At an age when most people haven’t even finished high school, Ken Mansell was already getting ready to re-enter the classroom as a teacher.
He was just 17 when he enrolled at Manitoba Teachers’ College in Winnipeg, the first step in a long and distinguished career that would make him a Flin Flon fixture.
“I got a good email yesterday that says, ‘You know you’re a teacher when you want to slap the next person who says, “It must be nice to work from 9 to 4 and have the summers off,”’” Mansell says lightheartedly.
Mansell hails from Miami – the southern Manitoba town, not the sunny Florida city. It was, he says, “once a busy little town typical of the same prairie roots shared by many Flin Flonners.”
After graduating from high school, Mansell couldn’t afford university, so he settled on teachers’ college.
“Most called it ‘normal school’ but it was anything but that,” he recalls. “I was in the residence with mostly rural and northern students.”
Down the hall from Mansell was a young Flin Flonner named Dennis Ballard – a new friend and a future colleague who still lives in Flin Flon.
“We still have fun teasing each other about the not-so ‘normal’ school days,” Mansell says. “I was only 17 then and Dennis was old enough, over 21, to legally buy wine and beer. Enough said about that.”
After college, in 1963, Mansell got his first teaching job at the junior high level in St. Laurent, a small French and Métis community about an hour outside Winnipeg.
“The school was run by Royal Catholic nuns except for us four lay teachers,” he says. “There was a lot of culture shock, but I enjoyed learning the ropes here along with fishing without a hook.”
Among Mansell’s students that first year was Yvon Dumont, the future lieutenant governor of Manitoba.
Not surprisingly, Mansell’s French improved while in St. Laurent. That set him up nicely for his next job in Holland, Manitoba, where he again taught junior high.
“When I was asked if I could teach French, I assured them I could speak it as well as the prime minister of Canada, the Honourable John Diefenbaker from Prince Albert,” says Mansell, referring to a prime minister known for rather limited French-speaking abilities. “This [seemed] to be good enough and I stayed there for two years.”
After Holland, Mansell moved to Belmont, Manitoba, where he became principal of the local school. He was just turning 21 years old.
Belmont is near a town called Ninette, where many young women worked in a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. Among them was Mansell’s future wife, Carol Dow, who hailed from Creighton.
“She worked the telephone switchboard and soon got my number,” Mansell says.
After the couple wed, they continued living in Ninette while Mansell attended Brandon University to begin earning his Bachelor of Arts degree.
In 1969, Mansell and his wife moved to Flin Flon, where he had landed a job at the now-defunct McIsaac Junior High School.
“Flin Flon was bursting at the seams back then,” he recalls.
“I soon loved the place. We raised three sons here. It had all the amenities of a small city surrounded by relatively untouched wilderness. A far cry from my small rural village on the prairie.”
From a financial perspective, Mansell had picked a good time to get into teaching. When he began his career in 1963, he earned $2,800 a year. By 1976, he was up to $17,950.
“Salaries increased rapidly from then on as we were paid by experience and education,” says Mansell, who helped negotiate Flin Flon teachers’ collective agreements.
Teaching in Flin Flon in the 1970s was a young person’s game, Mansell recalls, with a high turnover rate and do-it-yourself socialization.
“Teachers socialized with their own bowling league, curling bonspiels, house parties, socials, fishing, camping and of course Friday after school at the Legion,” he says.
Mansell would spend 30 years teaching in Flin Flon, never veering away from grades 6, 7, 8 and 9 and always including math and geography in his slate of classes.
By the time he called it a career in 1999, he had few regrets about his chosen occupation.
“When asked why I chose teaching, there were two reasons: July and August,” Mansell says. “Of my 36 years I enjoyed 90 per cent of them – not a bad average.
Looking back, Mansell noticed little difference in his students over time.
“Despite what many people think, kids were not much different then than they are today, at least emotionally,” he says. “The big difference was that most boys could get work and apprenticeships a lot easier then without a high school diploma, at HBM&S. It didn’t take long before they were making a lot more than I was.”
Over the years, Mansell has belonged to numerous Flin Flon organizations, such as the Odd Fellows, Border Explorers Snowmobile Club, Hot Stove Curling League and the North of 53 Consumers Co-op board of directors, to name but a few.
Mansell remains active with groups such as the Lions Club and the Flin Flon NDP Association, of which he is currently vice-president.
Reminder readers will also know Mansell as a panelist in What Do You Think?, a Q and A feature that ran each week for nearly two years.
In his answers for the feature, Mansell freuency cited quotes from well-known figures to illustrate his points.
One of his favourite quotes, from poet WH Auden, illustrates not only Mansell’s belief in service to others, but also his wry sense of humour.
“We are here on earth to do good unto others,” Auden once said. “What the others are here for, I have no idea.”
