Whoever said accountants lead uneventful lives never met Dave Kendall.
A dedicated family man, diligent volunteer, successful businessman and one-time movie extra, the proud Flin Flonner has charted a compelling course.
It all started with a classic Prairie upbringing in Swanson (pop. about 25), one of those barely-there Saskatchewan hamlets. Dad maintained railroad tracks while Mom stayed home to raise the four kids.
“Growing up in a small town like Swanson was interesting,” says Kendall, now 60. “To get my money for buying little things, I’d go in the ditches picking up beer bottles and pop bottles, and riding a bicycle up and down the highway.”
Kendall earned a cool 12 cents for a dozen beer bottles and two cents per pop bottle. Luckily Swanson’s general store, with its single gas pump out front, accepted pop bottles as currency for candy and other goodies.
Kendall attended elementary school in a single classroom that housed grades 1 to 6. By the time he was in Grade 3, it was apparent that he had a flair for math.
“When the Grade 4s and 5s were having their math, if they didn’t know the answers to questions, our teacher, Mrs. Gerwing, would ask me just to kind of rub it into the kids in grade 4 and 5 that they should be working harder,” he recalls.
At the tail end of his high school career, Kendall and his family moved to North Battleford, Saskatchewan. With several thousand people, the community could feel like a bustling metropolis to the newcomers.
“I thought going to a big community like North Battleford, I wouldn’t be able to play sports [because] they’d have so many people,” says Kendall, who loved basketball and other school sports. “As it turns out, there wasn’t any problem.”
Career path
As he began pondering careers, Kendall considered engineering but settled on accounting, a path recommended by his accountant uncle.
After finishing Grade 12, Kendall went off to Saskatoon’s University of Saskatchewan to take his bachelor of commerce.
Early into his university stint, he achieved what may be his biggest claim to fame.
An announcement came that the U of S hockey arena would be used to film scenes for a low-budget Canadian movie called Paperback Hero. Extras were needed to fill the stands.
Kendall, then 19, and his brother jumped at the chance – literally. Not only are they visible in crowd scenes, but they can also clearly be seen leaping over the boards to join an ice brawl.
“It was interesting to go to the movie and actually pick yourself out very briefly,” says Kendall, who saw the 1973 sports drama in a theatre.
In the film, also visible in the stands with Kendall is a young woman named Betty, soon to carry the last name Kendall.
The couple had begun dating back in high school. After he graduated from the U of S in 1976, they were married.
Not yet a full-fledged chartered accountant, Kendall accepted an internship at a CA firm in Saskatoon called Winspear Higgins Stevenson and Co. Two years later, he was eligible to write his CA exam.
He passed on his first try, no small feat considering that half of students who took the exam failed. At the youthful age of 24, he was Dave Kendall, CA.
Kendall stayed with Winspear Higgins Stevenson and Co. and was assigned auditing duties. That’s when he met fellow chartered accountant Bill Vancoughnett.
Vancoughnett was a Flin Flon native who would later move back home to work at his own firm. Left, when his partner quit, Vancoughnett offered the vacancy to Kendall.
“It was a bit of a difficult decision on whether to move or not, and particularly to some place quite as far away as maybe it seems,” says Kendall.
Made move
Nonetheless, the Kendalls, who by now had two children and a third on the way, made the move to northern Manitoba in November 1983.
As a partner in the newly named firm of Vancoughnett and Kendall, Kendall worked not only to satisfy clients, but also to involve himself in the community.
In time he would compile a lengthy resume of volunteer initiatives and construct a reputation as a humble, good-humoured and esteemed citizen.
Among others, Kendall is active with Community Futures Greenstone, Flin Flon and District Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Northern Neighbours Foundation and, as president, the North of 53 Consumers Co-op board of directors.
“As soon as you have an accountant on [a] committee, then they like you to either become the treasurer or certainly kind of give them the financial expertise,” Kendall says.
“When you look around the community and you decide there’s a number of good organizations that…need help, and you’re one of the few that have an expertise in a certain area, then you’re certainly reluctant not to do that.”
As active as he was in the community, Kendall was just as busy at home as the father of four children. In explaining why he wanted such a large family, Kendall employs his trademark penchant for jest.
“We always tell our older kids that we wanted to wait until we had a good one, and that’s why we had [youngest child] Courtney as number four,” he says with a laugh.
On the business side of the ledger, Kendall’s firm underwent several partner and name changes, not to mention a major expansion. Today the firm is known as Kendall and Pandya, with Kendall in Flin Flon and Manisha Pandya in Thompson.
Kendall still relishes the job, particularly since he gets to work with a variety of clients, but he admits it’s not always easy.
“Certainly a challenge in a smaller community from an accounting and auditing point of view is, if you’re with a bigger firm you might have a tax partner and you’d have an audit partner and then you’d have small-business partners,” he says, “whereas in a smaller community you kind of have to deal with all of those issues at different times.”
What surprises some about Kendall is his reluctance to take his community service to the level of public office. With his intelligence and love of community, he is a seemingly natural fit for politics.
Kendall says people have advised him to run for office, but he advises himself to steer clear of that game.
Politicians often talk around the issues, he says, and it would be frustrating to “be in a situation whereby you’d like to get some change to happen and it just doesn’t seem to be able to happen, no matter how much you kind of press an issue.”
Looking ahead
What Kendall is planning on is retirement. Within three years he wants to be in a position to retire or at least have another partner in the firm so he can take more time away from the office.
After nearly four decades in accounting, he has definitely put in his time. He’s also no longer just a father of four, but a grandfather of five – with more little ones surely to come.
Beyond family, retirement would also give Kendall more time to pursue interests such as travel, reading and sports such as golf. (He’s no slouch on the links, having sunk a hole-in-one at Phantom Lake back in 2004).
When Kendall moved from Saskatoon to Flin Flon, he and wife Betty decided they would give themselves five years to decide whether they liked the community.
More than 30 years later, there’s no doubt about the answer.
“The town has certainly been good to us,” Kendall says.
And Dave Kendall has certainly returned the favour.
Family man
Dave Kendall and wife Betty have four successful children:
Corinne Matthews (Flin Flon): librarian at Hapnot Collegiate, married to Rob and mother of two children, Parker, 15, and Olivia, 11
Travis Kendall (Saskatoon): manager at Prairie Plant Systems, married to Stephanie and father of three children, Jackson, 6, Malcolm, 3, and Lincoln, 1
Jeff Kendall (Saskatoon): graduate of arts and science who majored in political studies, now studying education with a major in social studies
Courtney Kendall (Saskatoon): graduate of statistical science (Masters), married to Judd Campbell and currently working at Walmart
