Hockey keeps Ike Kalelest busy.
The 73-year-old has seven grandchildren playing hockey in Williams Lake and he attends all their practices and games, often giving rides. When the Stampeders are playing in town, he’s a regular goal judge, something he’s done “forever.”
During the Coy Cup being hosted here next week he has signed up to judge every game. “I’ve never had an incident with the goal judging,” Kalelest said at the rink Saturday evening before the Stamps game. “I try to do the best job I can.”
When it comes to the NHL, he doesn’t hesitate to disclose that his team is the Philadelphia Flyers. He’s been a fan since the team’s inception.
“I liked the Watson brothers, they were from Smithers.”
His team isn’t doing so well this season, but they are a young team, he suggested.
“They’ll get it back. Goal tending has been a problem.” He watches the games whenever he can and said hockey is really the only sport he likes to watch.
Growing up in Canoe Creek Kalelest did not have much time for hockey.
There were hockey teams at the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School he attended, and he played a bit but was never good enough to make a team, he recalled.
Like many people, he remembers being transported to the school as a small boy.
It was 1949, he was six years old, and the children road to the school on a cattle truck.
“School was more like a prison,” he said.
Kalelest left school after Grade 7 and went to work for the BC Cattle Company at Canoe Creek, staying on for 15 years doing odd jobs.
“Then I worked at Gang Ranch for a number of years as a working cowboy,” he said.
His mom, Helen Sargent, was a single mom raising three children in Canoe Creek. She had horses and her children enjoyed riding the horses.
They also went fishing in the summers with their mom. The name Kalelest was his father Peter Alec’s last name and means “three stones.”
In 1978, Kalelest moved to Williams Lake with his family of four children and went into logging. He worked logging all over the Williams Lake area, first as a bucker and later as a cat skinner building logging roads.
When his back started giving him grief, he retired at 63. His doctor warned him he might end up in a wheelchair so he had some back surgeries and ever since he has enjoyed good health.
He’s also a great grandpa with six great grandchildren living in Fort St. John and Grande Prairie he tries to visit so that also keeps him busy. As he was sitting on a bench in the arena lobby a young player came up to say hello. “We won our game,” the young hockey player told him. Watching the youngster walk away Kalelest smiled.
“I’ve had a good life here in Williams Lake,” he said.
