It is never too late to say “thank you” - Vancouver Island donor celebrates 80 years of good fortune.
“I have had good health and good fortune,” says Frank Garnett, retired from his own oil well drilling company, Garnett Drilling.
“I have been very happy and financially successful and my family is looked after, so I thought it was time to do something for those less fortunate than myself.”
It was at a meeting of the Saanich Probus Club of which he was then president, where Frank became inspired to make a donation to the BC Cancer Foundation. He was about to celebrate his 80th birthday, but unusually for someone his age, had not had any personal experience with cancer. The guest speaker at that fateful meeting was Dr. Brad Nelson, director of the BC Cancer Agency’s Trev & Joyce Deeley Research Centre in Victoria.
“Dr. Brad Nelson is out there doing good things and they are doing impressive
research here on the Island.”
Subsequently Frank and members of the Probus Club toured the Agency’s Deeley Research Centre and saw first-hand the progress being made by Dr. Nelson and his team. After several meetings with the BC Cancer Foundation, Frank very generously decided to make a substantial donation to support the work of the BC Cancer Agency on Vancouver Island. Frank chose to make his gift by donating shares he owned.
“You don’t have to be touched by cancer yourself to say ‘thank you’... it is never too late to say ‘thank you’,” Frank says.
Frank and his wife Betty recently celebrated 55 years of marriage, and have four boys, ten grandchildren and five great- grandchildren. Although much of his life was spent traveling and working in the oil and gas industry in Calgary, New Orleans, Jackson, Mississippi, Houston and Melbourne, Australia, Frank’s roots run deep in Victoria. His father was born here in 1881 and his grandfather died in Victoria in 1892 and is buried in the historic Ross Bay Cemetery. Frank and Betty returned to Victoria to retire in 1996. A former stranger to gardening, Frank can now be found most days in the spring and summer somewhere out in his vast garden, at his home overlooking the water and Saanich hills. “It’s a real pleasure. I planted 120 geraniums and 100 begonias myself last year,” he says proudly. However he has not quite managed to retire completely.
“Now I work for my oldest son,” he jokes, in a real estate development company that Frank started, which builds single houses and patio homes in resort communities on Vancouver Island. He also manages to fit in fishing, golfing, curling in the winter, and is involved with his local United Church.
Frank just hopes that others are inspired, and they too will decide “it is never too late to say thank you.”
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