Ernest Matthew Braithwaite

The Braithwaite family is sad to announce the passing of Ernest Braithwaite in Surrey, British Columbia on March 6, 2018 at the age of 80. Ernie was born near and raised in Dewberry, Alberta, the eldest son of Joe and Olga Braithwaite, growing up with his brother Lorne and sister Sharon. A hard-working farm boy, Ernie became a tenaciously competitive hockey player, which took him to play for the University of Alberta where he pursued his Bachelor of Commerce degree. At 19, he travelled to study at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and play and teach the locals hockey. After touring Europe in cool 1950s style with pals in a VW beetle, Ernie returned to Edmonton to resume his Commerce degree and meet his wife Marlene. After graduation, Ernie worked in accounting for companies around Edmonton, ending up in the nearby oil boomtown of Drayton Valley, still playing hockey, then for the Lacombe Rockets. Meanwhile, the family was growing with Murray and Gary. Taking advantage of a vocational training program to educate teachers, Ernie returned to the University of Alberta to become a teacher. Responding to an advertised opening for a high school teacher in Medicine Hat, Ernie and Lorne set out before dawn to drive over six hours, Ernie shaved and changed into a suit at a service station, did the interview, and then they drove home. He was hired. Neil was born and the family moved to Medicine Hat. Ernie taught business and accounting for two years. One of the speakers he invited was a securities broker. Ernie was impressed by the speaker’s success (despite modest talents) and soon moved the family to Calgary where he started in the securities business with Richardson Securities. Meanwhile he was recruited to play Senior hockey with the Drumheller Miners, regularly commuting from Calgary, car-pooling with other Calgary-based teammates. The Miners won the Allen Cup in 1967 and were Canada’s representative team in European play. Ernie flourished in the securities business, building on his network of Commerce and hockey connections. He and Bill Grafam started the Calgary office of Cochran Murray. For many years one of the most animated Stampede Breakfast parties was in the Braithwaite backyard, complete with country band and chefs from the Three Greenhorns steakhouse. Ernie met numerous colourful people, such as Jesse Knight who flew Ernie into the bandito-lands of Mexico in search of silver, and the aristocrat-born White Russian painter Nicholas de Grandmaison, who survived German internment camps in World War I and eventually came to Canada and produced acclaimed portraits of Indigenous people that earned him an Order of Canada and burial on the Peigan reserve in Southern Alberta where he had been made an honorary chief. Ernie was a pallbearer. Ernie soon began and then completed part-time MBA studies at the University of Calgary, later teaching courses in the program. Ernie shifted into the oil industry, working first with Sunningdale Oil. This broadened his horizon, to Dubai and elsewhere. Eventually he, Roy Gillespie and George Rostoker formed Cherokee Resources. George had been in the French army during World War II and through guile escaped a German prisoner of war camp. Ernie joined George’s annual salmon fishing camp in the Queen Charlotte Islands every year for decades. Ernie was an avid duck and pheasant hunter for a time, on one trip trading a hard-to-find 16-gauge shotgun to Warren Winkler, later Chief Justice of Ontario. Ernie and Marlene then began pursuing their interests in horses from rural upbringing, acquiring a couple of thoroughbreds and then moving to a farm south of Calgary near Priddis to breed thoroughbreds, with plenty of rock-picking, barn-building, fence-building and haying with family labour during summer school breaks. In the early 1980s, he and Marlene bought a mare in Kentucky and moved to an acreage on Whitbey Island, north of Seattle to breed thoroughbreds. Always a small operation, Ernie developed broad networks of participants in the horse industry, from stall grooms, to trainers, to horse owners, to stud farm owners, to track owners. A trip to the track with Ernie involved him stopping countless times to chat with someone he knew in a different aspect of the industry about how things were going for them. Ernie made several trips to Saratoga in New York State. He even studied and got a trainer’s licence, to better train his trainers. Ernie’s relentless curiosity, tenacity and loving care of horses on the farm, combined with Marlene’s bloodstock mastery, produced over a dozen stakes race winners. Ernie and Sonny Gorescht made numerous trips to watch their horses run and often went to Santa Anita (for the Big Cap), Del Mar, Emerald Downs, Hastings and other venues. Ernie served on the board of directors of the Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society. After 15 years on Whidbey Island, Ernie and Marlene moved to South Surrey and scaled down their thoroughbreds. Marlene took up rose-gardening and Ernie was busy tending to hundreds of rose plants and very active in local lawn bowling, as a bowler and volunteer groundskeeper. Ernie always worked very hard for his family, steering all three sons through university. Family ski trips in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia were annual winter rituals, including an annual ski week spanning New Years at Fairmont Hot Springs with the families of Ernie’s University of Alberta Commerce friends Trimble Macor, Bruce Fuhr and Aaron Schtabsky. Many family summers were spent camping around Alberta and British Columbia, at Sharon’s lake cabin and Lac La Plonge, with plenty of bridge, cribbage, fishing, ukuleles and singing. Ernie passed away peacefully from progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) in his final years, which is an uncommon brain disease. Ernie is survived by his wife Marlene, sons Murray (Tracey), Gary (Silvia) and Neil (Michele); grandchildren Ross, Allison, Emerson, Cesar and Martin; his brother Lorne and sister Sharon; and many nieces and nephews and their children. A commemorative ceremony will be scheduled for inurnment at Dewberry beside the graves of Ernie’s parents.