Mervin Eugene Kereluk

Merv was born on May 6, 1944, in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, to a loving Ukrainian prairie family. They lived a short distance away in the village of Insinger where his parents, Wasyl and Lena operated a general store. Merv has an older sister, Evangeline, and would later be joined by a younger brother, Glenn.

In the typical small town Saskatchewan arrangements, most of Merv’s elementary schooling was in a two room school in Insinger, then one year in a slightly larger school in another village eight miles away. From there, it was on to high school in Foam Lake for grades 9 to 12. There he became involved in intercollegiate football. Although he ended up on crutches for four weeks, the reports are he sustained fewer injuries that he left behind. In these teen years, Merv was also an enthusiastic baseball and hockey player on the local town teams.

During these early years, Merv would also become familiar fishing, hunting, pool and physical work. One summer holiday, between grades 10 and 11, Merv jumped at an immediate opportunity to work on a Pepsi truck unloading full cases and loading empty cases on the truck. He did this to avoid a family construction project his uncles and grandfather were about to start, building a large house. He knew he was going to be pounding nails all summer long for the family wage rate of essentially nothing. Merv stayed at that Pepsi job for about four summers. He tried underground mining for the fifth summer. Did not like that.

After high school, Merv attended the University of Manitoba, taking Sciences. When he left university, he took some time to decide what he wanted to do. He was lured by the money to longshore work in Halifax. The money was good, but again he did not like the work. He moved to Montreal where, through some friends, Merv was introduced to sales. In this case it was magazines sales. This led him to opening offices in Montreal, Ottawa and, eventually, Vancouver.

Some people persuaded Merv the opportunity in vehicle sales were better. He started working at a used car lot and soon was at Musgrove Ford. He eventually became sales manager at Musgrove. In the early 1980’s Merv moved, as sales manager, to Cherry Ford which became and remains Chilliwack Ford. Merv stayed at Chilliwack Ford until he retired in January, 2013.

When he was in better health Merv was an avid fisher, hunter and pool player. All of these stem from his early years growing up in Insinger. In his time around Chilliwack Merv had a close network of very good friends with whom he shared the joy, adventure and outings of hunting and fishing and the fun of the weekly pool games.

Merv enjoyed travelling. He made many trips to Europe, another to Cuba and several to Nevada. Merv, his brother and sister-in-law, did a trip across northern Nevada visiting small to large casinos, numerous trips to Reno and several to Merv’s favorite spot, Las Vegas. Incidentally, Merv was know to have horseshoes up his, you know where.

Merv was predeceased by his parents and by his son, Trevor. He leaves behind his sister, Evangeline, brother, Glenn, nephews, Brendon and Kristopher and niece, Alexis, as well as many cousins and many friends. Merv will be profoundly missed by many of us.

Merv had his own boisterous, unstoppable manner of humour, storytelling and debating. When he got on a roll, it was hard to stop him. Usually, you couldn’t, unless you were louder. Even that didn’t always work. At times, you just had to wait for him to say:

“And that’s that for that.”