Carolyn Massel
Carolyn Massel is the principal of Westglen Middle School, having started as a student teacher there soon after the school opened in 1987. She has been an avid fan of the music artist John Cougar since her teenage years, though also enjoys Styx and Journey. She grew up on a farm near Westcott and wanted to be a horse trainer in her youth—a dream that was cut short upon the realization that she was “going to die penniless and in debt,” with nothing but a “mountain of horse manure.” After a venture into French translation, she switched to education—a field she had always had a steady passion for.
How has the community changed over the course of your life?
“Dad would bring us into town [on Auction Mart Day], and now I realize Mum wanted peace and quiet. But there used to be a pool hall on Main Street, right beside the drugstore… I still call it Slipps Drugstore, but the drugstore right at the four-way stop, and then the next building was [the] pool hall. There used to be a bench out front, and I have all these memories as a kid of sitting on that bench with a pop with a whole bunch of other kids, all just sitting there swinging our legs and drinking pop and talking because our dads were all inside playing pool and enjoying their social outing, right? But I think at the heart of it, the things that matter haven't changed. The people still come to Didsbury because the hospital is here, and the Lions Club and the Elks; there's still the doers in town.”
What key points in your life reflect your experience with the town of Didsbury?
“When I was in school, we had what was called county band, and every town had the band teacher for one day. So Monday was Didsbury’s day that you had band class, Cremona was Wednesday, I don't remember anybody else's. On Monday the bus started in Cremona, went to Carstairs and picked up band students, and then another bus started in Sundre, went to Olds, and then we all ended up here in Didsbury for band practice every Monday night. It was a two hour practice, and then you got on the bus and went home. But to me, and at that point, Didsbury was the heart of the county. The county office was here in town, this was kind of the big community, and this was the heart of band, and so to me it always felt like Didsbury was the heart of the county and this is where you came to do cool things”
“I think when I had… [Chelsea Wilson’s] class, there was a contest. There was some new ride at Disneyland, and the Calgary Sun was offering a free trip for a teacher and their entire class to Disneyland, but you had to collect the Sun newspaper, and there was this token on the inside page of this newspaper, and you had to cut out these tokens. My husband knew somebody in Calgary that had a newspaper distributorship who always had newspapers left over at the end of the day, and so he agreed that he would give them to us every day, and so the kids found out—they had grandparents collecting these things and everything. We were gonna win this trip if it killed us. And the kids were dumpster diving—they'd go to the recycling bins and dump—yeah, it's funny. I just saw Christine Engel today... and she fell into a dumpster, dumpster diving. No educational value whatsoever, we would cut these darn coupons out for an hour, three times a week. Then we were getting pretty good, but everybody was keeping it close to their chest, what they had. Nobody was telling anybody, and so we started phoning around—we heard other schools were doing it, like Acme and Beiseker, and we phoned, and we said, ‘look, we've got like 20,000 or something, how many have you got?’
And they're like, ‘Oh, we’ve got 1000.’
‘Okay, can we have yours?’ We were just like, ‘Well, you can't beat us, so can we have yours? Like, let's get a small town school winning.’ We came second, and guess what you get for second? Nothing! Big, sweet nothing. But you know what? Those kids are all in there. They all remember that intensely, right? It was something we all worked together on, and we had this big goal, and, and we didn't make it, and that’s okay.”
In conclusion, Carolyn noted that “you didn't come for the school lessons, you came to be with other people. Yeah, fun—teachers, we know that, right? That's why we come.”
