With his blue headband and long grey ponytail, Ken Peale embraces a distinctive look.
“Maybe it’s just my way of being a hippie 60 years after the fact,” he says with a chuckle.
Though he has marched against war, abhors inflated patriotism and holds a liberal arts degree, Peale is no hippie.
The question of who he is, in fact, cannot be answered with a single label.
Peale, 73, is such a fixture in the Flin Flon area that some residents assume he was born and raised here.
He is actually an American, born in Battle Creek, Michigan. As a child he regularly moved around the States, as both his father and stepfather were in the US Army.
When Peale was five, he and his family temporarily relocated to Tokyo, Japan, which was still recovering from allied bombings inflicted during the Second World War.
In the mid-1950s, the family settled in Florida, where Peale attended high school and later Florida State University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in geography.
He worked in mapping in St. Louis before heading to Hawaii, where he earned a Master of Arts in geography. He then remained on the island as an employee of a missile test range in support of the US ballistic missile defence program.
At the time Peale was working for Kentron Hawaii, Limited, soon to become Kentron International, a US defence contractor. When he left Kentron to get a computer science degree, it was with the intention of staying with the company.
New opportunity
Partway through his degree, Peale got a letter from Kentron. The company had an opening. It was in northern Canada. A place called Flin Flon.
Having always felt out of place in America, Peale wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.
“I didn’t know if I would ever get this chance again,” he says. “You can’t just pack up and move country to country like you can city to city.”
Peale arrived in Flin Flon in early 1984. He was to start work at the Canadian Forces station, which performs work for the US Department of Defense, near Creighton.
The station has long been the subject of local lore. Commonly referred to as a weather station, Peale says it is actually a geological-geophysical research facility.
By day Peale worked as a computer operator and maintenance technician at the station. By night and weekend he enjoyed learning about his new surroundings.
“My first impressions of Flin Flon were good,” he recalls. “I thought as a mining town that people would come up here and work for [Hudbay] for a few years, save up some money and move on. St. James Church, now St. Peter and St. James, at the time had a choir, which I sang in. I was surprised how many people we buried from our church. People came up here, liked it and stayed.”
Peale certainly fell into that camp. Ever the restless wanderer, Flin Flon became the first place he could envision eternally hanging his hat – er, headband.
Like many proud northerners before him, Peale got involved in his community. In 1990, he joined the New Democratic Party and would serve on the executive of the Flin Flon NDP Association.
Just as the NDP’s progressive philosophy appealed to him, so too did the relatively laid-back political atmosphere of his adopted homeland.
“You can have a political argument [in Canada] and still keep your friends – in the States that’s not always the case,” Peale says.
In 2000, Peale made the leap to theatre when he joined the Flin Flon Community Choir. Since then he has portrayed a dockworker in Titanic: The Musical, a beggar in Fiddler on the Roof and a photographer in Chicago, among other roles.
“I like the chance to be somebody else for a change,” he says. “Here I can portray somebody else, have somebody else’s problems.”
Keeping faith
When Peale faces his own real-life problems, he turns to his faith.
He wasn’t raised in a particularly religious family. Rather, as a child he would join his friends at Sunday school at whatever church they happened to attend.
Today Peale worships at the Anglican Parish of St. Peter and St. James, where he is a licenced lay reader. His depth of Biblical knowledge is apparent in his ability to freely cite passages from the holy text.
Peale is also a believer in healing prayer. A few years ago, while he was visiting Israel, Peale befriended an Anglican priest who soon fell quite ill with a fever and red skin.
“That evening, he asked, could I come up and do healing prayer?” says Peale. “So after dinner, his wife and I went up to his room and he didn’t look good at all. We talked a bit and then we prayed. The next day he was fine, although later on he did have to go back to see the doctor. But I have never seen a change like that just in my own personal prayer ministry.”
Unfortunately, healing prayer does not always deliver such a dramatic result.
“Sometimes it’s, you don’t get what you want, you get what you need,” says Peale. “You can pray over somebody who is dying and pray to relieve that person’s suffering. The person dies. Okay, well now he’s with Jesus. If I get in a condition where I’m terminally ill, don’t have any quality of life left, I don’t want people keeping me alive, either. Why sit around here and suffer when I can be up there?”
Retired living
For now, Peale is very much down here. He retired from the Canadian Forces station in 2010 having spent the better part of 26 years working for five different contractors.
While a friendly rivalry exists between Flin Flon and Snow Lake over which community is preferable, Peale divides his time between homes in both northern centres.
Never married, he stays busy with his work for the NDP, church and choir. He is also an avid traveller, often visiting family in Florida and touring the sacred grounds of Israel.
After the Americans put a man on the moon in 1969, Peale thought that at the pace the US space program was going, he would be working on the moon or the International Space Station by the turn of the century.
Instead, he ended up in another faraway place known as Flin Flon – and with no regrets.
“I plan to spend the rest of my life here,” Peale says. “The relative isolation, the uncongested area, the natural beauty and the more relaxed and friendly people keep me here.”
Still, the question remains: What kind of person is Ken Peale?
“I’m still not sure,” he says. “I try to be fair and treat others as I would like to be treated. I like doing the best I can in any task I undertake. I take guidance from what Jesus taught us: Love God and love your neighbour.”
