) were active in Lethbridge, Alberta, where they dominated the local architectural scene for more than twenty years. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England on 7 May 1877, Henry M. trained under his father William Whiddington (1849-1934), an architect in London, and with W.H. Duffield while attending classes at the Architectural Association in that city. Both he and his brother emigrated to Canada in 1906 and settled in Alberta where they are recorded among the first members of the newly formed Alberta Association of Architects. Henry M. joined the Alberta Association of Architects on 19 November 1906. He later went on to be Hon. Secretary of the Association in 1909 and was on Council of the Association in 1907. In 1912 he was appointed delegate of the Association to the Annual Convention of Builders Exchanges, Lethbridge.

Henry M. and his brother created a partnership and opened an office in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Edmonton in 1907 but by 1910 both had relocated to Lethbridge where they established that town's first professional architectural office. From that location, they also operated a branch office at Hosmer, British Columbia.

Their designs for institutional buildings borrowed from Edwardian and Beaux-Arts precedents and employed a formal symmetry evident in their plans for Fleetwood School (c. 1912) and for the Galbraith School (c. 1912). For unknown reasons William A. left Alberta in 1926 and Henry continued to practice under his own name. In late 1928 Henry moved to Cranbrook, British Columbia and opened an office there, but within two years the practice was closed. Henry later moved to Victoria, British Columbia in 1940 and died there on 19 September 1949.

Alberta Association of Architects fonds. The Canadian Architectural Archives.

Whiddington, Henry Morgan. The Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800-1950. http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/356. Retrieved April 7, 2017.